Contemplating Savagery

 

Along the side of the road in Nicaragua, right past the border and on the Pan-American Highway to San Juan del Sur, stands a cluster of huge wind turbines.  They loom about 300 feet off the ground, giant white monoliths that look completely out of place against the banana trees and rolling green hills, like they were dropped here by aliens.  The aliens in this case are the Russians.

We were in a busted-up ‘85 Toyota Corolla taxi with broken windows and a hanging bumper making a run for this beach town.  Upon waking up New Year’s morning with the sun burning our hangovers, or rather emerging from an hour long nap after partying all night long on the beach, Uri and I decided to bolt to Nicaragua about 170 Kilometers north of Tamarindo.  The border was confusing – you had to check in no less than five times to different people, spend $1 at the border and get a paper for that, go into the sweatbox immigration office and get a stamp for that, and walk along a long road with checkpoints before finally being free.  Military police in black combat fatigues shouldered AK47s and didn’t smile when the red-eyed backpackers cracked jokes.  Pete told me before we left “Be careful – they have a lot more guns up there than Costa Rica and they like using them.” 

Our taxi driver had a doll of a saint attached to his dashboard – I think it was a San Juan, but it looked more like a hula girl to me.  I was tempted to give it a tap with my finger and watch it jiggle, but I was told long ago never to touch another man’s saint. Uri was passed out in the back seat, sweating like a hostage.  Two hours ago I winked at the cab driver and woke Uri abruptly from his deep sleep, telling him that we were in Nicaragua.  He unpeeled himself from the ripped leather seat and started watching out the window to catch a view of this new country.  We were in Liberia, Costa Rica, only about 50 minutes out.  Uri cursed me out and laid back down to sleep as the cab driver and I chuckled.  At the border we picked up two American girls who were backpacking around Central America and wanted to split the cab fare.  Two hours later and we were speeding through Nicaragua for real, sweating profusely and drinking lukewarm Tona beers.

We passed beautiful orchards and lush green pastures by the side of an ocean inlet.  Someone had warned me that there were lakes in the region that had fresh water sharks, one of the only places on earth.  It sounded scary but the Nicas assured us that the crocodiles would eat us up long before the sharks got a chance.

My day dreaming was cut short when we ran into a military police checkpoint.  Three young men in military dress stood by the side of the road, dismounted from police motorcycles, and gently waved our taxi to a stop.  The vibe in the taxi instantly changed.  The driver stiffened up in his seat and slowed down hesitantly, hoping that they would wave him on.  But they pulled him over and the cocky policeman sauntered over and stuck a hand in the window “Passports!”  

We gave him our passports and sat in nervous silence.  I tried not to make eye contact with the other policeman, maybe 19 years old, who was checking us out, probably interested in the girls.  We were in the middle of nowhere and they could have done whatever they wanted to us or the girls and we’d be powerless to stop them.  The taxi driver collected his paperwork and handed it over regretfully, like he would never get it back.  The policeman barked at him for a while and finally handed our passports and paperwork back.  He angrily waved us on and the cab driver very slowly and deliberately pulled away, checking his rear view mirror and making a small sign of the cross.  His hands were shaking. 

The military police are Gods down here – they do whatever the hell they want and to whoever they want, and are only accountable to those who are more corrupt.  They’re usually just looking for a bribe but you never know.  We’re not talking about mall cops here – these guys are all ex Contra rebels who before earning a paltry paycheck were crawling through the jungles and killing and kidnapping people for twenty years.  They got very good at it.   

       

Not that we are innocent in the matter.  In fact the US has its bloody fingerprints all over Nicaragua modern history.  I had no idea about this – they certainly don’t promote it in our history books in between talking about how we saved the world from the Nazis and kept the Soviets from blowing us all up during the Cold War, but the US actually invaded Nicaragua 1912.  We occupied the country in the interests of building a canal for trade purposes, which later went in Panama.  These days we invade people for oil – then it was shipping.  The US ended up pulling out of the country in 1933 because it was getting too expensive and the Great Depression was draining war coffers at home. 

 After the US pulled out, Anastasio Samoza Garcia came to power and served as dictator of the country all the way from 1936 to 1979.  His regime was known for extreme corruption and selling off natural resources and trade agreements to foreign countries.  At times Samoza was backed by Cuba, the Soviet Union, and yes, even the USA. The US made sure that our corporate interests were well served in the region, exporting pesticides and clear cutting their forests in exchange for foreign aid and political favors.  These days in Halliburton, but astonishingly in the 1950s and 1960s, 40% of all U.S. pesticide exports went to Central America. We force fed the country a steady supply of compounds banned in the U.S., such as DDT, Endrin, Dieldrin and Lindane.  We’ve done this before with selling Nestle milk for babies in Third World countries in Africa, spinning a false informational campaign to mothers by telling them there was some huge benefit above their regular breast milk.  We did it again with selling harmful birth control drugs in the Philippines – thousands in a generation born without arms or legs and severe birth defects for corporate profit.  We pumped so many banned toxins into Nicaragua that a 1977 study revealed that mothers in that country had 45 times more DDT in their breast milk than the World Health Organization safe level.  We literally poisoned the country with toxins we wouldn’t even use ourselves.  These days it’s the pharmaceutical companies who are the biggest pushers on the block.

In 1979 the Sandinista popular movement ousted Samoza through a violent coup, splintering the country into a bloody civil war that lasted twenty years.  The United Nations estimated material damage from the revolutionary war to be USD$480 million, leaving it destitute and impoverished.  The FSLN (Sandinistas) took over a nation plagued by malnutrition, disease, and pesticide contaminations. Lake Managua was considered dead because of decades of pesticide runoff, toxic chemical pollution from lakeside factories, and untreated sewage. Soil erosion and dust storms were also a problem in Nicaragua at the time due to deforestation.

