Nicaragua Journal | Working for Women

The growing immiserization of governments and economics in the global south … enables and even promotes the migration and trafficking of women as a strategy for survival. The same infrastructure designed to facilitate cross-border flows of capital, information and trade also makes possible a range of unintended cross-border flows, as growing numbers of traffickers, smugglers and even governments now make money off the backs of women. Through their work and remitances, women infuse cash into the economies of deeply indebted countries, and into the pockets of “entrepreneurs” who have seen other opportunities vanish. These survival circuits are often complex, involving multiple locations and sets of actors, which altogether constitute increasingly global chains of traders and “workers.”
– Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

All of the topics I’ve talked about in this journal of my Nicaragua experience contain a single thread in common: They all affect women in one way or another.

In Nicaragua, women took part in the revolution as soldiers and supporters of both Sandinistas and Contras; women took their role in the government that worked to rebuild the nation after the civil war, and now are at the center of some of the nation’s political machinations. Women bear the brunt of Nicaragua’s poverty. And the lack of clean, safe water take the hardest toll on women, upon whom traditionally falls the responsibility for obtaining water and safeguarding sanitation for the families.

I encountered another intersection of women’s lives in Nicaragua and politics about a month after I returned from my eight-day Nicaragua journey. Tthe BBC reported that Amnesty International had started a campaign to protest Nicaragua’s abortion policy, which completely bans all forms of abortion, even in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. Before the law was changed in 2008,  Nicaraguan law allowed for abortion in these cases; now the total ban prevents medical schools from even teaching the ban to doctors. Amnesty International calls the ban a threat to the human rights and health of Nicaraguan women and girls. According to the report:

At all stages of pregnancy, but particularly during the first three months, spontaneous  abortion (miscarriage) may occur for entirely natural reasons. Publicity surrounding the law has helped fuel fears among women who miscarry that they will be accused of self-induced  abortion. There is particular concern that women and girls who have a miscarriage may find themselves under suspicion of procuring an abortion if they present with symptoms of miscarriage and there is not sufficient medical evidence or expertise available to assess whether the pregnancy ended without external intervention.61 Because of fear of criminal prosecution, some women experiencing complications after miscarriages delay seeking medical treatment. Women who are suffering complications as a result of an unsafe abortion have a strong incentive not to seek medical treatment. Fearful of prosecution, they delay seeking the treatment they need and so put their own lives at risk.

Amnesty International and various news outlets who covered the abortion ban and Amnesty’s campaign, link it to President Daniel Ortega’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, which he cultivated in order to win its support in his successful 2006 bid for the presidency. The Sandinista leader had been a supporter of abortion rights in the past, and critics, of both Ortega and the party, have said the FSLN has turned its back on its people in its reach for power. According to a BBC report:

This was “playing politics with the lives of women and girls”, says Patricia Orozco. She fought on the side of the Sandinistas and is today a radio journalist and activist.

I asked her whether she felt there had been a betrayal of the revolution she took part in.

“We see our comrades in the revolution all changed, many of the women in particular.”

A women's health clinic in Managua, Nicaragua. Photo by Lynne Bradley

Abortion was not one of the topics that I was listening for while I was in Nicaragua, and as a result I don’t know how most of the women I met felt about the law. The closest I got to women’s health was to take snapshots of a beautiful mural outside a women’s clinic in Managua. I also got to deliver a plastic sack full of home pregnancy tests to the small health clinic in Chacraseca, whose single doctor, nurse, pharmacist and support staff are paid for by funds from JustHope supporters.

Primarily, my encounters with women’s issues came through an economic lens. I visited an artist co-op that supported women artists only.  I discussed the basics of a microfinance program that JustHope has begun in the district, and learned about the uses to which the women were putting their $25, $50 or $100 loans. Some were planning to start a pulperia, or a small, corner store or stand; some wanted to buy a pig to increase their farm’s output; others planned to start a bakery, sell makeup, or make and sell jewelry.

A pulperia started from a JustHope microloan. Photo by JustHope.

Why do microfinance programs primarily go to women? The New York Times’ Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn recently wrote a book called Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide that, in part, describes why these programs target women. In an excerpt published in August in the New York Times Magazine, they wrote:

One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men. Surprisingly frequently, we’ve come across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that the family couldn’t afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar, spending $5 each week.

Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent). If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries. Moreover, one way to reallocate family expenditures in this way is to put more money in the hands of women. A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier.

In Ivory Coast, one research project examined the different crops that men and women grow for their private kitties: men grow coffee, cocoa and pineapple, and women grow plantains, bananas, coconuts and vegetables. Some years the “men’s crops” have good harvests and the men are flush with cash, and other years it is the women who prosper. Money is to some extent shared. But even so, the economist Esther Duflo of M.I.T. found that when the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have a good crop, the households spend more money on food. “When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves,” Duflo says.

