desde nicaragua

Estamos hartos de no tener nuestro propio espacio

(Recently wrote about a neat arts collective in Guatemala City's Zona 1. If you find yourself there anytime soon, check out La Banqueta -- a welcoming space for independent artists, actors and activists. The following is a version of that story ...)

A narrow hallway lined with photos, posters and a colorful mural of Guatemalan artists leads past a tiny darkened bar. Just beyond a door to the right, a handful of university students research art history in a cozy library, where all the shelves were built by hand. Up the stairs to the left, a stage hand arranges the set while actors rehearse lines for an upcoming play. 

“It’s a very casual place, like its name suggests,” says Byron Vasquez in Spanish, a 26-year-old who sometimes deejays parties at La Banqueta, which means “The Sidewalk” in Spanish. “You can walk in and run into your friends, grab a beer, talk about art or politics.”

Indeed, there is nothing pretentious about La Banqueta. And that’s exactly the point: to offer an urban space for those who want to create art but can’t afford to attend events at state or privately run galleries or theaters. For that reason, it's not unusual for those who stop into the bar to bring their own beer instead of buying drinks there.

For an admission fee usually between 20 and 25 quetzales (or about $3 U.S.), activities at La Banqueta range from theater and hip-hop concerts to art exhibitions and puppet shows. About 80 percent of proceeds go to the local acts, while the other 20 percent help pay for the center’s operating budget.

 And a tight budget that is.

'Well, here we are with more in our hearts than bellies because there just isn’t money,” Vasquez said. “So maybe the bellies have to wait to one side until we figure out a way to keep the place going.” 

The center, which opened last November with financial support from the Norwegian embassy, operates like a collective among the 17 young people who started it. That means everybody splits the work (cleaning, bartending, scheduling activities or building furniture) – and nobody gets paid for it.

“So we have enough cash to stay open in July,” said Eric “Spanky” Galvez, an actor with the Andamio theater troupe which dreamed up La Banqueta three years ago. “And we don’t want the project to die, so each one of us is looking individually for ways to find funding.”

One unique aspect of La Banqueta is its Rafael Pineda Research Center for the Performing Arts, the only library of its kind in Guatemala. It is named after one of Guatemala’s most famous stage actors and directors, Rafael Pineda, who died in 2004.

The center carries a thorough selection of locally produced scripts, as well as other works relating to art and literature, that are available for loans.

On stage next week  is “Dentro del Closet” (In the Closet), a play about two women on death row in Guatemala for the crime of being lesbians. The show, produced by Mujeres Amazonas, runs August 1 and 2 at 8:30 p.m. and tickets are 25 quetzales.

It’s to give space to performances like this one which take on local issues that La Banqueta exists.

“There was this real need to hear ourselves, see ourselves,” Vasquez said. “We were sick of listening to outsiders while we lacked our own space. What we have here goes beyond mere initiative: we have heart, because we were fed up with not having our own space."

Check out La Banqueta's blog here. (Photo by Spanky Galvez) Or check out this Youtube video of the place ...

ceramics in s. juan de oriente

San Juan de Oriente

In a tarp-roofed shack here, two sons continue a tradition that during their mother's childhood was simply considered “women’s work.”

Barefoot they soften clay dug out from a neighbor’s finca, spin it on a manual potter’s wheel and mold it into pots and vases. The work used to be crude, unfinished pots for the kitchen, to cook beans, to carry water. Mothers taught their daughters, who taught their daughters, while the men worked the fields in this tiny village south of Managua.

Then a few decades ago, some “yanquitos” came here and set up a school to teach folks about fine paints, polish and finishing. More than that, they taught the people about selling to a global market. Someone brought a book with pictures of pre-Colombian designs (think: Aztec and Mayan). Others soon brought down story boards and color palettes from chain stores like Macy's and Crate & Barrel.

The craft went from utilitarian to decorative, consumption from local to international And it began bringing in money. Men stopped working the fields; women became their husband's helpers. Ceramics took over this town's economy.

I took three buses to get to San Juan de Oriente this morning and spent the day with Enriqueta del Carmen López and her family, for a story about changing traditions to go in a cultural magazine here, and hopefully local radio and TV later.

Adam Smith's invisible hand definitely has touched this place, in ways that are hard to measure. One son has traveled to Taiwan and Cuba and Mexico and Colombia and Bolivia to show his work. He lives on the other side of town. The rest of the family sleeps in stick and plastic shacks with dirt floors. Their diet is simple (perfect for a capricious vegetarian like me) and their tools are rudimentary; paint brushes, for example, are made with the women's hair.

