

|

The International Writers Magazine: Central America : Reality
in Nicaragua
Making
It Happen
Roger Smith in Chinandega
Father
Ruy Montealegre, a diocesan priest, is showing off his latest
project. It is a large rectangular building, right now just four
high cinderblock walls, that will become a club house for the
local youth of his parish, slums just south of Chinandega in northwestern
Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the New
World after Haiti, and even by Nicaraguan standards Chinandega
is poor. The sprawling slums, in comparison, make Chinandega proper
look brisk and prosperous. Father Ruy wants to give the kids and
teenagers a refuge from the slums poverty, squalor, hopelessness,
violence, and drugs.
|
|
Over there, he
says, pointing to a corner, will be the café, where they can
have soft drinks and snacks during dances and after classes. And over
therehe sweeps his hand toward one entire end of the building,
a space fifty feet widewill be the basketball court.
Is basketball popular here in Chinandega?
Padre Ruy is a tall man with broad shoulders and close-cropped black
hair. He is dressed in priestly clotheswhite shirt and black trousersbut
has the bearing of a military officer, his movements authoritative,
brusque. At the question, he turns and glares.
I will make it popular.
Father Ruy was raised on a large farm near Chinandega, his family from
the countrys landed class, but he spent much of his young adulthood
in other countries, principally the U.S. He earned a degree in accounting
from a Nicaraguan university, because his father insisted on it, and
then left to take masters degrees in nuclear engineering and then
theology from American universities. Now he is returned, forty and well
educated. A head taller than most Nicas, he could easily pass for an
Mid-Westerner. Until, that is, he talks for a while. Then he reveals
himself to be a disconcerting mixture, a chimera: He sounds of the United
States, but he says things that would not be said there.
I met Father Ruy by accidentor maybe its a bit more accurate
to say, in the Nicaraguan manner. I was taking a turn through the scruff
central park of Chinandega with a friend, Dora Cortés, when after
having seen the two captive caimans and the Sandinista monuments there,
we began to feel oppressed by the midday sun, so she suggested that
we have a look at the altar paintings in the cathedral across the street
where it was shady and cool. Dora knows everyone in town, practically,
and introduced me to the cathedral priest, a squat man with the uneasy
jollity of a scholar out of his element. By the time we left the cathedral,
the priest, who noted our fatigue, had made arrangements. He brought
Father Ruy to us, who offered to drive Dora home and me back to the
grain factory where I was staying. It was a ten-minute drive. I got
there four hours later.
First he has a small errand to run, taking educational materials from
the cathedral to his office, so off we go. En route he decides to take
me on a tour of his diocese, and he swings the car off the León-Chinandega
highway and into a warren of low huts, cobbled together for the most
part from graying planks and corrugated tin. Open sewers line the dirt
streets, and there are short poles carrying narrow gauge power lines,
but they end not far into the settlement; the newer streets continue
without them, petering out into what had once been farming land. Thats
just the problem, that land. The regions cash crops have largely
disappeared. Cotton, peanuts, and even sugar, which once supported an
agrarian economy, are no longer profitable. Nicaraguan agriculture is
hard pressed to compete in world marketsmarkets that are fed by
countries, like the United States, which subsidize their farmers. It
is cheaper to import foods that had long been Nicaraguan staples, and
so local farms are abandoned. With the fields lying fallow now, campesinos
have migrated to cities to find work, and with those cities crowded
to begin with, slums grow rapidly on the outskirts to house them.
Padre Ruy looks around, almost proudly, but admits, "Its
an ugly place." He decided to change things soon after his bishop
sent him here (he also admits with a sigh that he had requested a rural
diocese, a small town in the mountains, nice and quiet, but orders are
orders). He shows me the first step of his master plan: new churches
for each of five neighborhoods of the slums, as delineated by him. Altogether,
there are twenty to thirty thousand residents, but he cautions that
is only an estimate. People arrive and depart daily. Life here is provisional,
and the people unrooted.
