desde nicaragua

38 horas con la calaverita de gato

Léster Juárez is a new friend, a La Prensa reporter who covers national politics. He is 31 years old, single and a lifelong Sandinista. He's also mature enough to not take himself too seriously — and last week handed in his resignation to the editors — leaving me in a comfortable position to criticize and question everything under his byline.

He responded well to the ink I scrawled across and around his three articles in yesterday's paper. I should preamble this by saying that journalists here are overworked and underpaid. On average, Léster puts works 70-hour weeks. Six-day weeks, several articles a day. He goes to law school on his day off and has lived in the same teeny US$40/month room for the past nine years.

Everything in this country is highly politicized in a way I am barely beginning to grasp. Parties mean everything here, and every new administration basically cleans house and replaces most government employees with party members. This explains why it takes so long for things to get done here. If the people running government agencies are new to their jobs or have been chosen mostly for their allegiance, there will be delays and ineptitude, if not straight-up corruption.

He wrote one story titled "Bonilla 'explodes' against Montealegre" about a Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance  congresswoman at odds with her party's leader, Eduardo Montealegre. Now, nobody he interviewed described Jamileth Bonilla as "exploding" against Montealegre, but there — in the headline — the word is in quotes. It's nowhere else in the story. As a (U.S.) reader, I automatically believe that the reporter/editor chose to use quotation marks because somebody interviewed used the term. Quotation marks imply somebody that does not represent the newspaper is speaking. This sort of helps editors defend themselves against claims of bias.

But, Léster tells me, although that's what he understands the use of quotation marks to mean, it wasn't the case here. His editor liked the word and put it in quotes in order to make it stand out. End of story.

Well, not quite. Remember that I was talking about how political things are. Montealegre is La Prensa's man. By choosing language that makes one of his opponents — albeit someone from within his own party — look bad, the paper is doing its job.

Looking past its headline, I ask questions about the actual story. Like, why does this matter? Facts that to me would appear key — like that Bonilla had once switched to the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance after a fall-out with her original party's leader — were simply not mentioned or alluded to. You're just supposed to know these things as a reader.

Understandable, perhaps. On to another story: "Supreme Court justices could be challenged." Basically the story gives space to the opinion of one "constitutional rights expert." I wrote last week about a movement here to change to a parliamentary system of government here. It seems some of the drafters of the proposed changes to constitution sit on Nicaragua's Supreme Court. The "constitutional rights expert" makes logical arguments against allowing justices to both judge and take part in cases.

I have a few problems with this. First, why does this guy's opinion matter, and couldn't the reporter — my friend — have learned whether this stuff is ethical or proper on his own? I mean, the expert uses the law to back up his argument, so couldn't Léster have quoted the law before the expert? Would that have given the story more credibility?

Later in the story you realize that the expert's main gripe isn't about ethics, but against the proposal itself. He is anti-Sandinista, and that is the main detail that qualifies his opinion for the editors at La Prensa.

Léster explains to me that his editors have a list of "experts" to call for this kind of story. Because they agree with La Prensa's political leanings, whenever they say anything it gets quoted and turned into a story.

Does this grant them a sort of legitimacy they might not necessarily deserve? And does that legitimacy translate into the ability to sway readers toward some political leaning?

I think so, and Léster agrees. But here in Nicaragua you know what you're getting into when you buy a newspaper. That's why he's quitting his job. Instead of doing journalism that questions in order to amplify discussion or urge solutions, he's just stabbing a party for the sake of stabbing.

So what's next for Mr. Juárez? A public relations job — in government.

Juana

I walked past Juana nearly every day for weeks. I rarely stopped to give her money. Sometimes I'd buy her a tamal, but I never said more than a few words to her.

She is a woman in her 70s who wears a rag on her head and sits in the shade near the market or across the street from this café. Her face is a mosaic of wrinkles, and tourists often take her photo. Today I sat down with her. This is what she told me:

I used to work selling fruit over there on the corner. I was young and I walked around with a basket on my head. Then I got sick. I tremble so much and I fall. And my eyelids are so heavy. I think I have cataracts. I couldn't walk around anymore.

So I started asking for money about a year ago, and when I make my 20 pesitos I go home. I go to the market, buy my food and soap, and go home. I have a little house and I live by myself. I have to pay the electricty bills, the water. That's why I have to collect money here.

