desde nicaragua

the park is not for you

old news in the united states, but a striking thought here: The cyber café as the new playground.

I turn a street corner in a middle-class neighborhood in Cusco, Peru, and all I hear is boys laughing and yelling. It is Saturday afternoon and it sounds like they`re playing soccer. But this is a busy street and I already passed the soccer field and playground.

Approach, and to my right a tiny room with 24 shiny black computers, a man with glasses and a button-up shirt looking up every few minutes, and barely a space to move. So many boys! All of them, boys! All of them between oh I don´t know 8 and 15, all of them playing or watching somebody play a game called War Craft and another called Star Craft. They are all playing in the same world, yelling into black headsets, looking over a few screens and yelling at each other's faces, and the man with the button-up shirt tells me to wait! 10 minutes! then it can be your turn.

Outside again. This place is packed and I don´t know if I can handle such a noisy little room. But the café down the block looks the same! and I am using so many exclamation points all of the sudden but where did all these children come from and why are they all boys and why was nobody at the park I passed earlier on my way to here.

Peru is special, and Cusco is no exception. Internet penetration here is tremendous due mainly because of places like this, which began booming in popularity in the mid-1990s because they´re relatively cheap and accessible and novel.

There´s more though, at least here in Cusco. Yesterday I tried to find out why more children weren´t playing outside, and this is what I discovered:

The city has grown and not enough green spaces have been created to handle the new population, (from 1993 to 2005, it grew by some 11 percent, according to the nation´s census.) More people also means more cars, which means less road space for street soccer.

And about 5 years ago, the city began fencing in parks and sport fields to protect against vandalism. That´s what Cusco`s environmental director (who is in charge of parks and gardens) told me yesterday. Neighborhood groups that directly manage local parks decided to start charging admission, too, in order to pay for upkeep and security.

¨And it´s one thing to pay the park admission, it`s another thing to rent a soccer field. There´s no guarantee you´ll even be able to play soccer if you pay to get in,¨ one 15-year-old boy (on his way to the cyber) told me. ¨On the other hand, there is more security that you´ll be able to play at the cyber.¨

Capitalism respects his money.

So discussing this with the family I´m visiting here, we start thinking: poor kids who can´t afford to pay to get into a park (less than a quarter U.S.) and can´t necessarily play in the streets because of the cars are kind of out of luck. Cybers are about as out of the question as pay-to-play parks.

The parks director said the city hasn´t conducted any studies on park usage, but that it´s safe to assume the same number of children are playing outside as before -- you just have to remember there´s the same number of parks for a lot more people. Her worries aren´t like so many in the States about children leading sedentary lifestyles (obesity, diabetes, etc.) Because the altitude here forces bodies to work harder to stay warm and the diet is pretty natural, you don´t see many fat kids running around.

¨But if they´re living in virtual worlds, spending hours and hours every day in front of a computer and not interacting with other children or their environment, I worry about what kind of adults they´ll become.¨

I wonder whether they´ll be that different than kids in the States.

Learning from Venezuela's media machine

                                        (banner on Carretera Norte, Managua)

There's more to the aid that Daniel Ortega's government gets from Venezuela than the controversial petro-dollars used to fund social, health and education programs. I don't want to get into whether those programs are any good, whether only card-carrying Sandinistas benefit, whether the folks who run them are corrupt, etc.

I'm interested in media strategy. Have a look at this story: Chávez works on U.S. image. Here, Pablo Bachelet looks at the incredible PR web that Hugo Chávez has created to court support in the U.S. (Check out the Citgo commercials!)

Indeed, no Latin American country in recent history has invested so much money and effort in shaping U.S. perceptions of its government, largely negative as a result of Chávez's anti-Bush rhetoric, his friendship with Cuba and Iran, and doubts about his commitment to democracy.

I think Danny O. is taking some lessons from Chávez. Let me start with some background.

Here in Nicaragua, Ortega faces the same kind of opposition from the private newspapers as does Chávez in Venezuela. It's a chicken-egg question, in both countries. Just over a year ago, PBS's Online News Hour devoted a segment to media in Venezuela.

(Maryclen Stelling Macareño, who runs an independent media analysis,) said that if the media doesn't "behave," then Chavez will quite simply shut them down. Asked if the state media also intends to become more objective, she answered, "Who is going to be the first one? No, nobody knows."

Again, same story in Nicaragua. Newspapers here are fiercely critical and not objective. Ortega, too, regularly criticizes the press and the individual families who run the newspapers. (Oligarchy, his word.)