I found Kristoff and WuDunn’s take true, but somewhat unfair; while several men that I met in Nicaragua had that attitude of pleasure-before-responsibility, I also met several who were providing for their families the best they could. I met families where the men were absent either because they had left to live with another woman, or the mother of the family I had met was the other woman. I also found myself in communities and families of general respect and love. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s complicated. What I mean by that, I’m not sure. I think if I take away anything from my all-too-brief time in Nicaragua, I hope it’s that I remember this — it’s complicated — when trying to make a judgment on a situation. Too often when I have to make a judgment about a topic, an issue, a choice, I want to go with the soundbite or the side that most closely aligns with what I think I believe. And too often, reality slaps me upside the head to tell me that my own experiences aren’t always the best site to make a judgment about someone else. There’s a lot of grime on the lens I look at world through that needs to be cleaned off properly so I can see the whole picture.

For example.

Photo by Lynne Bradley.

On our last day in Chacraseca, our group visited some houses members had helped build the year before. One of the houses had been improved quite a bit: an extra room had been added on, decorative bars, to help protect the television and refrigerator within the house, had been added. Leslie, our group leader, told us that the mother of the household had gone to work as a domestic worker in Costa Rica for a year to pay for the improvements. Great, I said, thinking that it was good the woman had had the opportunity to make some extra money to pay for these luxuries. What initiative!

Leslie replied, “That means she left her children alone for a year. That was the only work she could find to support her family.”

Leslie didn’t have to explain further. I knew what this meant, had spent a semester studying this very issue, and yet I still assumed my own framework when I met it face-to-face. The mother of the family had become part of the global care chain, which an American Prospect article describes as:

A typical global care chain might work something like this: An older daughter from a poor family in a third world country cares for her siblings (the first link in the chain) while her mother works as a nanny caring for the children of a nanny migrating to a first world country (the second link) who, in turn, cares for the child of a family in a rich country (the final link). Each kind of chain expresses an invisible human ecology of care, one care worker depending on another and so on. A global care chain might start in a poor country and end in a rich one, or it might link rural and urban areas within the same poor country. More complex versions start in one poor country and extend to another slightly less poor country and then link to a rich country.

Care chains are one of the products of globalization, often unrecognized by those of us in the industrialized world because we see such work as a choice, rather than an only option that breaks up families and often leaves the woman vulnerable both at home and in her workplace abroad. Although care chains can be beneficial — they can provide economic freedom, which can lead to social and political freedom — they put a literal price on the emotional and psychological well-being of families, and human worth becomes yet another globalize commodity.

So what do I know?

Well, I know that all of the women I met in Nicaragua, all the women I’ve read about since coming back, aren’t victims. They are doing what they can do make the most of the opportunities they have access to, with all the agency and strength that they have access to. But I realize, also, that that there’s a big difference in being a victim and being in a position where you’re easy to victimize. I wonder how much our government, economic or international policies might change — hell, how much of our relationships with one another — might change if we kept that in mind.

Nicaragua Journal | Agüita

Que el agua es de todos, no del mejor postor

Aterciopelados, Agüita

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

Sitting here right now, writing this blog, I am leisurely sipping from a 32-ounce water cup that I drew from the kitchen faucet. Since that faucet is located in Norman — instead of Oklahoma City, which has some of the best-tasting tap water in North America — this cup of water has a slightly sour taste that isn’t very pleasing to my palate. But it’s pure and it’s free of bacteria, parasites, chemical waste and industrial toxins that can cause life-threatening illnesses like cholera, diarrhea and cancer.

Most of the world isn’t this fortunate.

According to Good Magazine:

• One-sixth of the world’s population does not have access to clean water;
• Every minute, four people across the world die from a water-related disease;
• Diarrhea caused by water-borne diseases kills 4,100 people per day; 90 percent of those deaths occur in children under the age of 5.

I spent my time in Nicaragua with one eye on the work that I was doing and the other on my ever-present plastic water bottle, which served not only was a source for drinking water, but also for teeth-brushing and some hand-washing. Any water that didn’t come from that water bottle, or the 5-gallon vessels of purified water we bought at the corner stores, I had to look at with suspicion and avoid, lest I end up with any number of water-borne ailments.

Again, most of the world is not this fortunate, to be able to shell out $1 a liter for a day’s drink. Neither are most of the people in rural Nicaragua.

Photo by Leslie Penrose.

