desde nicaragua

mayday, May Day ...

I try to make plans to meet a new friend for coffee but she hesitates: Remember that this week is weird — it breaks on Thursday because the first is a holiday.

A holiday? I thought Easter just happened ... May first May first May first ... oh! May Day!

I don't recall ever making much of a deal of this in the States, but in Nicaragua it's a national holiday. May Day, which has its roots in pagan holidays, commemorates the fight for the eight-hour work day.

This from the Nicaraguan Labor Ministry to all employers and workers:

That on Thursday, May 1 of the current year, will be the celebrated the International Workers' Day, date of great historical transcendence for the labor movement, and that synthesized the fight for workers' demands.

For that, said day is an obligatory national holiday, with the right to rest and salary, according to Article 66 of the Labor Code.

Government employees get Friday off too!

To celebrate, this chela is going to a concert at El Bongo Tropical to hear such Latin American classics as Sambalandó and national tunes like Palomita guasiruca. Beers are 15 córdobas so I am promised company.

* * * * *

Oh, and it looks like we're back to power outages. So much for cero apagones ...

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.

A story with pictures.

We started slow. Somoto is a quiet town and the weather is cool, and we savored the morning. After breakfast, conversations with kind people and packing our lunch/adventuring gear, we made our way to the bus station.

The 9:30 a.m. bus took us to Soni, a tiny town on the Panamerican with an entrance to the canyon. Twenty minutes later we were off, chattering animatedly and wondering how to turn the spike-y nopales along the dirt road into delicious meals.

We were happy, energized and ready.

That's Javier, my dance partner and fellow adventure seeker. He carried the backpack. I carried my camera.

That's me. The sun wasn't very high yet and we were still dry.

We paid 10 córdobas to a kid sitting under the shade of a tree at the beginning of the canyon. He said it was for the alcaldía, or the city. There's some sort of conflict between the folks who live along the canyon's edge and the city about who should keep the admission, and what that money gets spent on. One thing the alcaldía is definitely not spending the money on is signs. Besides one on the Panamerican (sponsored by Palí, the country's Wal-Mart chain), there weren't any signs or helpful directions/ information on the way in.

Although, this guy on the horse did offer to guide us for a price. We politely declined his services.

In the beginning we were careful. Nobody wants to slosh around in wet hiking boots, so when the sides of the river ran into unhike-able boulders, we looked for stepping stones and gingerly hopped across the ankle-deep water. But the walls began to narrow in, and the depth of the water rose.

We reached a point where climbing along the sides of the river got dangerous. A few guys offered to take us in a boat and we scoffed. Obviously, we were brave. We then reached a point where the guys were now were unloading people from the boat and transferring them onto life rings. We couldn't go any farther without getting the backpack wet, so we asked for one. They gave us two, and we were pulled across by a brown-skinned guy who swims like a fish.

The water was cool.

A couple of kilometers later we were alone again, and breathing heavily. It was getting hard to hop across the stepping stones without slipping. We stopped for lunch (tomato-and-cheese sandwiches) and a 20-minute nap. We walked in our swimsuits and hiking boots. Javier's skin began to burn.

It started to get cool and I put on my T-shirt. Then I fell in the water. Then the sides got impossible again and the water was higher than ankle-deep. Then knee-deep. Then belly-deep and chest deep and oh my god it reached my neck and Javier is shorter than me and I hope he can keep the backpack out of the water.

It was around 4 p.m. and I was tired and it was cold and wet and getting dark and we didn't know how far it was to the bridge at the Panamerican. I felt like a mountain goat. Some boys sitting against a boulder eyed us suspiciously as we scaffeled the walls behind them. I think they wanted us to fall in.

Finally, some women washing clothes in the river told us the bridge was just ahead. We pranced up the side of a hill, threw on our wet clothes and entered a totally different landscape.

I don't know if it was less beautiful.

Chávez: Uribe's government is a tool for U.S. imperialism

"Chávez is supposed to be an incredible speaker," my friend's wife told me. "They say that after you hear him talk, you just wanna make out with him."

With those words ringing in my ears, I left for Plaza Inter, where the Venezuelan president gave a speech this afternoon as part of his tour of Central America.

In a way, she was right. Chávez is passionate, funny and convincing. I found myself laughing, nodding, hanging onto his every word — well, every word of the first hour or so — and even agreeing a few times when he said it's either socialism or death.

I did not, however, want to make out with him. The man wasn't quite that charming.

Chávez spoke for 2 hours and 25 minutes to a crowd of more than 1,000 Sandinista supporters about the Colombian FARC hostage situation, plans to help alleviate Nicaragua's energy crisis and baseball.

