The Agonist - Agonist Travel Journals

The Mountains, Land-Reform and Jobs

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:23:11 -0700

I was involved in two pretty interesting conversations with Ruy and Plutarco while in Nicaragua. They spanned about three days, but below you will find the gist of them both. I traveled with a friend who wrote up the conversations in dialogue form, as my Spanish leaves lots to be desired.

Ruy:

On Evangelicos

Ruy: “There are a lot of evangelicos here. You know, the people here have a lot of illiteracy and no education. When the evangelicos come, the people don’t know any better. They take, and take and take and the people just flock to the church and give what little they have to these thieves; puto evangelicos estupidos.

More after the jump.

Continued

On Ortega

· They are all the same (politicians). He is just another politico now.

· I’m not an Ortegaist, but I do have respect for him for standing up to the US

· Lo que me importa es trabajo, si tengo trabajo, estoy bien con el politico (I just want to be able to make my own way and I don’t have confidence in the politicians.)

On The Sandanistas

· I was taken into the mountains for three years. They took me, I did not want to go. “No, no fue voultario”. I went to a training camp with the Russians and they taught me how to fight.

· I saw two of my friends murdered in front of me in the mountains. One of my friends got his head sliced off, right in front of me. There was nothing I could do. When you are in the mountains the only thing you can think of is your own skin. Your own skin, that’s all you can worry about. This affects a person.

On 'The mountains'

BR- Did the war impact the whole country or was it mainly isolated in North?

R- Yes, it was mainly in the North; in the mountains. They would take people from the countryside but the fighting was in the mountains.

BR – How are the people in the mountains now?

R – Oh, there is no more fighting in the mountains. The fighting has stopped. Its safe.

BR- What I’m trying to ask is how the war affected the people there.

R – Oh, there are a lot affected people there, crazies. The war makes you crazy. You can’t see what we saw and not be affected. I had to take off for seven years to clear my head. I went to South America and United States. It took a long time.

BR- You are really lucky you could do that. I imagine few people had this luxury. Are there are a lot of people with problems there?

R – Yes. The people in the mountains were affected. There are a lot of crazies there. The men beat their wives and there is a lot of drinking. Lots of violence, fighting in the bars.

Plutarco

BR- What do people around here do for a living?

P- Mostly fishing and small farming. Remember you saw the shrimp/salt farms on the way to town.

BR- there’s a lot of people here . . . .they all do fishing and farming . . . is there enough work for them?

P – More people used to work, things used to be better. People used to be able to get able to borrow money to grow their business and get them through hard times. The government used to help.

BR – In the 80s?

P- Yes. Now people can’t get any help. There are no loans and if you can get loans, they are too expensive. Interest is too high.

BR- What does the government do now?

P-They do what they can, but there’s no money.

BR- so do they give materials for houses or food?

P- Yes, materials for building (not sure if he was just agreeing to be polite . . . . .but t he clear message was that people were not getting what they used to)

BR- Didn’t the Sandanista’s give people land?

P- Yes, sort of. They gave it to cooperatives, for community co-ops. But the profit was never for the individuals. The government set the prices at which they would buy the whole sale product.

P- Now, its just too hard. People can’t get money to grow or sustain during hard times. You can’t barrow money and then owe the same amount in interest in less than 5 years. This does not make sense.

BR- Its good you know this. A lot of people have gotten into trouble by not understanding this.

P- Yes, people do what they have to. I watched my father do business when things were better. He would barrow money to sustain us when crops were bad. But, you can’t do that now.

BR- What about NGO’s or micro lending?

P- That’s only for the leaders of the community. They will receive the money for the community but it never gets to the community. They are the only ones that benefit.

BR- So the community politicians are just like the national politicians.

P- Exacto.

P – See this road, see how bad it is? It was great during the 80s. No one has cared to keep it up since then. They used this to get people for the mountains.