The irony, of course, is that parts of Nicaragua are very wet and water-covered, at least during the rainy season. According to Public Citizen, water covers about 10 percent of Nicaragua’s surface, and the water table has been easily reachable through hand-dug wells. However, over the past 20 years, environmental degradation, pollution and a rising population that’s taxed the available water has threatened the country’s ability to provide clean water to its people. Only about half the country is able to access clean water; in rural areas, only a quarter of the country as clean water. Only about a third of the country has sewage coverage. In addition, what water is available that is available is being scooped up by multinational firms, backed by  International Monetary Fund policies, that are privatizing water access.

Chacraseca community members dig trenches in which to place pipes for the community water project. Photo by JustHope.

Clean water access is one of the the main projects that JustHope is working on together with Chacraseca. The community has been working on getting clean water to all its 8,000 residents for about nine years. Thanks to a $250,000 grant from the Austrian government and fundraising efforts by JustHope partners, Chacraseca was able to buy pipeline, professionally drill two wells and build clean water tanks in order to provide water to all but 200 families in the sector. Community members — women, men and children together — took part in the work, from digging trenches for the pipelines to building and installing the tanks. JustHope is currently raising the last few thousands of dollars to bring water to the rest of the community.

For those who have had taps installed at their homes, getting clean water is as easy as turning a knob. The final tests on the last wells took place while I was in Chacraseca. The water in those wells, purified through chlorine, were finally deemed safe to drink. I took a sip from a plastic bottle that had been filled at the well; it was sour and left a terrible taste in my mouth, but it was drinkable, and it was safe.

My attempt to carry water from the well. Photo by Denise Haines.

For those who don’t have faucets at their home, clean water is neither safe nor easily accessed. At the home our group was helping to build, in the remotest part of Chacraseca, the family still got its water the old-fashioned way: via a single well that served the entire neighborhood, drawn 20-gallon bucket by 20-gallon bucket. It takes a team of oxen, hitched to the pulley system, to pull the water up from the water table more than 200 meters below the earth. One man led the oxen down a long trail so he could haul the bucket up to the surface; another man tipped the water-filled bucket into a cistern, where the women of the neighborhood could then draw water for their homes’ use. The mother of the family whose house we were helping build showed us how she transports the water, in 2-gallon buckets atop her head. I gave the chore a try; I could barely lift half a bucket, and the weight of it left a painful bruise on the top of my head that I felt for days. This water, of course, wasn’t drinkable without purifying it first, and the family, which included two small children under the age of four, had no way of purifying it.

Access to clean water is only part of Nicaragua’s water problem. The other is water privatization, in which for-profit companies take over a nation’s water supply, create infrastructure for water delivery, but charge a high price for what was previously free. The good part: clean water; the bad: water only goes to those who can now afford it. Water privatization for many developing countries is often a condition of a International Monetary Fund development loans. According to Jennifer Schwab, director of Sustainability for Sierra Club Green Home:

The shrinking supply of clean drinking water worldwide is on a collision course with its relentlessly growing population. And in a number of developing world countries such as Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Angola, and others, private for-profit corporations are taking over the water supply and charging high prices for this previously free commodity. In many cases, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are behind this strategy.

The world’s three leading for-profit water firms — Vivendi, Suez and Thames — would counter that they are installing an infrastructure to support a supply of clean fresh water that otherwise would not be built by the governments of these under-financed nations. They also provide jobs and inject significant sums into otherwise struggling local economies.

So who is right? Nobody can charge citizens for the air we breathe. Should water be for sale or is it a basic human right? Is it possible for sustainable social policies and multinational, public companies to coexist? I think the answer is no. If Vivendi, Suez or Thames invest the capital to install the clean drinking water infrastructure and their business model is to sell drinking water, how can they be required to give it away to local citizens? This is the quandary we face especially in the developing world. Company CEOs and Board Members will argue they have a responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits, while local governments have a responsibility to their citizens. These poor countries, most often targeted for privatized water systems, need infrastructure and money to provide clean drinking water. Private companies feel that by providing these essentials, they have the right to charge for water consumption, regardless of the consumer’s socioeconomic status.

The IMF has pushed for water privatization in several parts of Nicaragua, including the capital Managua, Jinotega and León, which is three miles away from Chacraseca, and the cost of water increased water prices by 30 percent in Managua. The public policy nonprofit Public Citizen lays out the the IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs for Nicaragua that include plans for water privatization and an increase in residential water prices here. The report states:

The government of Nicaragua has been responding slowly to IMF and Inter-American Development Bank pressures to increase cost recovery and privatize water services. There are a variety of domestic political obstacles, from the role of water utilities in the political patronage system to popular resistance to increased water fees, that have slowed the externally imposed water sector “reform” program. Gaining popular political acceptance of the water privatization agenda will not be simple. There is tremendous resistance and social opposition to increased tariffs for water and social anxiety about relinquishing control of major portions of the country’s water system to foreign multinational corporations. Water, like food, air, or land, is basic to human survival. The basic injustice of water fees that are unaffordable to the majority poor population is very clear to most Nicaraguans.