Like a good speaker, he warmed up the crowd by talking about something light: Nicaragua's favorite pastime. He summarized last night's baseball game between the Managua Bóers and Masaya San Fernando (Managua won, 4-2), talked about playing ball with his mentor and "father," Fidel Castro, then made an interesting suggestion:

  "It occurred to me last night that we should invent a baseball league for the countries in Alba — for Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua. Not Bolivia, of course, because they don't play baseball; they play soccer."

He mentioned bringing in the Caribbean countries and creating a baseball training school, but quickly  the conversation turned serious. Chávez needed to respond to criticism from the Colombian government about his role as a mediator in the hostage situation. He scoffed at being called a terrorist or supporter of terrorism ("I don't agree with kidnappings ... I hope the FARC desist with that strategy"), as did a Washington Post editorial today.

"The Colombian government sends protest letters against Venezuela," Chávez said. "Let them send as many letters as they'd like, but we will continue to insist that peace needs to be reached in Colombia. It's enough of the war."

(For those of you who don't know much about the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia), it might be worth your while to do some research on Plan Colombia, the United States' multi-billion dollar campaign to end cocaine production in that country, and the ongoing civil war there in order to understand the context.)

Chávez called Colombian President Alvaro Uribe a tool for U.S. imperialism, and that he "does whatever Bush tells him to do. That is the problem because Bush does not want peace; he wants war."

And, that, Chávez and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega agreed, makes Bush the terrorist. It's convenient for the Bush administration that Colombia's state of civil war continue so that the U.S. military can maintain its military presence there and threaten Venezuela, he said.

On Nicaragua's never-ending energy crisis, Chávez announced a project to build two more generators of 60 megawatts each by March, adding to the two his country already built here. He spoke about plans to take advantage of Nicaragua's geothermal energy potential (thanks, volcanoes) and the progress of the $4.5 billion oil refinery being built near Léon.

"This investment is from Venezuela," Chávez said. "The only condition? That we create the grand country of Sandino." That's Augusto C. Sandino, the national hero who stood up to Yankee imperialism.

By this point in the afternoon, people were getting tired and hungry. Several hundred in the crowd were bussed in from across the country because of their membership in farming cooperatives or other campesino groups. You see the same sort of faces at these events: older, tired-looking men in FSLN caps and jeans, arms crossed, and listening quietly.

These guys didn't make it through. Something that has always struck me as awesome about events like today's is how accessible they are to people. Anybody could have walked into the room, stood back and listened. No tickets necessary. I guess this is what Daniel Ortega means by "el pueblo presidente."

One last thing: Chávez confirmed a new date for the next Alba summit, originally slated for this past December here in Managua. It's now to take place here on Jan. 25.  According to the Venezuelan leader, the new Alba bank will be officially created at this summit.

On democracy, language and the next ALBA summit

As I mentioned in an earlier post, December 7 is the last day of the Purísima celebration. I hope to be in León tonight for the best parties. Between then and now, I'm riding buses, heading to the office to work on a few story ideas and reading the news.

* For The Nation, Greg Grandin, an NYU historian who specializes in Central America, writes about Chavismo and Democracy. After Sunday's "No" vote in Venezuela, critics and media  hailed it as a tribute to freedom and democracy, and a slap in the face to President Hugo Chávez's power grab. Grandin analyzes the points in the failed referendum, and writes about what direct democracy has actually meant in Venezuela.

Political scientists can debate the viability of direct, or "protagonist," democracy, but they would have a hard time making the case that politicians in Latin America's traditional representational systems are more accountable to their citizens. Throughout the 1990s, candidates for president repeatedly ran on antineoliberal platforms only to capitulate to the IMF and Wall Street once in office. And what system of checks and balances controls the monopoly power of Latin America's corporate media, as much a political as an economic force, or the "veto" that bond managers and banks have over a country's financial sovereignty? Hate him or admire him, Chávez at least tells voters what he plans to do: he made clear that in his re-election campaign he planned to introduce legislation that would allow him to seek yet another re-election ...

Never before have the majority of Venezuelans been so involved in the political life of the nation. Throughout the country, peasant organizations, cooperatives, women's and gay rights' organizations, indigenous groups, environmental activists, community councils and cultural associations argue about the possibilities, limits and perils of Chavismo. Hundreds of community radio and TV stations provide a forum for residents to express views, address local issues and learn, free of charge, production and broadcasting skills. Critics dismiss these stations as but more mechanisms of patronage and control. But all empirical evidence points to an extraordinary democratization of free speech, with little or no monitoring of content, frequent criticism of the government and uninhibited and robust grassroots participation. This is confirmed by yet another poll, released last month, by the respected Chilean firm Latinobarometro: for the third year running, Venezuelans are behind only Uruguayans in their satisfaction with their country's democratic institutions (59 percent compared with the regional average of 37 percent).