(Both Ruy and Plutarco would speak of “the mountains” not “the war”. There was something interesting about this but my Spanish is not good enough to explore this nuance. Nor was I comfortable enough to explore the irony in his complaint of the deterioration of the road used to take children from his town to the mountains.)

BR – The Sandanista’s would come for Soldiers, like they did for Rudy?

P- They like people from this area, rural people.

BR- Stronger?

P – Yes, and not political.

BR- Would they take mainly children?

P-Yes, you had to be (13, 14 or 15, I can’t remember) years old. I was not quite of age and they had already taken my two older brothers so my mother pleaded with them and I was able to stay with her but it was not easy. It was just me, taking care of the family. Then my brother came home from the mountains and he was not right. It was very difficult.

P- They also took land from the people here.

BR- Part of the land reform?

P- No, not for the people. For his people. See these hills, all of them, all this land? He gave this to one person. This is really good land. It goes all the way up there and all the way back there. From those hills you can see everything. It’s a lot of land, really good land.

BR- I thought he took land from Somoza to give to the people?

P – This land was from someone who bought it. He was not a polititician. He paid for the land. They took it when he died and the land was in probate. His family tried to fight it, they are still fighting it. That’s always how it is. The rich people have all the lawyers and judges and they just get more and more.

(then we started driving by the owners that were given the land)

P- there they are; see, they are not poor. They did not need the land. See how nice their truck is.

BR – So this was not land given to the people?

P – No this was land given to one person, for their own benefit. One of Ortega’s cronies, as a reward.

Many thanks to BR for the transcription, as I seem to have been overcome by a severe case of laziness.

Final Granada Photos

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:10:34 -0700

I fly home tomorrow, so this is the last batch of photos from Nicaragua. Enjoy!

More on Crime Rates in Nica.

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:25:04 -0700

SP -- your comments on Nica's crime situation are spot on. In an earlier incarnation, I covered all of Central America (well, never made it to Belize....) for one of the analytical arms (OK, chose your own body part) of the USG. At the time, Nica in the run-up to the return of Comrade Danny and was a particular favorite of mine. The Nicas are probably the most interesting of the Ladino groups in the region.
The lower crime rate CAN in part be traced to the socialized medical & educational programs the Sandis brought in. Another factor is that Nica expats during Danny's previous time at the trough departed the country as family units (middle class & all that). More important, most settled in Florida -- not the west coast, where local gangbangers were a dominant influence.
Young Salvadorians left home for LA to avoid the meatgrinder of the war and to make a contribution to the household coffers. They returned home (well, we've been sending them, haven't we?) with the tools and the talent to bring east LA to Central America.
If you've time, I'd suggest a swing thru Honduras. I always found it a very downbeat & fundamentally depressing society -- possibly because of their "good doggie" history with the Colossus of the North (no, Not Mexico!).

Crime In Granada

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:31:33 -0700

For a long time Nicaragua has had the lowest crime rates of any Latin American country. I don't know if that was a function of a semi-socialist/communist history or the simple fact that there just isn't much left to steal in a country when a former president pilfered the state coffers of $100 million. (Yes, that is chump change back home, but here?)

Sadly, crime is on the rise and Conservatives back home, while they love to berate Daniel Ortega, they'd love the privatization of the police function here. From a Nica Times article, October 2-9 issue:

The communications officer for the National Police of Granada, Luis Carrillo, says citizen security is not just the police's responsibility. He says that everyone has to work together to ensure 'citizen security.'

Might I suggest to Officer Carrillo that he import some gun-toting white southerners for his vigilante justice project?

Heat

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:07:31 -0700

Have I mentioned how uninspired I am when it comes to writing? I think it's the heat. It's downright devastating. Singapore was hot and so was much of the area around the Straits, but this heat? Good grief. I had a hard time finishing my pancakes this morning it was so hot.

Flor De Cana

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:16:08 -0700

I've never been a big fan of the rum. At least until I tried Flor de Cana, the local Nicaraguan brand of rum. It's nice and goes down smooth. I should know, some surfers and I polished off a full bottle a few nights back on the beach at El Popoyo.