When we drive down the widest of the narrow streets, several people
wave to him, and most smile as well. But not all of the residents are
friendly. Some glare from doorways and then slip inside as we pass,
and the majority are simply impassive. He explains that in addition
to the gangs, drugs, alcoholism, unemployment and underemployment (which
approaches 80 percent), and violence, there is little permanent family
structure to provide continuity to daily life. In fact, there are few
married couples. Instead, a man and woman cohabit, have children, and
then the man leaves. The woman takes up with another man for protection
and a modicum of financial support, and they have more children. Before
that man in turn leaves, the children of the previous liaison are neglected
or abused, driven to the in-group safety of gangs. Without family stability,
the sense of the slum as a communitysomething more meaningful
than a mere placedoesnt exist. This acculturation extends
even to religion, here in a land that is overwhelmingly conservative
Catholic. Only about 3 percent of slum dwellers are regular communicants.
Padre Ruys task is large, but he is a man of innovation who knows
how to make things happen here, starting with the youth center and the
churches. These he designed to fit the environment. Made of stuccoed
cinderblock, the churches are open along their longest walls, so any
breath of wind can cool worshippers, and surrounded by a covered veranda
to keep the rain from blowing in during the rainy season. Wrought iron
grids replace the walls in order to frustrate vandals and thieves, who
are a big problem. Padre Ruy had to include two locked storage rooms
for each church or else all the alter adornments would disappear at
once. There are no glass windows because, he says, local protestant
boys come and break them out of spite. He laughs after saying this:
"I did the same to their churches when I was a kid."
But what does disturb him about the Protestants is the unwillingness
of ministers to join him in a common effort to improve living conditions
here. Trust is not ecumenical in the Nicaraguan slums, so he is on his
own. To encourage a community spirit he has named each church after
a saint, chosen to be representative of time, gender, and raceone
medieval saint (St. Thomas Aquinas, his personal favorite), one modern
and black (St. Benedict of Palermo), and three biblical, including two
womenbut also so that the feast days are spread throughout the
year. That way each church and its neighborhood can hold a separate
celebration and invite the other four parishes to join them. Nicas love
fiestas. Plenty of them fosters a more cohesive community.
After a tour of one church, which has a medical-dental clinic nearby
and community hall, we at last reach his office. Of all his construction
projects it is the tiniest, just two small rooms of cinderblock, and
he only built it because his bishop ordered him to do so. He wanted
the use the funds allotted to him for community projects. He takes us
to one of these, an open-air tile and brick factory nearby, which supplies
building materials for yet further projects, all of which are intended
to provide some regular jobs to his parishioners. The bricks made in
the factory are just nondescript red bricks, but the tiles are lovely.
They have a variety of dichromatic, swirling patterns, stylish and pleasant
rather than bold: black and deep burgundy; pale green and cream; deep
blue and rusty brown. The stacks of tiles in the yard contrast as much
with the dusty greenery of the countryside as birds of paradise.
During our wanderings Dora and the cathedral priest trail behind us
nonplussed by our non-stop discussions. We argue and laugh and gesture
through topics no one would expect to hear in one of the hemispheres
poorest slums, on the edge of overgrown fields and under eucalyptus
trees where long-tailed grackles screech down at us. For each problem,
Padre Ruy has a simple, radical solution. Political weakness in the
face of Mexico and the U.S.?Central America should band together
into a single country, or at least a federation. Problems from the entrenched
militaries?disband them and reemploy the soldiers as park rangers
and coast guards. The looming threat of energy shortages?no problem
at all, just build more atomic generating plants.
When I demur that radioactive waste is a significant problem, he scoffs,
then takes out a pad of paper and draws a flow diagram to illustrate
the typical power plant radiation levels and what they mean to health
(remember, he holds a masters degree in nuclear engineering).
"Its a myth," he says of the peril of radioactive waste,
so feared in the U.S. "Listen, if I were president of Nicaragua,
I would invite every nation in the world to send their nuclear waste
here." He elaborates the economic benefits: money earned from fees
for disposal first of all but also from reprocessing to extract usable
metals and radioactive isotopes and selling these for use in medicine,
the power industry, instrumentation, and manufacturing. "Probably
only one percent would have to be buried," he claims, which he
would do by embedding it in glass and inserting that into bore holes
in stable rock.
A tall order, I say wryly, so when will he get started on it? He laughs
at my skepticism and replies, "One thing at a time."
People
Have to Live
We are on the narrow country road between Chinandega and the Pacific
coast in a Toyota SUV bound for a restaurant and a dinner that the local
hospital aid association is hosting in honor of the visiting medical
team. Our driver is one of the association directors, a wealthy businessman
and farm owner who is prominent in Nicaraguan agricultural affairs,
and he is a worried man.