Before taking office last January, Ortega had said that the media can "say what they want. There is freedom of expression here even to say any crude thing, any slander ... I harbor no sentiment of hatred or revenge against those sending this kind of message, this dirty campaign."

The dirty campaign has continued, from both sides. But in the past few months, the government has changed tactics. It's now sidestepping local newspapers and producing its own media instead.

Ortega's media team is run by his wife, Rosario Murillo. Government sources say it's the foreign press she wants to court. (Similarly, the newspapers here pander to a U.S. crowd. A growing portion of the newspapers' readers are in the United States, getting their news online.)

Cue in the government's new(ish) Web site, Elpueblopresident.com, which I wrote about recently. Instead of talking about news or issues with the private media, the government just posts the information it wants to share on its site, just like media analysts had predicted.

The administration has been increasingly snatching talent from the private media and placing them in flack jobs throughout government agencies. Part of their job? Writing for the news site. Sources say more high-profile journalists will soon join the exodus.

Nicaragua doesn't have the coffers that Venezuela has in order to open up media offices in the United States. But this site — along with promises from Iran to support journalism here, the entry of Venezuela's Telesur on public airwaves — definitely indicates a strategy shift toward the Venezuelan media model.

And so far it looks successful. Alexa searches show government sites' popularity rankings are on the rise. Reporters — frustrated with typical government secrecy — are taking their cues from the sites for interesting "investigative" reports. The government even printed cute baseball caps (in hot blue and pink) to promote El Pueblo Presidente.

Nicaraguans don't use the Internet for local news (porn and social networks are more popular than newspaper sites, according to Alexa, and general Internet reach is minimal). So it's obvious who government trying to convince: folks in the States.

The question I have is why Ortega — who seems to enjoy badmouthing the U.S. — cares what they think.

Thoughts?

*** update

I should have thought to mention this. But just in case you didn't know, the US does the same thing — in Cuba, in the Middle East, etc. Maybe we can say that Venezuela is learning from the US model.

Also, this is kind of cute. What kind of information do we get on Latin America, anyway?

The Internet is a tool. A good one.

They cut Internet access at work. By work I mean La Prensa's newsroom. By newsroom I mean a place where journalists gather information, and assemble it into stories. By stories I mean the stuff published in newspapers that informs readers about what is happening in the world around them.

I can't imagine doing my job without the Internet. That is, I can't imagine doing it well.

Perhaps it's because I'm a Western-trained journalist, but access to the Internet to me means access to information that helps me understand subjects before waltzing blindly into a story; it opens the door to complex, investigative and explanatory reporting. I'm a better journalist with the internet.

But here at La Prensa, as of the middle of last week, a good deal of reporters (how many? I'm verifying numbers) arrived to work to discover their access had been cut. Editors had apparently complained that too many people waste time on MSN Messenger instead of working. (This happens back home, too.) So the higher-ups cut selected certain people and cut their access to the web, period. And yet it's not like back home where newsrooms (or workplaces in general) will cut access to particular sites or limit user privileges ... Here, it's all or nothing (minus work e-mail, which crashes often).

Needless to say, folks here aren't happy. Stories are being turned in earlier — which was probably the point behind the measure. But some reporters say they're turning in work that isn't as thorough as it could have been had they been able to do some research on the web.

Is there some other way to get that research done, or is it hopeless? I asked one reporter.

"If the editors don't think that the Internet is an important resource, then I'm not going to go out of my way to do that research," he told me. "I'll go home earlier."

The situation reminds me of a conversation I had recently with Cornelio Hopmann, executive director of eNicaragua, an Internet policy institute based in Managua. He told me Nicaraguans — even those from the highest economic class — just don't think the Internet is very important.

"In Nicaragua it's no means of communication, even for those who can afford it, who are educated, who in the U.S. would use the Internet," he said. "It's not a Latin American phenomenon; it's a Nicaraguan phenomenon."

"Brother countries" making inroads in national TV

The more I do actual journalism here, the less time I seem to dedicate to this blog. Funny, some weeks I spent hours each day reading and comparing, learning and trying to come to an understanding about various issues here and in the rest of Latin America — then writing little blurbs here. And then some weeks, like the past two, I've been doing the same thing but about very specific issues, writing about them for La Prensa, then coming home exhausted to crash in bed.

The past two days, for example, were dedicated to this: Iranian programs coming to national television. Basically, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has been opening the door for his "compañeros" in Iran and Venezuela to make inroads in national television here.

(By the way, Hearst News Service recently had a story about growing Iranian involvement here, if you're interested.)