I might be a convert. The only problem is I seem to fall in love with local blends, like Yeni Raki, that are well nigh impossible to get at home.

Life is rough.

On a side note, yesterday, for the first time in my life I was corrected by a local for calling myself 'an American.'

"I know you are an American," Walter told me. "So am I!"

Soy Tejano, then," I said.

He looked at me with his head cocked to one side. "Huh?"

"Texas," I said.

"Oh, you are a Norteno," he said.

"Sure thing."

He does have a point. Of course, I've heard 'yanquis' and 'gringo' here in Nicaragua more than anywhere else in my life as well.

It's A Strange World

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:58:25 -0700

Had someone told me twenty years ago when I was majoring in Russian, ready to fight the Cold War and all that, that twenty years to the day I would be spending my 39th birthday in a Nicaragua where Daniel Ortega was president and enjoying myself immensely, I would have laughed in their face.

Alas, here I am. 'Tis a strange life and a stranger world. Lots of new photos from the Lago De Nicaragua here.

En Nicaragua, Beisbol es rey!

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:19:48 -0700

More photos from Granada, here.

Popoyo Diario, October 3 2009

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 10:30:44 -0700

The vile shit we do in the name of national security is beyond me, sometimes. I’ve visited a lot of countries in which our national security obsessions have led to all sorts of misery, but here in Nicaragua it seems the most futile. What harm did this desperately poor country ever pose to us? A little Cuban influence? Or Russian mercs running around in the hills? As Ruy told me yesterday, “Soy no Sandinista, pero if I have no job, I vote for Ortega.”

That says a lot for a guy who was pressed into the Nicaraguan army to fight the Contras. “Three years I spent in the mountains, fighting that puto Ronald Reagan. Pablito,” he tells me,” I love you Americanos, but Reagan was el grande puto.”

Ruy likes that word, he uses it with a large smile, his little Ortega inspired mustache hanging from his upper lip. He’s got an infectious hand-shake and at close to 50 years old has the energy of a 20 year old.

We drive for an hour and a half from the beach here at Popoyo to Rivas, the only place within a hundred kilometers with an ATM. “Yeah,” I think, “capitalism has come to even Nicaragua.”

More after the jump.

“You see these schools? All built by the Sandinistas. Sure, our roads are no good, but we are educating people now. Soon, they will be smart enough to build the roads without the help of the Chinese or Nortenos,” he tells me.

The car stops, he says hello to some old man on a horse, chats him up and we speed along. Dusty rolling away in the read view mirror. Pigs loiter in dirty, disheveled front yards. Nicaragua is poor, but fuck, I think, the people do smile.

* * *

I require prodigious amounts of caffeine and nicotine to wake up, as I relearn that benadryl and ambien are not the best combo at bedtime. But my feet are no longer swollen like pimply papayas. There is something in the sand here I’m allergic to. That or I’m diabetic.

I grab the long board and head down to the beach to the ‘holy grail of Nica waveriding, Popoyo.” The board is heavy—and long at 9’2”—blows in the wind back and forth and tries my patience. There are few clouds and I look like a walking Crisco commercial, all larded up and not an inch of skin showing underneath the sunblock.

But the waves are too big and too fast for me. They come in easily discernible sets of threes and fours, with no whitewash to speak of.

My travel companion, whom I’ve taken to calling ‘Curls’ for her amazing mane of Shirley Temple curls, earned a very serious badge of honor yesterday. She munched her first board. She, unlike me, can surf. I just flail about like the rank amateur I am. But her? She’s got the goods. Alas, a big set wave came in, she misjudged the drop—they are two and a half meter waves—and went head first into the wall. The board jackknifed straight into the air, caught the next wave and snapped right in half. It amazes me that the human body just curls up in water and doesn’t get hurt at all, but the brittle board breaks. While she’s off earning real plaudits I’m in the surfers version of the kiddie-pool, desperately trying to just get up on a wave.