He talks about Nicaraguas economic and business woes during the
entire half-hour drive, and at times it is a harangue, for many of the
problems are systemic, critical, and in part of international origin.
Government price supports in other countries, primarily the U.S. during
the 1980s, enabled foreign exporters to undersell Nicaragua exporters,
while at the same time imposing import quotas on Nicaraguan goods, so
because of reduced domestic and foreign markets Nicaragua has seen its
cash crops shrink or disappear altogether: nursery trees, sugar cane,
sesame, soy beans, cotton, bananas and other tropical fruit, rice, and
peanuts. (It is now cheaper to import sugar than to produce it, a disconcerting
irony in a country whose rum, Flor de Caña, "Flower of the
Sugarcane," is a point of nationalistic pride.) With a huge foreign
debt and the economy in such straits Nicaragua had to accept austerity
reforms dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Our host
rails at the exorbitant fees charged by the IMF consultants who whisk
into Managua from Europe and throw their weight around. He argues that
Central America needs to confederate in order to survive, but even then
hes not sure there would be much improvement. A recent trade treaty
with Mexico provides a dismal precedent. The Mexicans, he complains,
always find a way to throw up barriers to Nicaraguan exports and manipulate
the treaty to their sole advantage. "They always say one thing
and do another," he says.
Suddenly, he breaks off and points to a group of poor men and women
walking along the roadside. "Look at them. They used to be field
workers, probably. Now there is no work for them. Nothing. They get
by mostly from dribbles of foreign aid. The country is full of people
like them, and they are tired of waiting for things to improve. Somethings
got to be done for them and soon. People have to live. Period."
This comes from a man who is a staunch conservative, so much so that
he fled the country after the Sandinistas came to power. His worries
do not arise from a egalitarian political sympathy. They are practical.
Heres what he is afraid might happen. The radical left will come
to power again. Widespread unemployment destabilizes socio-political
systems, increasing the chance for social upheaval and the election
of reactionary liberals who want to redistribute wealth and land. Hes
seen it happen before, he says, referring tacitly to the Sandinistas,
and now hes seeing it happen again in Venezuela. He despises its
president, Hugo Chávez, whom he considers a middle class-suppressing
rabble-rouser, and he fears the increasing power of the left in the
other Latin American countries that comes from a swelling popular demand
for jobs and economic improvements. But there is more to it than jobs
and economic prospects; the divisions between rich and poor are deeper,
more personal in Central America. We pass another group of people at
roadside as the dusk gathers (which in the tropics comes with startling
swiftness), and when they turn to stare at us, their faces are broad
and dark, the hair thick and black, the expressions curious but undemonstrative.
They are Indians. They are the poor people. Our host points at these
too. "If the poor people here see a white person, they think he's
rich. They think all white people have a lot of money." The remark
isnt simply a challenge; he is as white as we are. Perhaps thinking
he has gone too far, knowing how notoriously dense North Americans like
us can be about racial matters, he changes the subject, and soon we
reach the Restaurante de España, a gorgeous open-air establishment
beside the wide waterway separating Corinto from the mainland. His point
is clear, however: Another leftist revolution might not be so restrained
as that of the Sandinistas. However bloody its civil war was, at the
upper echelons of power, it was something of a family quarrel.
In The Jaguar Smile Salman Rushdie quips that the people on either side
of the civil war had dated each other in high school; they were from
the same class. The sides were ideological rather than racial. Next
time, our host implies, having white skinthe immanent symbol of
privilege and differencemight become a liability.
At the dinner, back among his peersprominent doctors, hospital
administrators, association officers, and other business peopleour
hosts ebullience is reinvigorated. He talks more about the countrys
agricultural problems. Theres no lack of talent, he claims, but
development money from the government and NGOs has a way of going
astray. Projects are started, but corruption stifles them. (The president
then serving, Enrique Bolaños, had just imprisoned his predecessor,
Arnoldo Alemán, for corruption.) Others around the table look
at him a little askance, but nobody contradicts him. The day before
he met with the ministers of agriculture and commerce to demand that
something be done to improve employment opportunities northwestern Nicaragua,
and now he fumes while relating the answer he got: There is too little
money to go around. Chinandega might get nothing. I try to steer the
conversation back to specifics, but when I ask about the details of
local production, he shrugs and says hes not sure. He takes out
his cell phone, dials a number, speaks briefly, and hands the phone
to me: "Here." I find myself talking to a peanut exporter
in Managua, who gives me the statistics for the last year: 50,000 metric
tons of peanuts produced, $35 million worth of exports to the United
Kingdom, Holland, and Mexico, also a tiny amount permitted into the
United States. The exporter agrees that Nicaragua could produce much
more for sale abroad if growers could find new markets; however, some
of the exporters details do not appear to square with what our
host said during the drive here. The increasing gusto of the dinner
party prevents me from questioning him further, although afterwards
he speaks to me privately. Yet it's not for further discussion. He just
wants to insist on one point, that I not use his name in anything I
publish.
