Slow news day for Nicaragua because of the holidays. Still, enough people are doing the normal badmouthing of someone else. You know, business as usual.
(One of my friends recently explained it like this: Since Nicaragua doesn't have its own Hollywood-type celebrities, that's what politicians become. So when someone says Eduardo Montealegre has a secret, late-night meeting with his nemesis President Daniel Ortega, it's gossip and it's juicy.)
What we have today is the following:
1) Former education ministers are criticizing changes to school funding under Ortega. Before, parents made "voluntary" monetary contributions to their children's schools. Now, school is free and the government puts down a smaller amount of money than the total collected before.
Critics say the difference is costing security, and schools are getting broken into and ripped off more frequently. What's more interesting to me, and the Prensa article didn't mention, is whether quality of education has changed at all since the changes. After all, education (as well as health) were the two areas where the first Sandinista administration had the most success. This is one of the stories I'm working on this month.
2. The other day, anti-Danielistas in the National Assembly joined to make dark predictions about Ortega using the new Citizens Power Councils to militarize the country, jail political opponents and confiscate property.
Now, they've founded an official movement against Ortega's "totalitarianism" called the Bloc against the Dictatorship. Their plan: If they can't prevent Daniel from making the CPCs a legit part of government, they'll vote against funding programs that the CPCs would probably manage, such as Hunger Zero and Usury Zero.
Read the bloc's declaration here in Spanish, or this excerpt translated by me:
The "Bloc against the Dictatorship" which we form declares itself in permanent session until we can achieve the reestablishment of the institutionalization of separate of powers and the respect for their independence. For that, we will initiate political and international actions, and mobilize all levels to put an end to the threat of dictatorship that has manifested itself with the dictatorial attitudes of current President Daniel Ortega.
3. Ortega said yesterday that he expects to finish the process of nationalizing the importation of petroleum by next week, with a treaty with Esso Standard Oil. (read earlier post)
He said that doesn't mean the government will "confiscate or expropriate the Esso refinery," nor will the company's commercial operations be affected, according to Radio La Primerísima. That scenario is only what the right-wing media wants people to think, he added.
"Those who are always planting fear and terror, who say, 'They're going to confiscate, they're going to expropriate,' — a lie. It's a lie as big as the lie they told about there not being power, that the next day the blackouts would return, when there is electricity all around."
* * * * *
As for elsewhere in the world ....
Sometimes, I really love the LA Times. This Column One (from two days ago, I just noticed) is a beautifully written story about life and death in the drug trade.
Here is just the top of In Mexico's drug trade, no glitter for grunts (you need to register to see the story, but that is free):
GUAMUCHIL, MEXICO -- Jose Alan Montoya died far from the beloved roosters he raised on his patio, far from the tortilla shop his mother ran, far from the people who still weep for a man gunned down on a marijuana plantation in the mountains of Michoacan.
Montoya was born and raised in a humble, orderly neighborhood just outside this town in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. He died more than 600 miles to the south, shot and killed by army troops who say he opened fire on them.
Drug traffickers are mythologized throughout Mexico by a subculture that portrays them as lavishly paid gunslingers. But most of the 5,000 who have lost their lives in the last two years in the business are people of limited horizons who die in relative anonymity.
The oldest of six children, Montoya had little education. In Guamuchil, he held odd jobs at hospitals and construction sites where he rarely made more than $20 a day, relatives said.
"Someone told him he was going to make a lot of money, that he could send money to his family," said Elva Camacho, his mother. "They must have filled his head with big dreams."
If I go back to the States — funny how that's changed from "When I go back to the States — I am seriously looking at getting a job at that newspaper.