I’m reminded of Alejandro’s comment about surfboards, “unlike woman, the board let’s you get up on it every time.” What does that say about me? Am I neutered?

I wonder what Reyes would say to Alejandro? They are peas in a pod. So alike. Alejandro is a cad, but far too funny to dislike.

"I like my girlfriend," he says, "but I like my life better. My priorities are family, surfing and girls."

Latin to the core. And a surfer.

As much as I like Nicaragua, I cannot help but notice the country’s economy is a disaster. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place that imports all its bottled water. But here in Nicaragua the water comes from Costa Rica and the salsa, of all things, comes from Honduras. Is there any industry here, aside from rich former-CIA staffers buying all the beach front property. “How’s that even possible,” I ask Ruy. “I don’t know,” he says, “but that mansion and that mansion,” he tells me, pointing north up the beach and then south, “are owned by former CIA staffers.

Is it paranoid rumor? I wonder? Who knows. The fact that the Nicaraguan’s think so is enough to be disturbed.

“And now, the evangelicos are invading,” he says. “Los putos puritanos,” he tells me. “Even the surf camp up the road is a ‘Christian’ surf camp.”

I shake my head.

“Soy Catolico, but he is evangelico,” he says, looking at his buddy Plutarco. He smiles at him. “I feel sorry for you.”

I concur. I’ve endured enough puritanism in my life as well.

Paddle!

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:53:57 -0700

I figured I better post a photo of me working, as opposed to doing nothing, which I seem to be pretty good at!

More photos of sunsets, geology, surfing and landscapes can be found here.

Lazy Days In Nicaragua

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:41:22 -0700

A couple dozen new photos are up.

There is nothing so hideous as waking to the thumping bass and screeches of of foreign music at six in the morning. But after 36 hours of no electricity I can't blame the Nicas (short for Nicaraguan) for wanting to revel in it. That, however, didn't help my headache. Or my first morning in Nicaragua.

My room is terrifying. Ants scurry across the floor. The shower is little more than a PVC pipe pumping out sulfurous swamp water. The sheets are clean, but only in a tentative, hand-washed way. The rafters leak mosquitos. The wash basin is filled with the accumulated grit of years. I don't think it has been cleaned since before the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza. The toilet has no seat. Surf boards and bottles of empty rum are scattered helter-skelter.

I stumbled out of bed, bleary-eyed and coated in sweat out to the veranda and ordered coffee. I lit a cigarette, dragged deeply as the nicotine and tar at the very least woke up my lungs. I surveyed the sights around me.
The wind blows up dust devils in the dirt road. Thatched huts line the beach. Blue skies and bluer water ripple out all the way to Hawaii as tropical clouds jog penitently in the sky. Alfonso argues in the kitchen with his mother. Coconuts cling to branches while the water in the mangrove lagoon behind me splashes softly onto sandy banks. A pair of Magpie Jays roost in the branches while a small heron and sandpiper feed on the banks. A fish kicks out of the water, snagging a wayward dragonfly. A hammock swings in the breeze beckoning me to waste my day in its embrace.

I'm tempted.

More after the jump.

Three dogs lya on the cool tiles. A breeze ruffles the feathers of a parrot who's vocabulary is little more than an occasional "Ola, papi!"We stare at each other across the table. He whistles softly at me. I whistle back. We continue for a few minutes and then he scratches his ears. I mimic him. Then he turns his head almost 360*.

"You got me on that one, buddy," I tell him. I am now reduced to conversing with parrots for entertainment.

The parrot and I discuss the meaning of life. He disagrees with Douglas Adams. "It's not 42, or 24, or whatever," he says. "Life is about sitting here, eating, pooping on the floor, chasing the dogs and watching humans do stupid things," he tells me.