The can't afford to hire helpers. They can barely afford the imported paints used. A tedious 18-step process with few resources means only a few dozen pieces are churned out a month. But, I have to admit, the finished product is exquisite.

              (Pictures below will enlarge when clicked.)

 

days in bluefields

May is a magic month in Bluefields. The hours have sort of swept past without my noticing, and I leave tomorrow for Managua.

Very humid here, which makes running a challenge.

The sky is beautiful especially when the sun sets. People leave doors hanging open and the music playing loudly. One night we ate at a China-Nica restaurant with a wild-west sort of saloon theme, except the walls were bright pastels and shiny, and the posters on the wall were of hot Chinese actresses. The colorful plates of noodles and vegetables were decorated with ketchup,  mustard and pepper. Picture up later, I need to stop by in a bit for an interview.

And this morning a one-hour massage turned into three hours of bliss on a hard bed in a natural medicine woman's house. She told me her life story, and gave me a full-body massage, physical evaluation, face and scalp rub, hair cut, herbal recommendation and relationship advice. (I turned down the pedicure.) Again, pictures later. My camera didn't have batteries until a few hours ago.

Oh, yesterday afternoon: several hours with this guy, Sabu. When people see him on the street they shout his name out and he goes "yeeeeow" and says things I can't understand. The video is H-I-L-L-A-R-I-O-U-S.

Tonight, a party in the historic neighborhood of Beholden. Preparations under way. The barrio festivals are part of the month-long Maypole festivities, which end on May 31 with a carnival. In the weeks leading up to the main event, neighborhoods celebrate the coming of the rains, and fertilization of fruit(life)-giving trees.

In the above photo, taken a few hours ago in Beholden, a few local guys set up a tree for decoration in the middle of the street. And in the photo below, children bowl in a traditional game called ketialu. A boy there told me the pins are set up in a circle and you get three tries to knock 'em down.

On art and forging a national identity ...

( ... or at least a managua identity)

I worry about writing about art. A knowledgeable friend tells me: "Yeah, art is funny because it's like you feel totally unqualified to talk about it, or totally in the know. Nowhere in the middle."

That said, let me do my best to explain something I'm learning about Managua's art scene. These are observations gathered from talking recently with some of the city's most-recognized artists, writers and those in-the-know folks who, for some reason or other, seem to be at every cultural event in town.

The scene is dynamic and young, carried by two distinct groups: those who are the children of the revolution, in their late 20s to early 30s today, whose fathers trained in mountains or fought wars, and those from the generation that followed, who are too young to have felt what the revolution meant, who grew up inundated or exposed to massive advertising and Internet images, who lack formal training but have the eye.

Art produced here is post-modern, cutting-edge, makes use of new technology and is literally scattered across the city. Galleries exist, but have limited funding. Artists depend on patrons, on friendships. Some of the most impressive pieces I have seen are behind furniture in friend's offices or painted onto decaying buildings. One musician I know collects and sells scraps of metals to get by.

Before, few things were planned; events happen when somebody makes a few calls to bring people together. That is the Nicaraguan way. A year-old cultural magazine guide is changing that, changing the way people look at time and planning ahead. This is a deliberate move, can you imagine that? By becoming a magazine of reference — when is so-and-so playing, when does such-and-such exhibit open — it really is changing a mentality.

Urban migration and 100,000 dead in a civil war two decades ago make the city young. The young people who move here bring in their customs and ideas from the country to this city that lacks a coherent identity. Managua is scattered, without a center, silly, poor, falling apart, contrasting, ugly, growing.
But the people living inside by necessity create something out of it, beautify the place where they live, like artists. Look at the advertising on the walls. Look at the street graffiti and the colors on the walls and the dirt-turned-cement walkways. The green.

Artists capture some of the nuances, help forge a local identity. This is what it means to be from Managua, to be from Nicaragua. An art exposition in an upper-class neighborhood brings together painters, installationists, musicians, photographers and women's rights activists. I am told this is the first time artists from different mediums and schools come together for such an open-ended event. This means networking. This means seeds planted for future collaboration.

The best thing about Managua's art scene is its openness. I have not found elitism here even though I expected it. Do you want to be a part of this energy? Welcome, here is what you can do. This leads to random drives with video montagists and performance artists, with movie-makers and musicians, more introductions, more invitations and plans and discussions and homemade lunches while sitting in rocking chairs on of kilometro 15 on Carretera Sur. I don't know how to write  about art but I am learning.