Also on The Nation's website, you can read pieces on the referendum by: Mark Weisbrot,  co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Sujatha Fernandes, a sociology professor who studies urban social movements in Venezuela; Chesa Boudin, a former intern on Chávez's foreign policy team; and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a psychoanalyst.

* Meanwhile, blogger Justin Delacour writes about a "glaring error" in an Associated Press story about the referendum:

It is incorrect to state that the constitutional changes would have "enabled him [Chavez] to remain in power for life." It would have been correct to say that the constitutional changes would have enabled Chavez to run for reelection indefinitely, but I can't emphasize enough that that is completely distinct from enabling him to "remain in power for life." Had term limits been eliminated, only the Venezuelan electorate could have enabled Chavez to "remain in power for life," and that would have been up to them. The distinction is really quite important.

It is an important distinction, and a good reminder of how much care foreign correspondents need to take when choosing words, as what they write defines for the outside world what is going on in a country.

* The NYT takes a look at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. foreign aid agency that lets recipient countries undertake their own projects, instead of doling cash to American contractors and charities. The story highlights its "sluggish record in getting projects beyond the planning stage to the point where contractors can actually build the roads, irrigation canals, power plants and clean water systems that poor countries say they need."

I hope to talk to the folks in charge of the MCC's $175 million, 5-year project in Nicaragua, which aims to improve transportation in the northwest part of the country, strengthen property rights and develop rural businesses. Paul Trivelli, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, wrote in August that some US$9.6 million has been dispersed to that date. More on this later.

* The next ALBA summit will not take place in Managua, as originally planned. The president confirmed yesterday that the sixth summit for the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas is happening in Caracas on Dec. 16 and 17, in homage to the grand liberator Simón Bolivar on the anniversary of his death.

Read about the ALBA model here.

Oh, and Guatemala's president-elect, Álvaro Colom, tells Nicaragua's president it'd be too complicated for his country to join ALBA since his country has already signed a free trade agreement with the States. He added that 62 percent of Guatemala's trade is with the U.S. "and obviously it's a little complicated for the country" to sign onto the Chávez's alternative agreement (EFE).

taking threats at face value

The president here gives a lot of speeches, says a lot of incendiary stuff. Sometimes, it's hard to tell whether any of it matters.

For example, late last night President Daniel Ortega suggested he will nationalize the importation of petroleum unless  Esso stores and refines some 8 million barrels of crude oil from Venezuela.

Any time you have the words "nationalization," "petroleum" and "Venezuela" in the same sentence, you know it could be heavy.

Ortega was criticizing the Texas-based Esso for not cooperating with the government's mission to end blackouts. On live TV, he said it's a "matter of national security," and that his government is "studying the possibility of nationalizing its importation."

His language gets sharper and he goes on to say that Esso's owners are "true mercenaries, speculators. They're bleeding the people."

It often seems like criticizing international companies is an easy way for Ortega to shift the blame for domestic problems. He does the same thing with the Spanish energy distributor, Unión Fenosa . Please, don't think I'm defending  Esso, a Standard Oil subsidiary, or Fenosa (read up on complaints about this company at unionpenosa.com — "penosa" meaning terrible). I'm just trying to look at things from a few viewpoints.

In truth, both the companies and the government deserve blame for the country's energy problems.

Fenosa is unwilling to comply with promises to invest in the country's antiquated energy grid until some the government fulfills its end of the deal — such as making it illegal for people to steal energy and letting Fenosa raise fees to cover costs.

This is all hard to understand, I know. The reason why petroleum is connected with blackouts is because about 75 percent of the country's electricity generators run on bunker fuel, a low-grade petroleum derivative.

As for Esso, the government's original beef with that company stemmed from a tax payment dispute. The government says Esso owed US$2.9 million in taxes; the company denied the debt. In August, a Nicaraguan judge embargoed its assets, and used Esso's tanks to store Venezuelan oil. Eventually the tanks were returned.

Still, Nicaragua continues to lack the capacity to store or process the raw oil that Venezuela continues to send at a discount.

This circles us back to last night's news, and my debate about taking Ortega's threat to nationalize imports seriously. The August seizures mean he means business, sometimes. I'm not banking on it this time around. I don't think he has the support to follow through.

Thoughts?

"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.

citizens power councils

I went to a nice government event yesterday, offered to write a story about it for La Prensa and this morning it made the front page.

It's sort of a complicated story, but basically the government is selling beans for cheap to poor people, and using very controversial and new Citizens Power Councils (CPCs) to distribute them. The price for this staple to the Nicaraguan diet more than doubled in the past month, and many families can't afford to eat them anymore.