Before that I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant as a cook. I had been married and was a housewife but my husband died when I was young. I was 30. He worked in construction. I had to work because we had a son. I worked as a cook and paid somebody to take care of him. I don't see him anymore. He moved to Costa Rica, I forget the name of the town. He doesn't come by. I don't know anything about him. I haven't seen him in eight years. He is my only son.

I only beg for money until around 11 a.m. Then I go to my little house. People give me 1 peso, 5 pesitos. I have to resign myself to doing this if it's what God wants. Because it's His will I have to put up with this until, well, just in the meantime.

a campesino speaks about justice

*Photos by Sam Pierceall
Back in Granada after spending a few days with campesinos in and around Matagalpa. Sitting in a comfortable chair in my favorite tourist-friendly café. Finishing a sweetened expresso. Staring blankly at my laptop screen.

At a loss for words.

What does it mean to be poor and landless in rural Nicaragua?

Hell. I don't know what to write, how to describe such a tangled, screwed up mess. If this sounds trite, if this sounds exaggerated or overly dramatic, it's because that is the truth. This is reality for too many human beings. I won't apologize if the words don't come out right.

This morning I met a man with conviction. His name is Mario Orozco Valle and he picks coffee at haciendas on the mountains of Matagalpa.

I didn't ask him for his life story. But there was a light in his eyes that every other campesino I'd met so far lacked. His voice was solid and he spoke with eloquence about justice and hunger. He did not hesitate.

It is 6:30 a.m. and Mario has been picking mature red beans for two hours. There will be 10 more hours of this, of moving around the lush green trees on this slick and hilly hacienda. Dozens of men are picking beans.

Aquí no ganamos nada. Lo hacemos solamente para no andar de balde.
Here we earn nothing. We do it just so we aren't doing nothing.

Thirty córdobas a day is what he made yesterday, picking two medios. One medio is about 19 pounds of beans. Thirty córdobas is less than US$2.

Marcos is 44 and has 8 children. Thirty córdobas a day doesn't feed them.

El pago es tán poco pero no tenemos otra salida. Como somos pobres no somos expertos en otro trabajo.
The pay is so little but we don't have another way out. Because we're poor we're not qualified for another kind of work.

He has picked beans for the past 14 or 15 years. He doesn't remember. Before that he worked picking corn and other vegetables.

He doesn't own land. He moves his family from hacienda to hacienda every year. He is illiterate. He says the work is difficult, especially when it rains because it is cold and people get sick. By people he means the women and the children who help pick when the beans mature.

Marcos tells me he wants to work, he will continue to work. He doesn't want a government handout. He wants a fair wage. A wage to defend himself with. A wage that allows him to feed his children.

Quién es responsable? No sé si sería el patrón o el gobierno. Nosotros sabemos nada de leyes aquí. Somos analfabetos.
Who is responsible? I don't know if it's the boss or the government. We don't know anything about the laws here. We're uneducated.

I tell him the explanation I heard yesterday from the president of the local coffee growers association: International coffee prices fluxuate. That's capitalism. Growers can't pay workers well if they don't get good prices. Of the final coffee sales, only about 10 percent makes it back to the growers. The rest goes to intermediaries, to vendors.

Eso así lo dicen para engañarnos, a nosotros los campesinos, porque no sabemos de leyes, de nada. Somos analfabetos. Entonces nos engañan con una tontería.
That's what they say to deceive us, us the campesinos, because we don't know about the law, about anything. We're uneducated. So they deceive us with some bullshit.

We have been standing together, a coffee tree in between us, for 15 minutes now. Talking. His voice is still steady. He asks me what I plan to do, whether I am going to do something. Who is this report for?

I say I am a journalist and I want to learn what life is like for people like him. I don't expect to make his life any better. But a journalist's goal, in general, is to publicize accounts of real life so that people in positions of power — those in government, those with money — can make decisions that affect change.

He looks at me and nods his head. This is good, he says, because campesinos are afraid to stand up for themselves. Another campesino had described it yesterday as walking on tiptoes, bowing your head instead of complaining. Otherwise you lose your job.

So somebody else has to have the courage to say something.

This is where I come in, right? Then why do I feel so detached? Why do I stand across from this man who speaks to me with so much passion and not feel anything? Am I less human? Have I lost compassion? Why can't I feel empathy? What does compassion mean?