* photos from Thursday's "100" exhibition, which drew 100 mostly local artists in protest of Nicaragua's ban on therapeutic abortions. Second photo is an installation by Alejandra Urdapilleta titled "Banderita de la patria (propuesta)," or "The country's little flag (proposal)."

Nicaragua — Art on the Web

For most things related to the government, talk about a web site that actually tells you something useful is a total joke. But the folks at the Nicaraguan Cultural Institute don't seem to know that ...

An email today from the director of expositions there, Rodrigo González, announces a new blog: Exposiciones. It's pretty straight-forward stuff. Paintings, photographs, dances, whatever. They're on display to the public — come.

This next bit is slick: the artsy patadeperro cultural guide is now online. The magazine's creators celebrated its year anniversairy at a splashy party at Galería Codice in Los Robles last week. They explain the free, monthly product like this:

Today Patadeperro is the most sought-after and consulted entertainment guide by Managua residents and visitors. This is due to the fact we're a modern, fresh, current, creative and terribly useful publication for an ample public.

There is a market for products like patadeperro in Managua, say what people say. And there is definitely room for more.

more than anything else

Nicaraguans spend a lot of time waiting.

Waiting for buses to come, waiting for buses to get where they're going. Waiting for activities to begin and waiting for late arrivals. Waiting for the best Brazilian soap opera to start and waiting for the sun to drop a little. Waiting for the rain to bring life, for the coolness that comes with night and for the girl selling thick, heavy tortillas to saunter past in the morning.

Yesterday I waited next to a half-closed window with a pair of friends on a bus to San Jorge. The wind pushed my hair back into tangles, and tried to drown our voices as we read from Travels With Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski, out loud. When I leaned into my friend to hear better, it didn't feel like waiting because of how delightful the words sounded together.

It took more than two hours to reach the port town, and from there we waited for a ferry which would take us an hour away to the Isla de Ometepe. The cabin was closed in and air-conditioned, and I was tired from waiting awake and so I waited asleep on my friend's shoulder, likely leaving a pool of saliva he was too kind to complain about. There was a view to enjoy, two immense volcanoes rising out of Lake Nicaragua, smoke-covered under a brilliant blue sky. But the rocking, swaying ferry kept my eyelids shut.

They opened again at the next port, where someone was waiting. Incer, one of the brothers from the family I live with, had come to meet us. I had never been to this island; he would be our guide. Introductions and pleasantries. A bus a hundred meters from where the ferry met the dock was done waiting for ferry passengers and it started to pull away. Incer's nephew, a wide-eyed teenager in a school uniform, raced after it, whistling until it stopped and waited, again.

Another ride, and another view that was not seen. This time not because of heavy-lidded eyes, but because night was falling. 45 minutes of waiting until our stop. We hopped off the back of this vehicle that was once a school bus in the United States, onto a dirt road scattered with pebbles and down a barely lit path. Drowsily we walked, stumbled. The sky now blue-black ink pierced with startling bright lights. Managua is not a well-lit city but the stars do not shine like this there.

I recognize this smell, I tell Incer. It's dirt and ash and trees and the salty sweat from our bodies. I feel like I'm in my father's rancho in rural Guanajuato. Again I stumble, and Incer uses his cell phone light to guide us. There is electricity in this village but the houses are not lit. Families sit on rocking chairs, with the doors to their homes open, outside, in the dark.

There was a family waiting for us, too, along a wooden table with food warming on the fire. A most welcoming family that I will write about tomorrow.

Cara de pícaro

Perhaps the man most lovingly photographed in an exhibit that opened last night at Managua's Teatro Nacional Rubén Darío is Alfredo "Come Hielo" González.

Here, the 78-year-old stands by a photo taken by Mara Martínez Cruz, who presented a lovely series on the Sunday senior citizen dance parties at the old Casa del Obrero.

The scenes captured by Martínez demonstrate a profound respect and admiration for old age. And together with pieces by two other female photographers, the exhibition shares glimpses of everyday living in Nicaragua.

“I’ll start dancing with a young woman and then a guy will come to ask whether I’ll dance with his wife, that she wants to dance with me and he gives her permission. He’ll introduce us,” González said. “Then another guy will come up and ask the same thing.”

González, who grew up in the Caribbean coastal town of Bluefields, spoke unhurriedly to a gathering crowd of admirers on opening night. "I came out of my mother's womb dancing," he told me. Clearly, he was stealing the show, and he enjoyed it.

I promised to go to this Sunday's party to watch him on the floor.