The US had its hand in both camps at one point, but fell out of favor with the Sandinistas as they subscribed more and more to the Marxist ideology and became entrenched with the Soviet Union and Cuba.  Just like Cuba, the threat of a Soviet puppet nation in the Western Hemisphere within missile range of Washington did not sit well.  The US put its guns and money behind the Contras, a group of Samoza’s national guard who had fled to Honduras and were fighting to reclaim power.  In 1982, legislation was enacted in the U.S. to prohibit further direct aid to the Contras.  I guess Ronald Reagan didn’t get that memo, because shortly after his officials attempted to illegally supply the Contras out of the proceeds of arms sales to Iran, triggering the Iran-Contra Affair of 1986-87.  These days it’s the Iraqis that are shooting at us with our own guns and training, conveniently supplied by our own government.  

In the heat of the mid-afternoon we rolled into San Juan Del Sur, a sun-drenched town on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.  On the north side of the bay there is a cliff that rises from the sands crowned with a huge statue of San Juan, Saint John the Baptist, overlooking the city and all its souls.  San Juan was a historical figure who led the baptism movement to offer repentance for sinners.  He challenged sinful rulers and those in power, but because of his call for God’s justice his wife arranged for his enemies to have him killed, and his head was offered on a platter. 

 All the jobs, and therefore the people, are in Managua, the capitol city, but once a year for Christmas and New Years they flock to the beach.  The place was so packed that we couldn’t even find a hotel room.  Our only option, other than turning around and trying to head back to Costa Rica, was to rent a room at a private house on the main street out of town.  Our adoring house mother greeted us when the cab pulled up and chastised us for tipping the taxi driver $2, which she said was way too much.  Even a $1 tip was a huge deal, about like getting a $20 bill in the US. She showed us around her modest concrete structure with a tin roof strung with Christmas lights.  The walls were washed with aqua-colored paint, apparently the favorite color of Third-World beach towns.  I was amazed to see that all of the electric was archaic knob and tube that lay exposed in the open rafters and came down the walls like a cobweb of extension cords and uninsulated lines.  Our room was barely big enough to fit one hard double bed and an open bathroom in the same space, like it a prison cell.  Turning on the shower produced a trickle of cold water.  A plastic bag was placed over the shower head so the water would collect and fall with a little more pressure.  I assumed that it wouldn’t be safe to drink the water, and usually in Third World countries it was safer to even brush your teeth with bottled water (or beer).  She brought out a dirty pad that she laid on the floor for me to sleep on.  Little iguanas ran up and down the walls and ants marched right over my bedding on the floor.

    

We sat and talked to her in her living room while her husband sat shirtless on a wooden stool on the front porch with the dirty hound that guarded the place.  She pointed to the three portraits on the wall, paintings of her adult children.  With the glowing pride of a mother she explained that her son was a passport officer in Managua and her daughter a doctor who delivers babies.  She looked up at the middle painting and then her eyes fell to the floor.  She sighed, and told us that her other daughter had passed away from some sort of throat cancer.  Her husband got up and walked into the other room, leaving the dog to guard against the street. 

I soon realized that despite my discomfort they were very well off financially by Nicaraguan standards.  Nicaragua is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti, which is so poor that some say it’s cursed by the devil.  In Nicaragua 50% of the country lies below the poverty line, defined as making under $350 US per year, about 7,700 Cordobas.  Per year!  17% of Nicas actually make under $185 per year.  Most of the jobs barely provide enough wages for people to exist with basic food and whole extended families pack into humble structures.  Tens of thousands of families and children comb through the acres of putrid garbage dumps in the main city for food and scraps of something to sell every day just to survive.  Here in the resort town of San Juan del Sur they benefit from tourist dollars and the influx of rich Nicas during the holiday season.  Mothers swept their front porches and put the day’s garbage in buckets or boxes on the street.  They sent little children running to the local store, returning gleefully with a few eggs or a bag with a little bread.  A lot of people still get around on horseback, bicycle, or motorbike if you really have it good.  I saw several horse drawn carts plod up the streets with farmers selling fresh milk, fruit, or firewood off the back.  A minute later a Range Rover drove by with one of the elite Rich Nicas, looking like American frat boys in Hollister and Polo shirts, here to splash in the ocean and play at the local bars.  The ATM machines are all guarded by heavily armed security personnel, but usually there are no US dollars in there and no money at all until around 1pm.  The maximum they let you take out is $100 US dollars or 1,000 Cordobas, about $45.

I was amazed to see that they even have guards in bulletproof vests armed with shotguns accompanying the meat trucks.  Eating meat is a standard of comfort in Nicaragua that separates the poor from everyone else, and the meat trucks are so valuable that they need to have armed guards.  Along the street people opened up their makeshift stores right out of their houses, throwing up shelves in their garage for a little market or putting a couple thin plywood dividing walls up off their kitchen for an internet café with two old laptops.  Many of the houses and stores are painted with a white backdrop and a red sun below the words “Claro que Se,” which is the advertising slogan for the national cell phone company.  From what I can see they own 100% of the market, a reminder just as powerful as the wind turbines, that someone is making a lot of money here off these people.  And yet the economic conditions are getting worse in Nicaragua – 50-75% of the population lives on less than one dollar per day.  Illiteracy rates have gone from 17% in 1990 to 43% today, and as high as 60% in rural areas.  The worst affected are always children, who really lack proper education, nutrition, healthcare, and safe living conditions.

(see Part 2 of Contemplating Savagery, coming tomorrow)