President Daniel Ortega' political opponents criticize the CPCs because they seem like another name for the Sandinista Defense Committees, which in the 1980s were the "eyes and ears" of the government during the Contra Revolution.

Because of that, the National Assembly vetoed Ortega's plan to make the CPCs an official part of the government. Before that veto was even written into law, an appellate court said CPCs are a constitutional right and overturned the veto. Meanwhile, as the future of the CPCs officially will be decided by the Supreme Court, the Ortegas announced the CPCs will officially go into effect by the end of the month.

I spoke with Juan Ramón Bravo Reyes, president of a large association of farming cooperatives, which are now selling beans directly to consumers through this government program. He's worked with committees, associations and cooperatives since the first Sandinista administration in the 1980s.

He told me that if the CPCs continue with programs like the discounted bean sales, they can be a strong force to protect citizens' interest.

"With the CPCs can begin the solution to their problems, and the inquietudes of the population," he said.
"They can be very useful if they aren't politicized."

* * * * *

Okay, so it's slightly surprising to see your name on the front page of a newspaper in another country. I'm trying to get over shocks. But then yesterday I casually ask my editor whatever happened with a first-person story — a column or essay really — he'd asked me to write about my trip Matagalpa's coffee haciendas.

He tells me it's in the magazine, a beautifully designed, glossy weekly that comes out separately from the newspaper. I buy it. And what do you know — a whole page devoted to the "Opinión" of one U.S. journalist.

* * * * *

Finally, a couple of pictures.

Last week, my friend came into town (err ... country) to visit. We took a bus to Volcán Masaya, walked 6 kilometers up a steep road to the summit. The volcano is active.

Here's Dan at the top.

* * * * *

Finally, I've got a ton of school work to catch up on. Well, by that I mean I have a lot to read. I'm taking a post-graduate history course at UNAN, and the reading/lectures are the kind of stuff you'd (or at least I'd) have trouble understanding in English just because it goes over your (my) head. It's a delightful challenge that it's entirely in Spanish.

On rhetoric and action

I swear I'm not trying to make this blog all about Hugo Chávez, but here's the latest, from Reuters: Chávez Threatens to Reconsider Venezuela's Ties with Spain. The headline basically tells you what's up, and we'll just have to wait and see whether Venezuela's president actually does cut some ties with Spain or punish business interests there.

Venezuela's oil might gives Chávez the power to make that kind of decision, to risk losing substantial foreign investment. On the other hand, Nicaragua can't do really that because it lacks economic resources. It's one thing for President Daniel Ortega to use international podiums to lash out against Western imperialism, to choose diplomatic alliances with fellow champions of the poor who are unpopular with the rest of the world.  But it's quite something else for him to act on that.

For example, many here believed that Ortega's complaints at the summit about the Spanish company Unión Fenosa would be followed by strong demands that Fenosa reduce blackouts, or worse for the company.  Part of the context is that the president had announced a few weeks ago that outages would be greatly reduced this month and end by December 1 because of a substantial boost in the country's energy production.

However, as the front page of El Nuevo Diario tells us today, Neither blackouts or Unión Fenosa will go.

There are no guarantees that the energy sector will reduce or end the extensive blackouts before the first of December, as the government had promised and this Tuesday made clear that it never contemplated booting Unión Fenosa from the country and doesn't intend to do so.

During a speech ... President Daniel Ortega made clear that his government has never contemplated getting rid of Fenosa, only make it fulfill the investments it has programmed in its concessionary contract.

"It's not as simple as saying that Unión Fenosa should go. If that was the solution I would have done that a long time ago," Ortega said, justifying the declarations he made against the company at the Ibero-American Summit celebrated in Chile.

"We prefer that Unión Fenosa fulfills its obligations," manifested the president, signaling the existence of a valid contract with the company and, "unfortunately, dismantling that so the country can take it over takes time." (my translation)

My friend Tim Rogers recently had a story about Ortega's Two Faces of Economic Change in the Miami Herald that's worth checking out:

One day he is denouncing yanqui tyranny, and the next he is shaking hands with U.S. investors who are building a massive free-trade textile plant north of Managua. At one moment he preaches the importance of socialist revolution, yet behind the scenes his government is signing free-trade accords with Panama and Taiwan and negotiating with international lending institutions.

...

''The President of Nicaragua has the right to say what he wants, but he knows that he can't do everything he says,'' said (Humberto Arbulú, the International Monetary Fund's resident representative in Nicaragua). ``The private sector knows when the message is for them and when it's not. They heard [Ortega's] discourse in the plaza, but they also see the agreement with the IMF.''

That's it for now. A friend has been in town all this week so I've been slacking a bit on reading the news. Should be back on top of things next week. Up next is a trip to San Juán del Sur with some surf lessons, hopefully.

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.