Farther down the theater's second floor was another González, unrelated. This was photographer Celeste González, whose work is widely respected among Nicaraguan artists.

She presented a solemn set of mostly black-and-white photos of nature, and children in Catholic traditional settings. In this collection, González attempts to develop the theme of transition waters from the isthmus of Rivas, using natural elements, water in all three states, and daily objects found in its current.

Hers were the most interesting pieces in the exhibit: a dark and blurry shot of a whirlwind of birds that looked straight out of a Hitchcock film; an elaborately dressed girl staring sleepily into the camera in front of fake scenery and a Virgen de Guadalupe poster; a distant shot of Concepción, an island volcano, covered in clouds.

Of the three photographers, Margarita I. Montealegre is the only one who uses color in all her pieces. Montealegre, a documentary photographer who once covered the civil war here as a journalist, captures popular participation and pride in the Güegüense masked dance festivals of the state of Carazo.

Rodrigo González, director of exhibitions at the Nicaraguan Institute of Culture, said he wants to open already-existing public spaces to unknown artists so that they can disseminate their work. González, a photographer and painter himself, is new to the culture institute, which created his job in June.

“Take these three photographers,” he told me, taking a seat in his bare office near the Plaza de la Revolución. “I wanted to promote them because they’ve been in the shadows for so long. I know the quality of their work. I could have invited artists who are better known, but it seemed interesting to me to pull these women out into the spotlight.”

His office has been busy keeping me busy; I'm finding it hard to believe the quantity of "cultural events" happening here. An Andean music concert at a Sandinista bar.  A documentary on urban art. A Spanish film near the embassy. Book releases. A poetry festival. Three days of respect to Bob Marley. A tribute to Nicaraguan artists who died last year.

What I love most about this is how accessible and welcoming the artists and hipsters who attend these events are. My calender is totally booked now with new friends who (try to) teach me to dance in dark corners of bars and share sips of rum straight from the bottle in nearby parks at midnight.

La Purísima and friendly strangers (or strange friends?)

"The faithful, musicians, neighbors and visitors come together at 3:30 a.m. to await the arrival of the Virgin on the street that corresponds with that day. At 4 a.m., someone with a megaphone announces her arrival down the nine streets, as is custom."
                                                          (La Prensa, my translation)

Yesterday La Purísima took over my street.

It started early, when I dreaming sweet dreams in my bed. And then, just outside my door: firecrackers, drums, people singing.

It was barely dawn and this small traveling procession down Calle El Arsenal called La Diana was only a hint of what would happen later.

La Purísima is a religious and cultural holiday celebrated across the country in the week leading up to Dec. 8. It honors the Virgin Mary and the most fantastic celebration happens in León, where it's said the tradition began. I will be in that city on Friday night, going from house to house, singing and asking strangers for candy:

Imagine ‘La Purísima’ like this: a richly decorated altar is placed in a corner of a family house, with a statue of the Virgin Mary‘s image. In front of this altar, a lot of chairs are arranged, that will be occupied by family members, friends, and neighbors invited by the house owners to celebrate its ‘Purísima’. Once all the guests arrive, the celebration starts with prayers to the virgin, but these are alternated with traditional songs. All the assistants accompany with whistles, tambourines and other instruments. While this takes place inside the house, outside some family members fire rockets and the so called ‘caraga cerrada’, (firecrackers) that contribute a lot to the boisterous celebration. Meanwhile the singings and prayers take   place, the host distributes to his/her guests fruits, traditional sweets, caramels, traditional drinks, sugar-cane and many other gifts.
                                                           (Vianica.com)

In Granada, La Purísima pits street against street in a festive competition for who can create the most beautiful image of the Virgin. I was at Calle Calzada, the city's busiest night-life street, the evening before. I liked their Virgin more.

Many hours later, after a day in Managua and a free pilates class, it is dark again. And it is growing louder outside my door.

I leave for the Bearded Monkey, the cheap hostel where my friend Sam bartends. He is off but there anyway, playing chess with the other Sam, who lately has been spending every day playing chess. The local chess master (his name is Bosco and he wants to sleep with a woman from every country) is playing some Australian guy and winning free beers. I find a candle, pull up a chair and read until the mosquitoes become too violent.

It is 8:30 p.m. I am walking toward the door when I see Marti.

I met this hippy from León about a month ago on the bus from Managua to Granada. He sat next to me and told me a poem from memory about a boy who grew up with the trees in the jungle. I never expected to see him again.

