newhavenleon.org Blog

I was recently standing in the courtyard of what used to be a jail run by the dictator Somoza’s National Guard troops, where political prisoners were tortured. I was standing there with Benito, who had been, at age 17, a political prisoner. He pointed out a giant mango tree in the courtyard, and described how the National Guard would hang prisoners from the tree in order to beat them, or actually hang them to death, or lower them with ropes into a well. Nicaragua’s National Guard had been established by the US Marines at the end of their decades-long occupation of the country in the early part of the 20th century, a history so recent to Nicaraguans that when the last Somoza fled the country in ’79 (with millions of public funds in his pockets), people referred to the event as the departure of “the last Marine.”

I can’t help but think of the US’s current adventure in occupation, and the young soldiers who recently testified at Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan – chilling and moving testimonies (completely ignored by mainstream media) by young people deeply and horribly affected by what they have seen and done. (http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier)

Benito picked up a couple of mangoes that had fallen from the tree, and began to eat one. I love mangoes, and the one he offered to me was perfect and juicy – but I gagged on my third bite and left the rest of it for the birds. My friend didn’t seem to mind that the fruit had been nurtured with the blood of his companions; in fact, he made a couple of macabre jokes as he was eating. Who can be squeamish with food prices as they are, anyway?

When visitors listen to folks in the rural community, they hear that the constant fires from the sugar can fields in close proximity are causing respiratory problems; that those community members with cattle have a hard time keeping them healthy because of chemical contamination from the cane fields; that the irrigation systems in the cane fields are lowering the water table for the entire watershed region; that the cane company is buying up the land surrounding them bit by bit, land that is supposed to be protected because it is indigenous. Then they learn that the company is able to do this in part because of a loan it received in 2006 from the World Bank (or rather, the International Finance Corporation, the arm of the WB that deals in private-sector loans), based in Washington, D.C., with money from CitiGroup. Then visitors also hear that the cane company is the only source of regular work in the area, that the cane company has repaired roads and given out free backpacks to the school kids. They hear the teacher at the school say “they are buying us, so that we remain silent, and it is working.” They hear from small-scale cattle farmer from the neighboring community who couldn’t remain silent and spent 45 days in jail last year for his trouble.

A student sports his new backpack — “educating throughout Nicaragua: ISA.” ISA is Ingenio San Antonio, the mill of the sugar cane company.

The Yale undergraduate delegation spent a night out in Goyena last week, between two days of working with community members on painting the new preschool. In the evening, some of the young people in the community took them on a walk to the river that runs through it. The line of people walking, Nicaraguans and Americans, grew long and scattered as their paces and conversations broke them into groups of threes and fours.

People were hot and tired after a day of painting and bilingual conversations in the dusty heat of the dry season… not too tired to take advantage of the shallow river, though; plastic flip-flops and sneakers alike were abandoned on the bank as the entire gang waded in. The Nicaraguans showed the Americans a small spring just upstream. Some people practiced handstands, others their water-squirting techniques.

It took me forever to get them all out of the water and on their way back to Nueva Vida for dinner — it grew dark, and we squelched back to dinner by the light of the half-moon. I looked back at the group, again stretched into a long lazy line of Nicaraguans and Americans, and couldn’t tell who was who. I could pick up pieces of a Spanish-English lesson going on from a couple folks, but mostly I just heard laughter.

Anabel, 19, part of the leadership of Aristides Sanches, one of the sub-communities of Goyena, at the river.
Walking back from the river, though the fields by the light of the moon.