I Did It My Way
"We used to live so simply," says my friend Dora plaintively,
a wistful protest that I hear repeatedly among educated Nicaraguans.
"Now look at all this." Her husband, Loreto, is driving us
to a fancy Mexican restaurant, Maria Bonita, in one of Managuas
fashionable districts, and he frowns in agreement. The traffic is dense,
swift, and frightening because no one pays the least attention to lanes
or signals a change in direction. It is the exuberant driving of people
for whom using a car daily is still a fresh, liberating, competitive
experience. Loreto is continually accelerating then slamming on the
brakes to match the general herky-jerky pace.
The cars are almost universally small Japanese- or Korean-built models,
many in tatty shape, but every once in a while we pass a large glittering
SUV of American or European manufacture, and at the sight of them Dora
seethes. A lot of narcotrafficking money is coming into the capital,
she explains, and as she speaks, she looks both disgusted and worried.
The drug money is producing a class of sudden wealth for the drug runners
themselves and for corrupt officials, who all like to show it off. The
drug money is also coming in during a time of swiftly increasing crime,
helping to fuel it. When another of my Nicaraguan friends learned that
I was leaving for Managua, he told me, "Here in León it
is safe. You can leave your front door open, and nothing will happen.
But Managua is not safe. You must be careful." When I told him
that I was going to fly from Managua to Puerto Cabezas on the northeast
coast, he was aghast. He told me darkly not to go out on the streets
there alone, not to let it be seen that I have anything of value. Yet
another friend complained of the kidnappings and brazen highway robberies
in broad daylight in Managua; at first he blamed it on Costa Rican gangs
but later admitted that Nicaraguans are likely to be involved too. He
sighed, "Managuas becoming like Mexico."
Today, when we stop for a light, the superficiality of the prosperity
becomes glaring. Hawkers of all ages, some dressed in the merest rags,
stream among the stopped cars offering to wash windows or to sell packets
of water, juice, cookies, or cigarettes. At every stop Loreto hands
out coins.
At Maria Bonita, the prosperity reasserts itself. The patrons enjoy
the touch of Mexico very much, even though most Nicas, who prefer mild
fare, are cautious with these spicy foreign dishes. The dining area
is spacious, open-air, and well guarded; the interior decor tries hard
to capture the atmosphere of the Old Mexico of filmdom (1950s-style):
thickly stuccoed walls, wooden balcony with flower pots, sultry lighting,
and bright posters, most featuring the restaurants movie star
namesake. Soon after we are seated, the remaining tables fill up quickly
with expensively, conservatively dressed families and fashionably turned-out
couples on dates. There is the continuous hubbub of clattering dinnerware
and talking, the owner circulates through the room chatting with his
customers, and then the first musical act of the night takes the stage
on the edge of the dining area. It is a mariachi band: guitar, guitarón,
violin, and trumpet.
Their music, brassy and frenetic, takes me back a year to a bemusing
episode. On that occasion, at this same restaurant, I was sitting beside
a Managuan poet, Juan Velásquez Molieri, and we were listening
to the same band. He arrived with his wife soon after our party was
seated. Dora, who knew him, invited him to join us, and we struck up
a conversation of mixed Spanish and English while his wife looked on
glumly. Learning that I was a writer and had once published poetry myself,
Velásquez rose to excuse himself, promised to return, and led
his wife away. A half hour later he was back without his wife, and he
handed me a gift, a thick collection of his poems, Los Esplendores Vividos.
I was touched by the gesture, yet he waved off my expression of gratitude.
"Life is intensive here," he said of Managua, and then tapped
a forefinger on the book: "Youll see."
