piran café

I finally got around to scanning some slides I shot ten years ago when I visited Posoltega, Nicaragua, in April 1999, about six months after storms brought in by Hurricane Mitch devastated the area. The photo above is of a refugee camp set up in Posoltega, in the country’s northwest.

On October 30, 1998, torrential rains brought in by Hurricane Mitch filled the nearby Casitas volcano, forcing the slope, above right, to collapse. It produced a massive river of mud, at some points more than a kilometer wide, that swept through the area, ultimately killing upwards of 3000 people. It annihilated several villages and smaller settlements, and displacing several thousand. [A good Mitch summary on Wiki.]

Below are some scattered notes from the visit (some are still in a stash of stuff back in the US), but first some quick background:
Nicaragua dominated much of the foreign policy debate in the US during the Reagan years, so it was somewhat predictable that Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega’s tirade at the recent Americas summit brought the country back into the headlines. When he was voted out of power in 1990, media attention on the country more or less vanished until Ortega regained the presidency in close elections in 2006. By then, after setting up a mutual immunity deal with the right wing Arnoldo Alemán, who was president from 1997 to 2002, he had long since lost support from most senior Sandinista (FSLN) party partners, who left and formed other parties, taking with them countless party loyalists. During its time in power, the Alemán administration quickly became synonymous with corruption and graft. An opinion poll published during my 1999 visit found that more than half of Nicaraguans viewed him as more corrupt than the former dictator Anastasio Somoza whom the Sandinistas overthrew 20 years earlier, and for whom Alemán worked. (Alemán was charged, eventually convicted and received a 20-year sentence, which was later overturned by the Supreme Court in what most view as part of the deal struck with Ortega.)

So, the widespread tales of corruption I was told by people in Posoltega (and in Managua) didn’t come as a huge shock. At an aid distribution warehouse (pictured above), several of the workers expressed their frustration with the federal government which was doing next to nothing to help the municipality, at the time governed by a Sandinista mayor. Bill Clinton visited the area during a Central American tour in March 1999; just prior to his visit housing construction materials were trucked in, along with 2000 bags of cement, a ‘donation’ from the government. After he left, the materials were hauled away under cover of night.

I spoke at length with Posoltega’s mayor, Felicita Zeledon Rodriguez, who said that after the initial influx of aid in the weeks after the rains finally subsided, nothing had arrived in more than two months. Among the numerous problems she faced was that the aid assistance was being taxed by the Aleman administration. Food was running scarce, she said. “The first harvest is in August, and it’s only April.”

Above is Jose de la Cruz Poveda, 17 at the time, who was one of the refugee camp leaders.

In Posoltega, my translator Tanya and I met Alvaro Montalvan, a reporter for Canal 12, who was investigating reports that much of the international relief aid sent to the stricken areas was actually winding up being sold in various markets in Managua. He and his cameraman were heading to the Port of Corinto to check on the status of 28 cargo containers of relief aid which had arrived on March 19 from Los Angeles, and we joined him. We tracked down the port’s container operations chief, who eventually admitted that seven of those 40-foot containers couldn’t be accounted for. They simply vanished. And in the meantime, as the stocks in Posoltega’s relief center were dwindling rapidly, the containers above were sitting port side for more than a month.

More pics, 18 in all, are in a flickr set here.

I know that there are numerous NGOs working in the region, and that a growing number of travelers are visiting that part of Nicaragua. This is a long since forgotten footnote of the country’s history, and I’d love to hear from anyone who’s visited or worked there over the past decade who can share any updates. I’m extremely interested in learning how people in the area have fared.

When I first saw Nicaragua’s Cerro Negro, Central America’s youngest volcano more than a decade ago, the idea of sliding down its steep slope of rock, pebble and ash on a small board didn’t really cross my mind.

But that’s apparently all the rage these days, according to this piece in Sunday’s New York Times.

Bigfoot Hostel and Tours, based in the beautiful town of Leon, runs the operation four times per week, $28/person (includes National Park entry fee and a free mojito upon return).

Cerro Negro, originally uploaded by Cmagov. Check out his flickr photostream here.

According to this post by Jake Tapper of ABC News, just after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano yesterday, the book’s Amazon sales rank was 54,295.