I want to write with anger about this. I want to know what a solution is. Or maybe I just want to want those things. It seems hopeless. It seems like a cycle. How does one respond? By writing a story that has already been written a hundred times over, hoping that perhaps THIS ONE STORY will be THE ONE to make the difference?

What can I offer? What am I supposed to offer when so many people have already seen what I've seen and the "situation" — these people's lives and their children's lives and their children's children's lives — hasn't changed, hasn't improved?

The coffee shop is closing now. I should say it's ironic that I still didn't think twice about dropping 15 córdobas on this expresso. It's hard. I'm still wrapping my brain around things.

Life is a struggle. We each have our own battles. I'm identifying mine.

Yosaris, age 7, mentally disabled. Her mother picked coffee in haciendas regularly sprayed down with insecticides while pregnant.

Antonio, age 60, coffee picker since age 12. Three children. Works to keep children in school.

Antonio, picking beans, 6:30 a.m. It will be a 12-hour day.

Reinero, age 6, son of coffee pickers. In Spanish, we call people with eyes like that pícaros. Lovely boy.

Eight people living in mud and stick shack. No running water, electricy. Daily food: Rice.

from drug runs across the U.S. border to this

He got out before they could catch him again, before he got deported or locked up.

He was 23 and hadn’t been back to Nicaragua since he’d left 15 years earlier. It was a place he barely knew, worlds away from his life of drug running, human trafficking and partying in the States.

“The first three months I was here in Nicaragua, I couldn’t get used to it,” George Selva tells me. “My mom used to cry each night when I’d tell her I couldn’t get used to this place, that I was going to find a way back. I had to.”

Today, the 29-year-old gives tours to foreigners in and around the city of his birth, Granada. He works for himself, hustling tourists on the northeast corner of the city’s Parque Central. On a good day George might make US$30 and on a bad day nothing.

It doesn’t come close to the Houston years.

“I used to make $20,000 in one week in the States, so you tell me,” he says, staring straight at me. “Just in one deal I would make $5,000, $6,000.”

***

In 1986, George’s mother left Nicaragua with her two sons. She opposed the Sandinista-run government, mainly because it had enacted mandatory military service two years earlier and she was scared for the boys’ futures. Her country was in the middle of a civil war.

With fake Mexican papers, they moved to Los Angeles. After two years there, George was sent alone to Houston to live with an uncle; his mother and brother returned to Nicaragua. He says it was in high school when he started hanging out with the wrong people.

He became a driver in an operation to smuggle illegal aliens across the Mexican border into the United States. He dropped out of school soon after starting 11th grade.

“I wasn’t really interested in finishing high school; I was more interested in making money,” he says. “When you’re young and you start making money, the more money you make the more money you want. It’s like an addiction, worse when you’re making it fast and easy.”

He knows about addictions. George had developed a cocaine habit.

Eventually, somebody figured out it was more profitable to run drugs across the border than people. George would rent a car in Texas, drive to his sources in Mexico, load the car with marijuana and cocaine and drive back to the border. There, somebody would strap bags of the goods to themselves and swim across the Rio Grande, where another rental car and driver would be waiting.

The money flew in, and it flew out just as fast. George says he spent the cash on drugs, flashy cars and a new house he shared with his girlfriend. His family rarely knew where he was or what he was doing. “Most of the time I was selling drugs and making money. I was more into doing that, partying, that I forgot about my family completely.”

***

Then someone snitched.

“I was doing that for four years and I got caught in 1996,” George says. “They took my truck. They took my house. They took my bank accounts. Even what I had on that day, $5,000 in jewelry, gold chains, my phone, they took.

“Everything that I had is gone.”

He served four years of a five-year prison sentence, getting out early after accepting a deal to work as a government informant. It didn’t work out. Most of the friends he used to work with weren’t living in Houston anymore or they were locked up. So he didn’t have much information to share the two or three times he actually called federal agents.

He made himself disappear in Texas for five months. “The D.E.A., the cops, they were looking for me,” George says. He didn’t want to go back to prison. “I said instead of that I’d come back to Nicaragua.”

It was a hard homecoming. He didn’t fit in; people here thought he was Mexican. In Houston, most of his friends had been Mexican and he learned to talk Spanish like them, to dress like them. He knew the country well after so many trips down.

He even had “Michoacan” — a state in Mexico — tattooed on his neck, and the Mexican eagle tattooed on his back.