And then about two weeks ago at Euro Café we met again. He was putting up posters for some concert. We kissed cheeks and each went our seperate way. I never expected to see him again.

But now he is in Granada once more and we do see each other again. One would be shocked by the coincidences but this country is very small, and I am not surprised when the night ends in my room, Marti with his eyes closed and singing about birds and trees and lakes and garbage and Nicaragua.

Before this (and before the thought occurs to me that the family I live with might think I am crazy and sing very loudly to myself), we watch the parade. The procession begins at the end of Calle El Arsenal and unlike U.S. parades there is only one "float." Any by "float" I mean one gigantic image of the Virgin, something like this:

                                             (La Prensa)

Thousands of people are lined down my small street. One very large family has taken up my doorstep, children are lighting firecrackers, men are selling cotton candy and ice cream and toys and hot dogs, the prostitutes are out with their quesillos and you literally cannot walk without jostling or being jostled.

The chavalos and chavalas are looking good, and looking at each other.

Marti and I walk, taking part in the processesion. I guess you could say people parade, not floats. The thousands get into the street and follow or precede the Virgin. Together, the street brings her into the cathedral, where the night continues.

We do not go to the cathedral. We walk and run into so many people we know. Everybody I've ever met in Granada it seems is out. There is Carolina, the girl I met at the doctor's office six weeks ago. There is my crazy bike friend Eric, back from a week's vacation. And the weirdo ex-pats who always wave to me, with their young Nica girlfriends. And the bar owners and their patrons, and the same street kids and the cashew sellers.

This is a community and I feel a part of it. Soon I will leave it, move into the capital and see less and less of Granada. For now, I am happy to stay, and quite proud to live on Calle El Arsenal.

* * * * *

And for your reading pleasure today, I bring to you:

* Peru May Become Latin America's Next Success Story from the Cato Institute's blog. Yesterday, the U.S. Senate yesterday approved a free trade agreement with the Andean country, and this entry by Ian Vásquez highlights some of the market success Peru is recently experiencing. When I was there almost exactly a year ago, our amazing guide Roger was preparing to give a delegation of U.S. senators a tour of his country and convince them to sign the agreement.

Vásquez writes that Peru's success "has become an embarrassment for Hugo Chavez, who has neighboring Bolivia and Ecuador as client states and is pouring a lot of resources into the Peruvian countryside in a campaign to promote his anti-capitalist ideology. Peru has become a key country in Latin America’s ideological battle between the modernizers and the populists.

A lot still needs to be done in Peru before it can be declared a success story. For example, property and land still needs to be titled in the mountains, taxes are still very high, bureaucratic regulations remain onerous, labor laws are extremely rigid, the educational system is terrible. But the free trade agreement will help because it will give permanence to trade policy; and policy stability and competition have been key to Peru’s success thus far. If Alan Garcia can complete Peru’s unfinished agenda, he will have finally pushed the country into modernity and would go down not only as one of the greatest presidents of Peru, but also of Latin America at a critical time in the region’s history.

* And yesterday, the NYT had an interesting story about how undocumented Brazilians living in the U.S. are giving up on the "American Dream" and heading back home:

To explain an often wrenching decision to pull up stakes, homeward-bound Brazilians point to a rising fear of deportation and a slumping American economy. Many cite the expiration of driver’s licenses that can no longer be renewed under tougher rules, coupled with the steep drop in the value of the dollar against the currency of Brazil, where the economy has improved.

“You put it all together, and why should you stay in an environment like that if you have a place like Brazil, where there’s hope, a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not a train to run you over?” said Pedro Coelho, a businessman in Mount Vernon, N.Y., who is known as the mayor of Brazilians in Westchester County. “Are they leaving? Yes, by the hundreds.”

* It seems like Cuba is the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean that will meet the UN Millennium Goal for universal education, according to a recent UNESCO report. Hopefully, Fidel can help some of that can trickle down to Nicaragua — because while for example Cuba has already reached adult literacy targets, Nicaragua is one of two countries in the region at "serious risk" of not attaining them, period.

* Finally, in the San Francisco Chronicle, a story about a visit to that city by the mayor of San Salvador, where gangs continue to be a major problem. The mayor, Violeta Menjivar, stopped by the Central American Resource Center to talk about "sharing gang prevention efforts, such as the resource center's tattoo removal program, that would be a good way to help break the international cycle of violence."

Meanwhile, presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo recently unveiled a TV ad (watch it here) that directly blames porous borders for allowing gangs that rape kids and push drugs into the United States. Given Tancredo's record, his simplistic conclusions are not surprising. "Secure our borders. Deport those that don't belong. Make sure they never come back," he says.