Before I went to bed last night it hit No. 17; it’s now sitting pretty at No. 5.

Not a day passes that I don’t think back to at least one specific moment (usually it’s many) from one of several visits I made to Nicaragua, going back to 1990.  I was hoping to return this year, but it’s looking highly unlikely.

Here’s a short film, Day of Light (Dia de Luz) which

chronicles an epic celebration of life in La Chureca, the trash dump community of Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, captured by six filmmakers in March 2008 over the course of one day… from sunrise to sunset.

Just 47, singer and bandleader Andy Palacio, who spearheaded the revival of his native Garifuna music, passed away last week.

The Garifuna are descendents of west Africans bound for slavery who were shipwrecked in 1635 off the coast of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, and eventually settled the Caribe coasts of Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua. They were never slaves.

I had the pleasure of meeting several Garifuna at a cultural conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 1999. Their music was funky, soulful and wistful, unlike any other I’ve ever heard. Just like their language, wholly unique.

Here’s a video of Palacio’s 2007 international hit Wátina; AfroPop World Wide has a nice remembrance, along with an hour long audio profile of Palacio and the Garifuna. Essential listening if you’re in the least bit interested in the sounds from that fabulous corner of the world.

This photo was taken 21 years ago today, near the start of the March Against Fear and Intimidation, in Cumming, Georgia.

Cumming is the county seat of Forsyth County, about a 45 minute drive north of Atlanta. Since 1912, when night-riding pin-headed inbred Klan types led a month-long purge of the black population after an alleged rape of a white woman by three black men, Forsythe County was virtually all-white. Afterwards, according to several locals, Forsyth became known as “a county that warned black visitors not to ‘let the sun go down on your head.’”

The previous weekend, on January 17, 1987, a march was held in Cumming to commemorate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which was formalized one year earlier. About 75 marchers were greeted by a motley crew of local Klan types, a group estimated at about 200. About a half-mile into the two-mile march, they began throwing rocks and bottles at the marchers, and largely outnumbering the police on hand, managed to halt the demonstration. The incident received national attention, and over the course of the next few days, a follow-up was organized. On January 24, nearly 25,000 people converged on Cumming to finish the march.

Initially, it was an extremely tense afternoon. Some 3000 or so National Guard troops and state and local police separated the marchers from the 2000 or so counter-demonstrators, organized primarily by The Nationalist Movement, a Mississippi-based white supremacist outfit. There were rumors that a National Guard arms depot was broken into and looted. The caravan of buses that drove from Atlanta had a police escort, and there was surveillance from virtually every highway overpass. We wondered, if the shit were to hit the fan again, whose side would the National Guard be on? Many of them were, after all, local boys.

But the march went on without incident. Fearing violence, many locals boarded up their windows and left town for the day. Others watched from their porches, some holding signs of support. Marchers largely ignored the taunts and signs of the counter-demonstrators. I’ll never forget one, written in a child’s hand, which read, “Die Nigers Die”. (Yes, it really was misspelled).  In the numbers game, the crowd of 25,000 was said to be the largest to gather in a civil rights march in nearly two decades.

I was still in college then; I covered the march for a small local paper in Ohio, and it was the first story I was ever paid for. I don’t recall what I did with that $35, but the march itself is something I won’t ever forget. That racism was alive and well was hardly ‘news’ to me. But it was, to me, a wild-eyed 21-year-old suburban white boy, the bluntest illustration of how racism was always barely –just barely– lying beneath the surface of just about everything in the U.S.

I changed that day, and many others I was with also changed. I’d also like to think that attitudes in general have changed over the past two decades, but my jaundiced eyes and ears tell me differently.

Let’s begin again.

(To see larger versions of the photos, go here.)

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That’s how BBC correspondent Duncan Kennedy describes a new theme park in Mexico that attempts to recreate the experience of migrants trying to cross illegally into the U.S. [Video here.]

The experience, apparently all conducted after dark, comes complete with masked guides –the infamous coyotes that George Bush describes as “evil” people– and armed border patrols, and even a staged death or two. Admission is “about 10 GPB,” or 20 USD. Unless I missed it, the report doesn’t say exactly where this theme park is, besides a vague allusion to “Central Mexico”. So, you’re on your own.