His life, however, turned out to be more intriguing than the living
splendors he wrote about, and there was no reason to view it as an especially
exceptional life for an educated Managuan of his generation. He came
from a middle-class family and trained at university for a life of business.
His business career was cut short by the Sandinista Revolution, however,
and he turned to journalism. Writing news stories during the Sandinista
days was risky. You dared not write in such a way to appear overly critical
of the revolutionary government, he told me, and some topics were taboo.
If you were accused of counterrevolutionary criticism, the consequences
could be very grim. He had to be careful, and that caution and the hectic
workload ground him down. But during the 1990s life began looking
better. He left journalism and became the public relations director
for a cable company. At age sixty, he was just finishing law school
and planning to open his own firm. He was enjoying life.
As was true of most of the restaurants patrons, he spoke with
animation, expansively, while moving his head and body in rhythm to
the mariachi music. It was engaging to be near such energy. At one point
he caught the sleeve of a passing waitress and handed her a note that
he had just written on a napkin. The note went to the leader of the
mariachi band, a request for a particular song. Time passed, song after
song was played, and Velásquez grew impatient, wondering if hed
been snubbed. Finally, though, a song began, and a broad smile broke
out on his face. It was the song he had requested, and within two bars
of its opening, the entire restaurant had fallen silent. It was not
the national anthem, nor even the immensely popular "Nicaragua
Nicaragüita," but rather a Spanish version of Frank Sinatras
theme song, "I Did It My Way." Sinatra is a favorite among
Nicaraguans, but even given that, "I Did It My Way" summoned
a devotion from the diners so passionate that it seemed to verge upon
desperation. As the mariachi singer, accompanied by single guitar, segued
into the crescendoing refrain, they all joined in lustily: "in
mi manera."
Now a year later, at the conclusion of dinner, a second mariachi band
arrives to provide an even more curious surprise for us, arranged by
one of the León physicians. The mariachis serenade us on our
way out to the cars and persist in the parking lot until some of us
agree to practice a Nicaraguan dance under the guidance of the band
leader. We dance among the parked cars as security guards and passers-by
look on. The band yet continues to play as we climb into our cars and
drive out of the lot. Within a mile, however, the music and gaiety of
Maria Bonita are a world away, and we are driving past shacks, go-downs,
and sleazy bars.
Managua is less a city than the shards of a city left over from the
earthquake that leveled it in 1972. Barrios have grown, seemingly at
random, each in its own manner, so that now, thirty-two years later,
the towering silhouette monument to General Sandino, built on a hill
overlooking the city by the Sandinistas to honor their icon, looks down
on a aggregation of gated communities, slums, rusting factories, glittering
malls, and roadside tiendasall spreading swiftly along the southern
shore of Lake Managua, which is all but dead from pollution. It is a
setting where politicians, government functionaries, NGOs and aid workers,
narcotraffickers, the old-guard rich and the homeless, campesinos hunting
for jobs and longtime residents inured to intermittent employment, businessmen
and factory workers, shop owners, and university intellectuals exist
in haphazard, discrete communities, like a dance floor filled with couples
each dancing to a different tune.
As for those narcotraffickers, Dora and Loreto are far from alone in
worrying about them. The national government feels the threat as well.
Drug runners have made bases for themselves in the two major cities
on the east coast, Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas, and they use the offshore
waters to smuggle with impunity. There are reports that increasing numbers
of processing plants for cocaine and methamphetamines are cropping up
in the countryside, and gang violence, the etiquette of the drug trade,
has increased dramatically. In the summer of 2004, bowing to heavy pressure
from the United States, General Javier Carrión, commander of
the Nicaraguan army, destroyed 333 surface-to-air missiles in his arsenal.
The U.S. government was afraid that the missiles might otherwise fall
into the hands of terrorists in Al-Qaida. Hoping for a favor in return,
General Carrión traveled to Washington, D.C., to ask for $80
million dollars in aid from the Pentagon so that he could buy planes
and boats with which to fight the narcotraffickers, whose equipment
is better than his armys. The Pentagon turned him down, citing
a lack of resources. The market for narcotraffickers is, of course,
overwhelmingly the United States. The irony of this is not lost on Nicaraguans.
© Roger Smith
These pieces all written between 2003-2004
Nicaragua
Dragons
and Rum
Dr Buitrago and Ruben Dario
More Travel
Stories here
Home
©
Hackwriters 1999-2005
all rights reserved
|