Chacraseca leaders test a community well. Photo by JustHope

To be honest, before I went to Nicaragua, I never thought about how much water I use each day, and how that access to all that water might be a justice issue. According to Good Magazine, the average North American resident uses more than 100 gallons a day; the average person in a developing country uses about 1.3 gallons a day, a little less than a single flush of a low-flow toilet in the U.S. Curtailing my water use might be better for the environment, lower my own bills, and even help ensure the supply for those in my immediate area. But are my water concerns related to those in Nicaragua?

Public Citizen points out that eventually, all water problems will be local:

In the U.S. we have taken for granted access to basic water and sanitation services. However, policies promoting privatization and increased cost recovery are creeping into the wealthy countries as well. Recent tax cuts and the U.S. “War on Terrorism” will make in unlikely that water and sanitation infrastructure will receive the public subsidies sufficient to maintain operations and hold the line on consumer water fees. According to the U.S. Water Infrastructure Network (WIN), an additional $23 billion a year is needed in the U.S. to meet environmental and public health mandates, and to replace the aging infrastructure. Relying just on utility rate increases will cause consumer bills to double or triple, according to WIN.

As a result, cash-strapped municipal, country and regional water system managers will likely have to face hard choices, including the temptation to sell or contract operations to private multinational water corporations. In addition, new rules proposed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) services agreement may help private investors access government subsidies and ease the entry of foreign private water companies into the U.S. market. The policies of water privatization and increased cost recovery may soon begin to hit home in the U.S.

So paying attention to the impact of water privatization in developing countries like Nicaragua is a smart thing for those of us in the U.S. to do, to watch for when these policies might begin affecting us. But there’s more to it than that. As a person who cares deeply about justice and who tries to participate in the creation of a just and sustainable world, the issue of water access has to be understood as something more than either profit or how they might affect me individually. Access to clean, safe water has to be seen as a human right, because water, like air, is something we must have in order to live. Jennifer Schwab calls for the world to take a middle path in managing water access and costs, finding a way to provide clean affordable water to every person while still providing the companies that create the infrastructure a reasonable profit. Perhaps that is the answer; how that might be implemented, however, is anyone’s guess. And whatever happens, it must happen justly.

Right now, all I know is I stand with the quote in the epigraph of this post: May water belong to everyone, and not the highest bidder.

Watch …

For the past few years to mark World Water Day, GOOD Magazine has created these videos about water inequality and the need for safe, clean drinking water worldwide.

Nicaragua Journal | ‘Dirty Water of Imperialism’

The degree to which Nicaragua in the 1990s was obliged to yield its economic sovereignty to the international lending and donor community was brought home to met he day after the 1996 general election by an observer group, of which I was a member, with an individual heading one of those institutions in Nicaragua. When asked what he thought of the results of that election, he responded that either outcome would have been the same to him, since neither Aléman nor Ortega would have had many options concerning how to run the economy. After elaborating on that point, he then confided that his institution had an economic plan for Nicaragua and that he had arranged President-elect Aléman to come to his — the international bureaucrat’s — office to see it.

Thomas W. Walker, Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

Leave the United States and order a Coke, and you’ll probably find that it has a different taste. I drank one Coca-Cola during my eight days in Nicaragua, at a small restaurant (actually, it was a table set up on the front porch of a woman’s home in a Managua neighborhood), and enjoyed the taste of Coke made not with high fructose corn syrup but cane sugar.

I’m not much of a soda drinker; under normal circumstances I drink water. But in a place where most of the water is not readily drinkable, when you realize that the 20-oz. bottle of water you bought at the corner store has to last until your next trip to the store, which is three miles away and you’ll have to walk to get there, and it’s got to serve for everything — from quenching your thirst to brushing your teeth — you hunt around for other options. I ended up drinking a lot of Toña, one of two beers made in Nicaragua.

A pulperia in Chacraseca. Photo by Lynne Bradley

The pulperias — the small locally run corner stores — were stocked with both Coke and Pepsi, but I didn’t have the heart to drink one anyway. If you walk into a cantina and order one of these drinks, I was told, you don’t order them by name; you ask for some “dirty water of imperialism,” a reference to the political and economic hegemony the U.S. holds over the Western hemisphere and a good portion of the world.