He was embarrassed to tell his mother why he was in prison. The illegal alien smuggling was one thing; the drugs were quite another.

“She’s diabetic, she was sick, I was worried something would happen to her if she found out,” he explained. “I didn’t want her to know I was doing that kind of stuff in the States. My mom and dad had better expectations of me.”

The truth eventually came out.

For two years George worked at his dad’s hotel, a few blocks from the Parque Central. He met a woman and became a family man. He is the sole money-earner in his household, supporting his mom, girlfriend and daughter.

He worked a few other jobs, at hotels and with tour operators, before becoming an independent guide in early 2004.

***

I met George one afternoon when I walked past his usual spot near some steps on one corner of the plaza. He has an air of confidence when he makes his pitches and an assertive approach. He isn’t successful every day.

“Here you make money only to survive,” he tells me. “You barely make enough money to, como se dice, para pasar la vida. Like today, I haven’t done nothing at all. Nothing at all. For the past three days it’s been real bad. But that’s the way it is.”

He likes American tourists — especially the ones scoping out a place to live out their retirement — the best because they’re more willing to pay for tours than European backpackers.

But he’s afraid both will stop coming because of Nicaragua’s president.

Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista in office when George’s mother decided to leave the country more than 20 years ago, is once again the president of Nicaragua. Like two decades ago, Ortega and the U.S. are not on the friendliest terms.

In a very real way, George’s livelihood depends on whether his country makes an effort to treat tourists and foreign investors well. For the past several months Nicaragua has had daily blackouts, and the water doesn’t run eight hours of the day.

“Nicaragua has been developing real fast,” he tells me, sounding like an economist now. “In Granada, there were a lot of people who were coming here to invest. When I say invest, I mean buying houses, building houses. Now some of these people want to sell because of the government, because of the blackouts. They see the situation get worse every day.”

Ortega promised one of the first things he’d do as president is fix the blackouts, George said.

“Look, Daniel Ortega has been in power for a year, but he hasn’t done anything,” he said, dismissing the Sandinista rhetoric about working for the poor. “They make the world think and believe they are working for the people. Buts it’s bull crap. They’re working for them.

“But that’s everywhere you go. Politicians, they’re very corrupt. Even in the States.”

45 minutes with gloria

"Yo quiero andar por las calles, ayudando a la gente."

I want to be the streets, helping people.

I was reading a newspaper at the hostel I'm staying at when a woman I'd seen mopping the floors earlier today stood quietly next to me. She inched a page closer to her and put her index finger under a headline, slowly moving her lips as she sounded out the words. A bus accident. Poverty among the Atlantic Coast's indigenous demographics. A photo of somebody in a hospital, hooked up to machines.

"Entre la vida y la muerte," she says. In between life and death. "La vida es dura aquí." Life is hard here."

She murmers a small prayer for the poor, the dead and the near-dead.

Then, without my asking, Gloria María Martínez Largaespada begins to tell me her story. She is 24, barely a year older than me, with eyes that sink slightly into her skull and hands that move emphatically when she talks about God.

Her first words are about money. She has two children to feed so this is understandable. At the hostel, where she has worked for three years, she makes beds, mops floors, cleans bathrooms, washes dishes, and takes out trash. Every time I'd seen Gloria before this moment she was behind a mop. Her schedule: 6 days per week, 8 hours per day, 50 cordobas per day. ($2.69 US)

Two foreign volunteers "work" here, too, and she nods toward a young Canadian man. Four hours per day, free place to stay, free food. $5 US per day. "When he eats," Gloria says, smiling frustratedly, "he eats like this." Her two hands are spread out the size of a football. "And he drinks three glasses of orange juice. That's not enough because he goes back for more, three more eggs, and then pancakes and another glass of orange juice."

She works harder, she tells me, and her daughter still goes without food sometimes. But it's all in God's hands. An Evangelical, she converted from Catholicism at age 13. Her mother threatens to kick her out of the house (at least 10 people live there, I gathered) on a daily basis. Her husband doesn't work, doesn't help pay for the baby's milk. Maybe her mother is right, maybe her husband is a lazy good for nothing.

"It makes me feel bad ... but it doesnt matter if I suffer, cry, go hungry ... because it is who He has the gates of life and death, and without him" (she snaps her fingers) "death. Nothing matters."