What do I mean by this? Well, first the Ortegas want Iran to help develop Nicaragua's film industry, which has been basically non-existent since the beginning of the first Sandinista administration. Iran, of course, has an internationally acclaimed film industry.

Last week, First Lady Rosario Murillo announced that a delegation of Iranian officials were in country to look at media and communications here. (Read comments by her and delegation here.)

So both governments say they'd like to bring Iranian soap operas and films and cartoons to Nicaraguan television. But the relationship is more than a sharing of popular culture. Iran wants to help build up Channel 4's "Multinoticias" — pro-Sandinista but private programming that is run by (now, don't be shocked here) two of the Ortegas' sons.

It's unclear how much money Iran plans to invest in amplifying Channel 4's coverage area.

Iran also wants to train Nicaraguan journalists. I'm not sure whether that's the kind of country Nicaragua needs to be taking lessons from, considering Iran's track record in regards to freedom of expression, the press, etc. Then again, the Ortegas (like previous administations) haven't been getting many accolades for their work here, either.

Now, enter Venezuela, which is close to sealing a deal with Nicaragua to take over the basically defunct state television Channel 6. That channel is run by the Ministry of Education but can only afford to show an hour or two of programming a week.

Why the interest? Well, Venezuela is the majority owner of Telesur, a network that's often called the Al-Jazeera of Latin America. It's Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's response to major Western (imperialist, he might say) media outlets like CNN, the BBC or Univsión.

Telesur might soon take up the state's channel, then. I wanted to draw a connection to the influence on television here from Iran and Venezuela — "brother" countries, Ortega calls them. So I spoke with Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, an expert in communications and Latin American soap operas who teaches at the University of Georgia and just happens to be Venezuelan.

“Is it good? Is it bad? To me, it's interesting to have access to content that traditionally we wouldn't get to see," she told me. “It's interesting to have other media powers in the world, but if the object is indoctrination, then it's a bad thing."

If anyone has seen a serious analysis of Telesur out there, let me know. I guess I should probably buy a television and start watching it to formulate my own opinions, but I can barely bring myself to sit in front of one for more than a few minutes every couple of months.

Oh well.

* * * * *

Anyway, if you're an American interested in news from Nicaragua, you probably know all about the Eric Volz case.  That's all Nicaragua is famous for these days.

Honestly, I don't feel up to adding to that scandal, but you can check out coverage from The AP, WSJ, CNN, TIME Magazine, The Nica Times, The Tenessean, Nashville City Paper,Friends of Eric Volz (or their MySpace page).

I had started writing a real post on the Volz case a few nights ago, but got slammed with work and haven't been keeping up since. I'm sorry, but such is life. The rest of the world is covering this one.

* * * * *

Finally, something a little closer to me is in the following photo:

(La Prensa/G. Flores)

The man on the left is Jorge Loásiga. He is an investigative reporter here at La Prensa, a funny guy who sits diagonally from my desk.

A few nights ago Loásiga was roughed up by Ortega's security at a presidential event. Police say he was trying to force himself past security. He says he is the victim of police brutality. All the media, as well as journalism associations, say the government is out to get La Prensa and that this is a sign of Ortega's free speech repression.

I'll follow up on this one later tonight or tomorrow. It's important because the media here is dedicating a lot of resources toward covering this issue.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Danny O is in Cuba, asking for help dealing with this country's energy crisis. Suerte, compañero. Energy problems mean no running water in Granada today. No running water means Melissa badly needs to take a shower.

"Wait a minute. I know these people ... "

Yesterday, President Daniel Ortega announced that regardless of what the National Assembly or courts say, he will go ahead and install the controversial Citizens Power Councils (CPCs) as a national cabinet.

He said if the Assembly continues to paralyze his work, "I would be obligated to govern by decree."

This alarms people.

The CPCs will be "formalized"  on Friday during a massive rally at the Plaza de la Revolución, Ortega said.

"We're going to newly install all of this legally ... in such a way that if they erase (veto),
we will again write the law, and that's how it's going to be: They erase the CPCs, we will
re-install them; whoever comes and tells the Assembly that no, I the following day will dictate another law that yes, and that's how we're going to be." (Radio Primerísima, FSLN outlet)

Last week, the National Assembly had vetoed Ortega's plan to make the CPCs an official arm of government. An appellate court later overturned the veto, and the Supreme Court was expected to follow with a decision.

To opponents, the CPCs are another name for a Sandinista volunteer group that existed during the first Sandinista administration, the Sandinista Defense Committees. The CDSs are often remembered for serving as neighborhood spies to government, pointing out dissenters in the community.