A Coca-Cola truck rumbles into the village. Three Spaniards sip coffee and whisper in the slushy syllables of Catalan. I light another smoke, inhale deeply and lean back in my chair. A Playboy Centerfold hanfs on the wall behind me, a lithe young Latina in a completely unnatural, if oh-so-seductive pose.

It's not even ten in the morning yet and already I know I'm going to waste my entire day on this veranda, or one like it. The deliberate motions of life's languid rhythms will go on without me.

By noon I've managed to collect my gear and find a better hotel. The Casa Maur is a traditional-style, long house hacienda. Surf boards line the walls. Surf videos are on the teevee and surfers are crashed everywhere, bodies contorted and resting.

A monkey dangles from a tree. A pair of macaws cuddle. The Catalans sunbathe. Behind the beach a lone man casts a fishing net out into the lagoon, far away from the alligator snout, dragging in nothing. It is now two in the afternoon. The day is a wasting.

Popoyo is empty, except for a few fishermen in strange tai-chi poses waist deep in the surf. Fishing line wrapped around PVC pipes. During the heat of the day there is little except a breeze and a large dragonfly.

The hours pass. I haven't moved from this chair. There are no clouds, and Magnificent Point is visible in the late afternoon. The only sound is the whoosh and crash of the pounding surf and my shallow, lazy breathing. The sun will soon set a friend says.

I turn my chair around, looking Northwest. Hills undulate up the beach, a narrow strip of golden sand snuggles between the broad expanse of blue ocean and green jungle. A lone surfer, board under her arms, walks up the beach. The sky grows pink, while a curtain of indigo blue draws down in the East.

Now it's orange. The sun is a setting silver dollar over the Pacific. Five fingers of light reach out for crimson clouds until all that is left are the lazy embers of an old sun.

From Colones to Cordobas

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:54:11 -0700

New photos up here.

I left La Fortuna at 615am. Yes, that early. I took the bus from La Fortuna to Penas Blancas, a small frontier town along the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border. It was a slow bus ride, taking about six hours. I arrived in Penas Blancas about noon.

From La Fortuna down the mountains to Guanacaste the flora was a uniform, high canopy, interspersed with small farms of guayavas, papayas, carrots, onions, peppers and the like. But as I entered the flatlands, high semi-dry grasses proliferated. It was dryer too. Still lush by Texas standards, but the grasses had a golden edge to them and the trees looked windblown. The bus stopped frequently, crawling north between parallel mountain ranges. Cool highland breezes gave way to lowland humidity and stifling heat.

The people changed in the lowlands too. Where they had been more Spanish looking in the highlands and along the Pacific Coast, here their looks took a decisive turn to the indigenous. Lean body frames, thin noses, light eyes and wavy hair were replaced by by thick straight tresses of black hair, coal eyes, short globular frames and flat noses with flaring nostrils.

More after the jump.

Where the Costa Rican side of the border was well organized, minimally bureaucratic and efficient--as borders go, that is--the Nicaraguan side was chaos, long lines of people wandering with little sign of purpose, hawkers and border officials stamping everything in triplicate. I managed to find the bank and exchange my Colones for Cordobas, walked out of Customs, naught but a shed with a corrugated iron roof into a classic Central American scene.

Dilapidated, small sheds sold unnameable foods at unspeakably expensive prices, better to gouge the few tourists around. The buses were at least thirty year old Lady Bird body-style models, painted in gaudy Latin American patterns and colors. A cacaphonous medley of Latin music blared away from three different boom boxes. It could have been East Austin or the barrio in San Antonio.

The ride from the border to Rivas, the local hub, sped mostly along the Lago De Nicaragua. Two extinct volcanoes hunched in the waters off shore forming the Isla de Ometepe. For one five mile stretch of road the wind swept fields were filled with thousands of swallows careening and caroming about in an amazing aerial symphony. The trees bent over by the persistent southerly winds where a $71 million wind farm churned out energy for this resource poor nation.