Please, sir, remember the civil war that brought gang members to the States in the first place, and who funded that war.

faring in strange and faraway lands

"How much do you charge?"

This one was new. I was running yesterday around 5 p.m. There was a coolish (everything is relative) breeze, the sun was setting and young people were out ready to cause trouble.

I was turning the corner by the lake, this beautiful and polluted scenery lined with bars and quesillo sellers and alcoholics. Three guys on bicycles are riding toward me. I maneuver my keys into position, so I have something sharp pointing out from the end of my right fist.  One of them says something totally normal and expected, like, "Hola, Mamacita." I don't even remember.

But then the new one, "Cuanto me cobras?"

It actually made me laugh. I hesitated to say this two months ago when I arrived, but now with complete confidence and no worries about making generalizations about a culture or sounding ethnocentric, I can say the following: Men here in Granada are disgusting, machista pigs.

I hate them.

I understand that I look sort of out of place when I run. And I suppose soccer shorts and baggy T-shirts are sexy. But the disrespectful, intimidating and sometimes physical aggressions these men display are driving me up the wall. There are catcalls, whistles, open-mouthed staring, stopped conversations and following heads. Sometimes guys on bikes will ride real slowly behind me or next to me. Old men will nudge each other and stare together in silence. Little boys who can't be older than 10 cry out "Opah" or "Nossa."

The worst was a few weeks ago when a guy walking down the road in broad daylight grabbed my chest.

I stopped running after that, and promptly started gaining weight. Which is why I started running again.

I need help figuring out how to deal with this. It's not just when I'm running; it's any time I am walking alone anywhere. I avoid one corner of my block because two security guards with guns do dirty things with their mouths when I pass. And I don't mean to imply this happens because I'm anybody special: guys are just idiots here when it comes to girls, particularly if they're foreign.

My neighbor is a 50-some year old, upper-class man who used to sit on his front steps and make comments when I walked past. When he learned I live 20 meters down he changed his discourse into friendly "neighbor-like" comments. Yesterday he asked how I was doing and I told him men in this city are pigs and I hate being outside by myself, immediately putting him on the defensive. Yeah, I meant to make you feel bad about yourself.

You make me sick.

on oil money and celebrating the dead

My friend Moisés Martínez did a nice job explaining this fishy petroleum deal between Nicaragua and Venezuela in today's paper.

At the National Assembly earlier this week, President Daniel Ortega explained the reason why benefits from the deal weren't explicity detailed in the national budget: although the state buys the oil from Venezuela, it immediately gets sold to Albanisa, a private company, which then takes the risks — and profits — involved in such a business venture. I guess 25 percent of profits is supposed to go toward social welfare programs by Alba, or the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.

But one question is how much of a private company is Albanisa when Venezuela owns 60 percent of it, and Nicaragua 40 percent. Would that make it a state company whose profits/spending should be regulated by government? And who will oversee whether the 25 in profits — estimated at around $30 million U.S. — earmarked for public welfare spending is actually spent responsibly if it's considered a private company?

Moisés wirites that Ortega's explanations "left more doubts than answers among his political adversaries and economic specialists from civil society, and contrary to what the president expected, there's been more criticism about the negotiations."

After Wednesday's session, I spoke with Eduardo Montealegre, who heads the  Nicaragan Liberal Alliance and was Ortega's main opponent during the presidential campaign last year. He'd been demanding that Ortega detail the benefits from the oil deal for weeks.

"What has been made clear today," he said, "is that there is no such support from Venezuela. It's all been a lie if all the profits go to a private company."

Ortega — who speech in Spanish can be read here — explained some of the benefits that already exist from the deal. The main one is that bus fares in Managua are subsidized at 2.50 córdobas — or some 13 cents U.S.
Most people here depend on public transportation, and while fares across the country have been increased to compensate for rising oil prices, that has not been the case in Managua. Opponents say this was a deliberate measure on Ortega's part to placate the bus unions — a very powerful political force here.

Another plan, Ortega said, is to buy new buses from Mexico for Managua.

That's it for now. I'm finishing a couple of stories today and trying to come up with a costume for a Día de los Muertos party tonight. (If you don't know what this holiday is, read this Los Angeles Times story about some fears the Mexican Catholic Church has about Halloween replacing the traditional religious holiday.)

I've never actually celebrated the holiday before! It's not as big here as it is in some parts of Mexico, but it will be lovely to take part. Let me know if you have costume ideas!