Of course, we must remember the context in which the CDSs existed: the civil war of the 1980s, a Counter Revolution funded by the U.S. government.

These new CPCs, under the direction of First Lady Rosario Murillo, operate in neighborhoods to "exercise direct democracy," according to the government. (Check out this January speech by Murillo that talks about this and creating consciousness and citizenry.)

Ortega's opponents don't want the CPCs to receive and/or distribute government resources because the groups are politicized. Who will know for sure whether the CPCs are only helping out Sandinistas?

So far, the government is crediting the CPCs with a lot of good work. Yesterday afternoon, they were even credited for ending the blackouts. Sounds weird? Well it is:

According to the energy minister, Ortega made the decision of "zero blackouts" after CPC members solicited the FSLN secretary's office on Monday, asking to end the energy rationing, motivated by the start of "la purísima" (a religious holiday) prayers, “so that one way or another, those of us who begin to celebrate "la purísima" no longer have darkness." (El Nuevo Diario, my translation)

And last week the CPCs helped with Enabas' discounted bean sales throughout the capital.

My friend and I were walking to in his (working-class Grandada) neighborhood  the other day when we passed by a huge group of people talking in front of a house. They were talking about education, politics and what the community needs.

Are these the scary CPCs? I ask myself.

"Wait a minute," my friend says. "I know these people. These are my neighbors."

I ask an older man what's going on, and he warmly invites us to join the discussion. The meeting is to elect the neighborhood's CPC representative.

Let's hope they don't get too politicized. They seem to have promise.

on hip sites, newspapers and britney

The Ortega administration has an incredible number of Web sites. I learn about a new one daily.

Like El Pueblo Presidente!, which became public on Monday. It seems to be part of the government's new media strategy of: 1) appearing to make more information public and 2) having space to not only combat the daily criticism from mainstream media, but a space to publicize good news.

You would never guess that this administration does anything good from the stories in La Prensa or El Nuevo Diario. I even started to believe this my first few weeks here. But, like anything and everything, there are an infinite number of shades between black and white.

The longer I spend here, the more I am surprised by what I learn about how this country's main newspapers work. Perhaps it's because, as I've written about earlier, I have access to levels of government/society/business here that I would never be granted in the States, and the inner workings I see here are the same back home.

What have I learned? Well, the newspapers here don't serve to explain how and why government functions the way it does so that citizens can make informed political, social or economic decisions.

No, the newspapers are a political force. They serve to criticize/support parties and personalities. And the line between advertising and journalism is incredibly blurry, if there at all. (The complications get multiplied when newspapers traditionally depend on government for advertising revenue. What happens when you bite the hand that feeds?)

The president talked about this at a speech last night in Laureles Norte, a poor Managuan barrio. (He was at one of the bean sales by Enabas that I'd written about yesterday, throwing out free 5-pound bags of beans to very excited supporters afterward.)

Ortega called the newspapers "powerful media that is at the service of the rich," referring to the Chamorro family which owns both major dailies. "Who are the Chamorros?" Ortega asked. "A family of the oligarchy."

While I haven't been here long enough to form a legitimate opinion, I am not ready to discount what Ortega says.

Sure, we can say he's just angry because the papers bash him every day. It's part of their job to hold him (and any public official) responsible — I really believe that. But there needs to be more substance. I often wonder whether the media is:
— professional (and whose standards am I holding it up to?)
— criticizing the administration for personal grudges, for the sake of criticizing
— unwilling or unable to prove assertions
— ignoring when the candidates/personalities they champion are in the wrong
— engaging in superficial "he said, she said" coverage

The other night I was talking with an editor at one of the major newspapers who said he doesn't belong to any political party. He told me he doesn't believe what his own newspaper publishes.

"I take more seriously whether Britney is pregnant or going to lose her baby than what we publish in this newspaper."

With all this reeling in my head, I've decided to focus my IAPA research on the role newspapers play in national politics here. It's fascinating.

We will never shut up, much less to the voice of a monarch

(EFE)

Santiago was the place to be yesterday.

At the end of a three-day Ibero-American summit in Chile's capital, the heads of state of 22 countries signed a pledge to increase economic cooperation, fight hunger and poverty with policies that complement the  U.N. Millennium Goals, and help create decent and quality jobs in the informal sector. You can download the document here.