In Nicaragua, the economic divide between the U.S. and the two-thirds world is palpable. Nicaragua is a country of stark economic division, with one of the highest degrees of income disparity in the world. It is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti, according to the BBC), with the majority of its people living on less than $1 a day. In rural areas, electric service is spotty; if there’s running water, it’s not necessarily potable. The house we helped build, in the most rural sector of Chacraseca, was built with concrete blocks and included a concrete floor, but when you consider that the family had been living in a tiny shelter cobbled together out of salvaged tin tied to branches taken from the forest, that tiny concrete house seems almost palatial.

Rural road in Chacraseca. Photo by Lynne Bradley

Our small group of builders reached that site every day after about a half-mile hike up a dirty path; the road, if you could call it that, was too bad — filled with deep ruts and sharp volcanic stones — for our van to make it all the way. Carts pulled by donkeys or oxen, however, didn’t have too much trouble.

A phrase I heard quite a bit during and after my experience in Nicaragua, especially by people who have made the journey themselves, is, “We may have material wealth, but they are rich in community.” But this division isn’t a natural one that keeps the U.S. on one side and Nicaragua on the other; it didn’t just shake out that way through a Guns, Germs and Steel history. Among other things, it’s national external debt, and it’s global economics.

Nicaragua’s external debt currently stands at about $6 million, reduced in the last few years from about $6 billions dollars after the nation entered the World Bank’s Highly Indebted Poor Countries program that canceled 80% of Nicaragua’s debt. This works out to about $1,000 for every person in Nicaragua. That original debt, though exacerbated by the civil war and environmental disasters like hurricanes and volcanic eruptions and from Nicaragua’s inability to pay the interest on those loans, came from bond payments, bank bankruptcies and structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Witness for Peace says Nicaragua spends about 25% of its annual budget on paying its external debt. Health care and education get 14% and 11%, respectively. So the money that could go to into social programs that might help end the cycle of poverty instead go into debt repayment,

There is plenty of argument about whether global economic programs such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are helpful or harmful to the economies of countries in the two-thirds world. Structural adjustment programs, for example, provide money for needed national projects such as road and dam projects, but they come with conditions such as deregulation of prices and currency, the privatization of state industries and the elimination of trade barriers. Essentially, the country is required to take part in the neoliberal market system that rewards lending institutions and wealthier governments that lend the money, at the expense of the nation’s poor.

Vincent A. Gallagher, in his book The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization, details the downward economic spirals that indebted countries experience under these programs. For example:

The social impact of IMF-sponsored devaluation is usually brutal and immediate. Overnight the prices of food, drugs, fuel, public services and many other products increase sometimes 30 to 50 percent. In poor countries high school students, taxi drivers and people with no formal education come to realize that prices rise after the visits by IMF representatives are reported in the newspapers. Many people in the United States have no idea how the system works. Poor people know all about it because of the way it impacts their lives. The prices of everything go up. …

Increases in the cost of transportation can be devastating. For example workers living in a poor area may take three buses to get to work. With devaluation, transportation costs can go up five cents for each bus fare. So the cost to get to the job and back can go up thirty cents a day or more. If the workers were already living on less than a dollar a day, as over 1 billion people do, the devaluation can push them over the edge. It may now be better for them to go to the local garbage dump to collect paper, bottles, metal and plastic to sell for recycling. They may be able to find food at the dump.

During my brief visit to Nicaragua this summer, the exchange rate was 20 cordobas for each U.S. dollar. The $50 U.S. that I exchanged in Managua lasted the entire eight days, dribbling out of my pocket usually less than a dollar at a time. A souvenir magnet I would have paid $5 for in the U.S. cost me a quarter (which I paid with a U.S. coin; all my cordobas were in 50s and 100s, and the vendor couldn’t make change). And the Coke, the “dirty water of the imperialism”? About 18 cordobas, or a little less than a buck. As was the bottled (and clean, safe-to-drink) water, as was the beer.

So think about this: If you’re making about $2 a day, are you going to be able to fork over nearly 50% of that for a clean drink? Or will you take your chances with the contaminated well that may end up giving you cancer, diarrhea or a host of other health problems?

I’m not an economist; I can barely balance my own checkbook, and when I was in Nicaragua I never could get the hang of the exchange rate. My heart would jump at seeing the menu price for ice cream at 60 cordobas. I had the same experience in Nogales, México, on a BorderLinks experience, trying to plan a dinner for eight on a maquiladora salary and realizing that a gallon of milk would probably deplete most of what I had. Everyone talks about how cheap it is to go to Latin America; our houses are filled with stuff manufactured by factories or food grown in Latin America that we love because they’re so cheap and help us meet our personal budgets with ease. But that’s only because the dollar goes horrifically further than cordoba, the peso, the sole. But if everything you buy is based on the dollar, and all you get is 20 cordobas a day, how will you feed your family? For the first time in my life, I felt too wealthy. I was able to spend my cordobas like water and came home with just a few coins in my pocket because I wanted to make sure it stayed in the country and benefited someone there. But I didn’t feel blessed, I felt like something was terribly wrong with the world, and I was on the wrong side of that divide.