An African influence shows up int he faces of the Nicaraguans. Curly hair, bigger lips and notably darker skin relax in the bus seats all around me. And the fit prosperity of Costa Rica has given way to heavier frames, well worn teeth and broader smiles.

Why is it, I wonder, that those who live closer to the edge of life smile more? And those of us who have so much more to be grateful for have faces flawed with frown lines? Is it that those with less are more likely to be grateful for what they have versus those of us who are consumed with worry about what we could lose?

The road north goes on. I'm dropped off at the Rivas bus station, a ramshackle, ad hoc congregation of cinder block buildings, food sheds and vegetable stands. It's poor here, but everyone is well fed. A buddy of mine suggested I check out the beach at Popoyo, north of San Juan del Sur. So, I hop aboard the bus to Salinas, pay $1 and sit.

Forty five minutes later down a dirt road, nestled between wind blown hills, small farmsteads filled with pigs, chickens and vegetable gardens I begin to see baseball fields. Children are playing 'our' game. I think back to the news yesterday, the Yankees have won the AL East. Will a Nicaraguan child be so lucky as to play for the world's greatest baseball team?

The bus continues its twisting journey. Night begins to fall. I'm filthy, hungry and tired. The driver drops me at a junction, points down the road and says, "Popoyo is two kilometers that way."

Five kilometers later it's even darker. I'm dodging the halo of mud-puddles in the moonlight. The only sign of human life I see is an hacienda up the hill, a generator echoing like so many gunshots in the hot tropical night. A cow lows in the distance. A black shade approaches me in the night.

"Buenas noches," he says.

"Buenas," I reply, too tired and too pissed off to ask for directions.

Ten minutes late a car stops.

"Where you go?" comes an Italian accent from the window.

"Popoyo," I answer.

"Get in," he says.

He's got slick-backed gray hair and a slight beer slur. We chit-chat for a few minutes in the black night.

"Not a good time to be out walking," he says. "The electricity is off here tonight."

"I'll be sure to check out the electric tables when I get to my hotel," I struggle NOT to say, instead, mumbling, "That explains a lot."

He drops me a Cabinas Rest Tica #2. The owner, Alfonso, shows me my room by candlelight. It's a good thing, too. In the light of day I'd probably have chosen the beach.

I sit on the veranda and eat Nicaraguan tamales by candlelight. Unlike any tamales I've ever had, they are like corned-beef and hash without the corned beef. A mushy pile of semi-boiled masa, with veggies. While I ponder the mystery meat in the tamales a troop of monkeys crash and howl in the branches behind me. Waves roar in front. Frogs croak in an unseen lagoon behind.

The cool beer goes straight to my head. It's only 730pm and within minutes I am sound asleep.

Waiting For Motmot

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:59:25 -0700

My latest Texas Monthly story is up, here. Enjoy!

Off To Lago de Nicaragua Tomorrow

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:32:27 -0700

I'm off to Nicaragua tomorrow and will be out of pocket until Tuesday. My next Texas Monthly story should run this week. My latest Guardian story was supposed to run late last week, but I think the Iran news pushed it back. I fly home from Managua on the 8th of October. So my regular blogging schedule will resume then. I'll keep you all posted.

Arenal Photo Dump

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:59:29 -0700

Lots of photos today. Hopefully I'll get a story done as well.

My favorites?

I'd be lying if I said the one above of the lizard wasn't one of 'em. By the way, all the animals in the subsequent photos are from the wild. None, except the kitty, are in captivity.

This one of the Arenal Volcano is nice.

And this one is for Don Henry Ford, Jr. Horses!

I love Vermillion Flycatchers. And this one of the Broad-billed Mot Mot? Probably the finest bird I've ever seen in the wild. I wish the colors weren't so washed out in the photo.

No photo collection is complete without food, this of a fine anti-pasto overlooking the Lago De Arenal, taken from The Country Store, owned by ex-pats from Arizona.

Cumulonimbus!

Finally, the hot springs at the foot of the volcano, known as Tabacon de los pobres.

Enjoy!