The accord will allow "nearly 6 million migrant workers in Latin America Spain and Portugal to transfer social security benefits between their nations," writes The Associated Press. Such an agreement recognizes that more Central and South Americans are choosing to migrate (legally or not) to Spain or Portugal instead of the United States, as a survey from the Inter-American Development Bank recently showed.

In the past, migrants from this region went almost exclusively to the United States. It now appears that measurable numbers of Central Americans are migrating to Europe, particularly Spain, and to Canada.

“We had already seen this same trend in South America. Now we are starting to find it in Central America,” said Sergio Bendixen, whose Miami-based polling firm conducted the surveys for the MIF. (The Miami Herald had a story about this here.)

But I kept running into walls as I searched for more information the immigration part of the summit's agreement (the documents aren't explicit). Instead, all the world appears to care about is that the king of Spain told Venezuela's president to shut up. To the right, for example, is the front page of Chile's main newspaper, El Mercurio.

Here's what basically happened: On Saturday, Chávez called Spain's former President José María Aznar (1996-2004, center-right party) a fascist for allegedly supporting the attempted coup d'état against the Venezuelan president in 2002.

Then, while he's talking, King Juan Carlos says, "Why don't you shut up?"

Minutes later, Nicaragua's own Danny Ortega is denouncing transnational companies from Spain — a criticism of the private company Unión Fenosa, which has a monopoly on Nicaragua's electricity and is rationing power because the country just doesn't have the capacity to generate enough to run 24-7.

During Ortega's talk, the king walks out of the room.

Later, Spain's current socialist President José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero asks Chávez to have respect for the legitimately elected ex-president, and asked for the establishment of a code of conduct for future summits.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and socialist is asking that the "incident" doesn't cloud some of the summit's achievements.

"The three times journalists asked her about the verbal encounter between Hugo Chávez and King Juan Carlos tried the patience of Bachelet, who after a half hour of declarations, asked her advisers not to accept more questions for the national and foreign press who wanted her reaction.

And though she didn't deny that the 'subject is interesting,' the president was clear in defending the summit: 'The truth is that if we stay with that summit, we're also losing perspective,' she said, adding that the meeting wasn't limited to 'shades and rhetoric,' but offered space to debate and reach concrete agreements. (El Mercurio, my translation)

And today, Chávez says he thinks the king of Spain was in on the attempted coup. In El Mercurio, he's quoted saying: "Mr. King, I tell you the following: We've been here for 500 years and we will never shut up, much less to the voice of a monarch."

As has happened in the past, nobody thinks the comments will affect diplomatic relationships.

I can't say that I'm surprised or annoyed that newspapers are making such a huge deal about this instead of what actually got or didn't get accomplished at the summit. After all, Chávez has an incredible record of publicly offending other heads of state, and his comments are usually funny and quotable.

But this speech in particular seems to have brought about a more critical reaction from around the world. Despite your/my personal politics, it's hard to figure out or sympathize with what Chávez intends to accomplish with discourse that is undiplomatic and juvenile.

The coverage is tremendous. It's the front-page story in newspapers across Latin America and in Europe.  In Nicaragua, La Prensa — always critical of Ortega's relationship with Chávez — exaggerates his part, or the importance of his part, in the mess, with Chávez and Ortega offend Spain.

But the best article I've looked at so far, from Venezuela's  El Nacional, analyzes how Spanish media has covered the situation. Understandably, it struck a chord in that country. (You only need to look at the comment section for an article in El País, where more than 1,500 people put in their two cents by the
next night.) Anyway, from El Nacional:

"The right-wing press was the most harsh against the Venezuelan president. 'The king put Chávez in his place in the name of the Spanish,' affirmed El Mundo, 'it's an act without precedents,' the daily added ...

 

The left-wing, and more prudent, press stressed the king's gesture. Juan Carlos 'was in his role,' as 'the Venezuelan president crossed with his disqualifications the line of tolerance in the relationship between sovereign countries, according to El País.

For the Catalonian daily El Periódico, the king's reaction 'perhaps wasn't adequate enough. But the monarch's words reflect to what point is it uncomfortable for the Spanish delegation the Venezuelan's diatribe.'" (my translation)

You can read stories by The AP, BBC News, and the Inter Press Service for more.

Anyway, it might be stupid of me to be spending time writing about this. I'm just adding to a lot of nothing. But here in Nicaragua, it's this sort of discussion, either by Chávez or our own Ortega, that really riles people. For some it's about speaking truth to power and finally having someone with the poor in mind. Others say it's all propaganda. I'll be writing more about this next week.

For now, I'm leaving you with some of that so-called propaganda. I see it every day when I go to Managua down Carretera Masaya.