I can’t discount that the development programs by the IMF and World Bank have provided helped Nicaragua by providing some improvement of infrastructure and creation of new markets, new imports and investment. There is much more to this story that I have recounted and attempted to critique here, and I know that I will probably always lack the background to really understand the intricacies of global economics. So I have to fall back on my experience, and I know what I saw. And I can’t see how a system that takes away funds from health care and education and infrastructure, a system that’s geared toward bringing revenue to the investors at the expense of the people in the country being invested in, is one that I can give my blessing.

It’s colonialism in an economic form, imperialism through investment. And I really have to ask myself if I want to be on the side of the empire. It’s reframed my view of Coke and Pepsi and a number of things I take for granted. It’s not necessarily the products, but what they stand for — the hegemony of the neoliberal market and the toll it takes on two-thirds of the world.

Nicaragua Journal: Ghosts of the Revolution

People in the United States often say that “real” social change must begin with the individual. What one sees in Nicaragua is a dialectic between individual change and changed social and economic conditions. The individual spirit is nurtured by the community, which gives opportunity and hope to the individual, and which itself depends upon the individuals who sustain it. A collective spirit emerges. The inherited poverty of the past and the hard times of the present are enlightened. Individuals share the spirit to build and create, to go beyond the given society. This spirit of struggle and hope is the heart of the revolution.
– John Brentlinger, The Best of What We Are: Reflections on the Nicaraguan Revolution

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

My visit to Nicaragua took place a little more than a month before the nation’s planned 30th anniversary celebrations of the 1979 revolution that brought the ouster of dictator Anastasio Somoza and the opposition Sandinistas (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional, or FSLN, and named after early 20th-century guerilla revolutionary and national hero Augusto César Sandino,) into power. There were signs of the celebration everywhere, if you looked for it. The most obvious, of course, were the cotton candy-colored posters and billboards that decorated the right-of-ways of the highways and the walls of buildings in León.

Photo by Al-Jazeera

Pink, by the way, is the new color of the Sandinistas, replacing the party’s  traditional colors of red and black, and leading some critics of President Daniel Ortega to question is commitment to the ideals of the revolution. They say he’s turned he’s become a bourgeois, free-market supporter that’s hungry for personal political power. Other defend him, saying that he’s still on the side of the people. I heard arguments on both sides while I was in Nicaragua. And this is what I’ve learned about the revolution and the civil war, and wished I’d known before going.

After the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza on July 19, 1979 (after armed struggles that killed more than 30,000 people), the FSLN, which named Ortega as president, or “first among equals,”  began a series of reforms meant to undo the harm caused by the Somoza family’s decades-long dictatorship. These reforms included literacy programs, free health care clinics, and education and land reforms that took land that had been “confiscated” by the Somoza regime and returned it to the campesinos (farmers) with an eye toward creating collective or cooperative farms. According to a recent article by Al Jazeera about the anniversary of the revolution:

The Sandinistas installed a so-called government of national reconstruction encompassing moderates from the business community, intellectuals and both conservative and Marxists politicians.

It was a revolutionary experiment without precedent in Central America.

The new government promised political pluralism and a mixed economy, which included initiatives such as a widely-praised literacy campaign that reduced the illiteracy rate from 60 per cent to just 13 per cent.

Not everyone favored Ortega’s style of government. A BBC article about the revolution says that the Sandinistas began to lose support because people found Ortega’s style of government “authoritarian and proto-communist.” These reforms, as well as Nicaragua’s ties to communist Cuba, led the U.S. government to believe that the Sandinistas were creating a base for the spread of communism throughout Latin America. In the early 1980s, the U.S. government under President Reagan began funding covert and overt CIA operations to fund a counter-revolutionary group, or Contras, with the goal of undermining the Sandinista government, and implemented economic sanctions against the country . The Sandinista government responded defensively, implementing censorship and other authoritarian measures, and turned to the Soviet Union to buy arms for its army. The result: 12 years of bitter civil conflicts that divided the country, killed more than 50,000 people (out of a then-population of 2 million) and devastated Nicaragua’s infrastructure and economy. Ortega and the Sandinistas were voted out of office in the 1990s, and a non-Sandinista government led the country for 16 years. However, Ortega was re-elected president in 2007 with less than 35 percent of the vote. According to an article by Global Post, Ortega — like a few other Latin American presidents — hopes to change Nicaragua’s laws to allow him to run for president again in 2012, and perhaps an unlimited amount of terms after that.

