desde nicaragua

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.

Guatemalan elections

I guess it's election season.

On Sunday, Guatemalans chose Álvaro Colom — a "gawky policy wonk and businessman who made fighting poverty his campaign’s centerpiece," describes the NYT — as their new president. Colom beat out Otto Pérez Molina, a former army general who has been accused of overseeing massacres during the country's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996 (AP). More than 200,000 people died or disappeared during those years.

Colon won with about 53 percent of the vote. He has quite the job ahead of him. Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America, with some 5,000 and counting this year. This trend of violence can be seen throughout Central America, largely due to drug trafficking and transnational gangs. Governments have unsuccessfully tried "Mano Dura" or "Hard Hand" campaigns to target the violence. But instead of solving anything the policy of locking up minor delinquents or kids with tattoos has turned prisons into training cells and command operation centers.

It had been a bloody few months leading to the election, with dozens of political candidates, activists and their families murdered or disappeared since last September, according to a recent BBC News Americas report. Before Sunday's elections, James Painter wrote that although Guatemalans would be electing their sixth consecutive civilian president since the military withdrew from formal power in 1986, it isn't quite something to cheer about:

The country's timid steps towards democratic rule mask a series of deep-seated problems.

Top of the list are organised crime, grim levels of public insecurity and deeply entrenched social divisions.

"'Guatemala is the saddest country in Latin America," writes a long-time observer of the region, Michael Reid, in his new book, Forgotten Continent.

He points to the "dark shadow" cast by Latin America's most brutal civil war in recent times, which left 200,000 people dead, most of them Mayan Indians.

The real power in the country, Mr Reid writes, consists in many ways of "shadowy networks linking corrupt former army officers and organised criminal gangs of drugs traffickers and money launderers".

If you'd like to read more about what kind of shape Guatemala is in, go here (Unicef), here (Human Rights Watch) or here (CIA Factbook). Or to learn more about the so-called "transnational gang problem" — which largely resulted after Salvadorans who were fleeing their own country's civil war in the 1980s clashed with Mexican gangs in Los Angeles — check out some reports by the Washington Office on Latin America.

Now, I'm not sure how I missed this yesterday, but there was a fantastic nine-page article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine that smoothly goes through Venezuela's petroleum strategy. The Perils of Petrocracy, by Tina Rosenburg, compares the benefits/drawbacks of private vs. state companies, analyzes whether Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's "Zero Misery" programs improve standards of living and suggests more transparency in government.

As a slogan, “Negotiate a Better Royalty Rate!” doesn’t have the ring of “The Oil Is Ours!”; nationalization of natural resources can bolster a country’s psyche even if the management of those resources is a failure. The urge to nationalize is, at its core, a political one. Chávez seized Pdvsa not so it would produce more but so he could directly control the money. When governments give into this urge, they tend to be susceptible to the temptations of using oil for short-term gain.

But not always. Nationalized oil production doesn’t necessarily lead to political corruption or shortsightedness. If the old Pdvsa were operating in today’s booming oil market, there might be plenty of money for investment in oil and social programs. But it would be the government’s job to watch the company closely to make sure the state got its fair share — in other words, to ensure oil does what it should do: produce maximum sustainable money for the state. It’s also the government’s job to use the money wisely. That is a more important and difficult problem than the dilemma of whether to nationalize, and the solution does not depend on whether production is nationalized or privatized. It is not even an oil problem at all.

Now I'm off to read the dailies here. I'm planning a trip to León and/or Chinandega — yep, same place where the leptospiroris has reached epidemic heights — later this week. Perhaps another motorcycle rental is in order. And depending on whether I can find a companion, I might venture up to El Salvador or Guatemala since I have family in both countries (thank you, Mom).