That’s the textbook history — maybe even the Wikipedia history — full of facts to act as little signposts for interpretation. Whether the revolution was good or bad for Nicaragua politically or economically isn’t really the question (it’s always good when a dictator is ousted, no question); whether its results and ideals were able to last might be a better one. Critics say that Ortega’s presidency suffers from corruption, too, with government jobs and public works projects going to friends of Ortega’s wing of the party, and all government workers being pressured to join the Sandinista party. But Ortega still has his supporters:

Eden Pastora, a former Sandinista hero of the revolution who later fought against the government as a Contra leader, agreed the government is doing many good things, and he does not agree with those who call Ortega a “dictator.”

“Where is the dictatorship if there are no political prisoners? Where is the dictatorship if there is no one being tortured? Without any people killed? Without any exiles? Without anyone being beaten? Tell me, where is the dictatorship without a single media outlet closed, not a single radio station, television station, newspaper or magazine?” he said.

Nicaragua still remains the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Unemployment is high, hovering at 80 percent, and most people in the country live on less than $1 U.S. a day. It’s not uncommon to see families picking through the garbage dumps to scrounge food or other items for survival. For all the revolution’s promises, has it been able to deliver?

Like any country, Nicaragua’s politics and its economy are not self-contained. We visited Ortega’s home, a guarded compound located across from a park in a middle-class neighborhood in Managua (Ortega’s home, incidentally, also serves as the seat of government; his attempt, I was told, to stay in touch with the people). Our group leader went inside the guard shack and asked whether  we might be able to take pictures of the home or talk with someone about Ortega’s policies. She returned and joked, “He said Daniel says we have a picture if we can get the IMF to forgive Nicaragua’s $6 million loan.” With such global pressures to keep in mind, I’m sure that my opinion, as an outsider from a country that’s responsible for putting most of that pressure onto Nicaragua, doesn’t outweigh those of the Nicaraguans who are quite literally living with the ghosts of the revolution in their homes and communities.

On our first full day in Nicaragua, my group visited a marimba school in a small neighborhood in Managua. The marimba is a national instrument of Nicaragua, and the backbone of the campesino music that provided a soundtrack to its history. The school provides instruction for children in the neighborhood and those around it, providing scholarships where they can, so that this piece of Nicaraguan culture doesn’t die away.

Photo by Lynne Bradley

We were treated to a performance by a group of teens who were studying at the school; at one point, a young girl left her spot behind the marimba and began to dance to the music of a traditional Nicaraguan ballad that had been sung during the revolution and the civil conflicts afterward. Our group leader began to weep. A committed social justice worker who has been traveling to Nicaragua several times a year since 1986, she was moved by how much Nicaragua has changed since the first time she had heard that song and now. “Back then,” she said, “that little girl would have been carrying a rifle and ready to go off and fight. Now she’s dancing to music.”

Photo by Lynne Bradley

We didn’t have to go far to see what might have happened to that little girl 20 or 30 years ago. Attached to the marimba school, which is a still-functioning liberation theology-style base community, is the Garden of the 13 Martyrs, a small cemetery that cradles the remains of 13 members of the neighborhood who died during the civil war. Two of them were young women, barely out of their teens before dying in the conflict. We found their pictures in a room in the school that displays the photos of the 89 youths from the neighborhood who died in the conflict, some of them bystanders who were caught by a bullet or a bomb. A sign hanging over the cemetery proclaims in black-and-red Sandinista letters: “Nuestro Pueblo Es El Dueño de Su Historia, Arquitecto de Su Liberacîon (Our People are the Owners of Their History, the Architects of Their Freedom).” Our host at the school, one of the teachers, told us that the garden represents their understanding that Jesus’ resurrection is found within the people: Those they lost during the conflict and the freedom they fought for are not lost, but is still to be found among the people that keep their memory alive and take up the work that is left to be done. And in addition to the garden, to the school, there’s also a clinic that provides free health care to the neighborhood, and a youth center that provides tutoring and a place for neighborhood youths to go in the afternoons. The government may not be able to continue in the spirit of the revolution, but it lives  on in the people.

Did the revolution make a difference? I still don’t think that’s the question. Did it have significance, did it mean something? No doubt that it means something to those who lived through it, suffered through it and are building a world out of the wreck the revolution and the U.S.-backed war left behind. The question that I found myself left with is what difference this event has made for me, and what responsibilities I bear as both a U.S. citizen and a person of faith who is committed to creating a socially just world. These are questions I’m still working out, haunted as I am by all the ghosts of the Nicaraguan revolution.

Watch …

Al-Jazeera has a four-part report on Nicaragua’s history, including the revolution and its legacy. You can access all four parts below:

Nicaragua Journal | Prologue: Sandino’s Hat

“I was struck by the fact that it was Sandino’s hat, and not his face, that had become the most potent icon in Nicaragua. A hatless Sandino would not be instantly recognizable; but that hat no longer needed his presence beneath it to be evocative. In many instances, FSLN graffiti were followed by a schematic drawing of the celebrated headgear, a drawing that looked exactly like an infinity-sign with a conical volcano rising out of it. Infinity and eruptions: the illegitimate boy from Niquinohomo was now a cluster of metaphors. Or, to put it another way, Sandino had become his hat.”

– Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

Photo by Lynne Bradley

the Sandino Vive (Sandino Lives) exposition, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution, was ongoing. That same silloutette adorned a much sought-after T-shirt that our trip leader wore; his face is stamped into a 1985 cordoba coin bearing his slogan, “Patria Libre o Morir” (Free Country or Death) that we received as souveniers. And even on the wooden campesino cross that I picked up at the tourist market in Masaya, there was a Christ-figure wearing Sandino’s hat.

I went to Nicaragua in June of this year knowing little more about Nicaragua than what I could remember from my childhood in the 1980s, when news about the Nicaraguan civil war and the U.S.-funded Contra army was featured on the nightly news. I remembered the words Sandinistas and Contras, and recalled that I was never certain which side were the “good” guys, but even then I had a feeling that the media or the president wasn’t being completely honest with me. I knew that liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal still lived and worked in Nicaragua, I knew that I had too many pieces of cheap clothing in my closet that bore the label “Made in Nicaragua.” This scanty knowledge became the foundation for nearly everything that I learned — and am continuing to learn — about Nicaragua, globalization, and what kind of world I and other justice-seeking people want to have a hand in building.

Community square in Chacraseca. Photo by Lynne Bradley

My trip to Nicaragua took place as part of a summer internship I served with JustHope, a Tulsa-based nonprofit organization that builds relationships between three communities in Nicaragua — Chacraseca, Santa Emilia and LaFlor — and communities across the United States. Part of that internship was taking part in an eight-day partnership trip to Chacraseca, a rural community about three miles southeast of León in western Nicaragua, and a few hours’ drive from the Pacific Ocean and the black sand beaches of Poneloya. About 8,000 people live in Chacraseca, about a third of them under the age 16. The unemployment rate is massive — 95 percent — with the average family income amounting to about $1 U.S. a day.

I took the journey with members of a church from California that worked to build both an elementary school program and a small, cinderblock house for a family in one of Chacraseca’s most rural sectors. While we resembled the dozens of other church groups, whose members sported identical T-shirts spouting their Christian commitments, who had come to Nicaragua that week while on a mission trips, JustHope is not a mission group. Rather, it looks to build relationships based on respect, mutuality and justice between the Nicaraguan and U.S. communities, with learning taking place between both groups. This turned out to be more of a challenge, I think, for us gringos because for us it requires a new way of looking at the world that challenges our comfort with global economics and development, and our U.S. identity as an undisputed world leader. The marks of previous relationships Nicaragua has had with the U.S. is written all over the country, too often in blood or martyrs, the sweat of exploited workers, and tears of grief and anger. Our visit took place just a month before the 30th anniversary of the revolution, and barely a week  before a coup ousted the president of Honduras, Nicaragua’s neighbor to the north, which reminded us that the politics in Latin America, while relatively stable now, still exist on the edge. In the wake of the coup, I nervously watched the news from Latin America and warily eyed President Obama’s reaction, wondering whether the U.S. was involved (it wasn’t), and what effect the coup might have on the entire region (not much so far).

They say that world travel broadens your horizons and changes you. I really hope so, and I hope that change wasn’t just found in my character, the typical reaction in the wake of mission trips. Sure, I probably built some character — living rough for a few days, if you’re lucky, will do that. But more than anything I want that my perspective be changed. It wasn’t just that I slept outside and ate rice and beans (gallo pinto, which is the national dish and quite good, actually) three times a day, but that I have to ask why it was such a big change, and what role am I playing in making the differences between here and there so great? And then, I hope, I work on those answers.

But first, I had to encounter the questions. I asked and received. In Nicaragua, I learned about its history of revolution and freedom, the shaky economics that keep Nicaragua dependent on the crumbs the U.S. and multinational corporations stingily leave behind, and the struggle for clean water and full human rights as Nicaragua works to become an equal partner with the U.S. on the world stage. And finally, I pondered the politics of mission and the message of justice that faith communities profess in a world of inequality. And as I looked around for answers, I kept encountering the ghosts of Sandino, and, of course, his hat.