TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - There's something fishy about these official international observers, and I feel like a lot of them exposed their true allegiances tonight at the Marriott in Tegucigalpa where the Supreme Elections Tribunal and all the hundreds of media here were set up to cover the elections returns.
In interviewing international observers tonight, I noticed a strange trend: not one of them had ever been an official elections observer before. They talked my ear off with all kinds of lofty rhetoric about how Honduras is speaking for itself now and what a great democratic fiesta this was and how Hugo Chavez lost his shot at taking over Honduras. Very few of them spoke in a way that was clearly non-partisan. After lots of questioning, many revealed they had allegiances to right-wing interests that had wanted the coup government to be recognized from the very beginning. This all made me start to question just how legitimate are the people hired to say the elections are legitimate? I wasn't the only one. And then this happened.
I was walking by a Chilean observer who got in a heated argument with a latina journalist I believe was working for Al Jazeera. She had also pointed out how inexperienced a lot of these observers appeared to be, and this guy and another observer got into it with her. Suddenly all the Honduran journalists and Honduran observers swarmed her and her argument with these two observers got drowned out by all these Honduran journalists and observers - IMPARTIAL PROFESSIONALS - shouting "Long live Honduran democracy!" and holding up signs for the cameras.
I got the Chilean guy's attention and he slipped out and I interviewed him. He acknowledged this was also the first time he had been an election observer, but he "has a law degree" and thinks he's capable of handling this job. OK, fair enough.
But while we were talking the crowd got even bigger around this poor woman and everyone around her was shouting "FUERA! FUERA!" (Out! Out!) and she actually had to flee the hotel because she was being verbally assaulted by these people, that's why I'm not sure who she was with.
Even the Chilean guy said "I disagree with her, but that over there's a bit much."
And some of those official Honduran observers chased her downstairs and out the door, and once she was gone they started whooping with fists raised towards the second floor balcony where we all were, and they all started chanting "Honduras! Honduras!"
It was just an unbelievable display of golpista mob rule. Dissenting opinions not welcome. The other international journalists were also shocked by the whole sight. Me and a French TV journalist were so incensed and talking about it that we started to draw the eyes of those same bastards who chased away a journalist who dared to ask a legitimate question about this cherry-picked group of international observers.
I'm still furious. Is this how we're supposed to know that democracy and transparency and freedom of dissent are still alive in Honduras? When the pro-coup media and pro-coup observers swarm people for asking questions and chase them all the way down the stairs and out the door?
Disgusting. Horrific. Any other words that come to mind I'll just shout off the balcony later once I get a much deserved drink.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Election morning
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - It's been a very slow day thus far, so I thought I'd take the time to make an update about my trip to the polls this morning.
I hitched a ride with Bloomberg reporter (and former Nica Times reporter) Eric Sabo this morning to several polling places not long after they opened around 7 a.m. Each had a handful of soldiers and police, but no overwhelming presence was visible anywhere in the streets. The city was dead this morning, as if it were any other Sunday. There's no sense that really anything is happening in Honduras unless you talk to some people in the modest crowds at the polls.
Those voting will tell you how important these elections are for democracy in Honduras. For some it's about their candidate, but for most it's about sending a message to the international community. There's no fear of violence, nor any real fear of fraud taking place. Without a doubt, there will be a lot of people who don't go to the polls, but it probably won't be significant enough for Zelaya's supporters to gain momentum on keeping the elections from being recognized. That's really their only hope at this point for having any say in Honduras' political future.
In other words, the only people who have anything at stake today in the elections themselves are the two main candidates for the presidency, Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos (from Zelaya and Micheletti's now very divided party) and National Party candidate Pepe Lobo, who barring a huge surprise should win today. Which one of them wins, in my opinion, really won't have more or less effect than the other on Honduras' future. It appears now there's more at stake on Dec. 2, when the congress votes on and likely rejects Zelaya's restitution.
At this point I really think the Resistance and the international community are out of options. The support of the United States was crucial in keeping the hope of Zelaya's restitution alive, and the Obama administration jumped the gun following the signing of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord in saying it would more than likely recognize the election results. Micheletti can pat himself on the back for signing that accord which gave the interim government ample loopholes to take advantage of. They were able to get Zelaya to agree to calling for a unity government that the interim government on its own got the right to decide and agreed to let the same congress that certified his ouster have the vote on his restitution without setting a deadline. That was crucial, because it let congress put the issue off until after the elections without drawing condemnation from the U.S., even though it was understood in theory that they would do it more promptly.
Polls close at 4 p.m. and I think the results may be known as early as 7 p.m., but that's probably optimistic. In the meantime I'll be here in the lobby of the Clarion Hotel with a few other journalists watching the local news and following the other blogs. Here's hoping Hondurans can find something to celebrate on an otherwise very uninspiring day in Central American politics.
I hitched a ride with Bloomberg reporter (and former Nica Times reporter) Eric Sabo this morning to several polling places not long after they opened around 7 a.m. Each had a handful of soldiers and police, but no overwhelming presence was visible anywhere in the streets. The city was dead this morning, as if it were any other Sunday. There's no sense that really anything is happening in Honduras unless you talk to some people in the modest crowds at the polls.
Those voting will tell you how important these elections are for democracy in Honduras. For some it's about their candidate, but for most it's about sending a message to the international community. There's no fear of violence, nor any real fear of fraud taking place. Without a doubt, there will be a lot of people who don't go to the polls, but it probably won't be significant enough for Zelaya's supporters to gain momentum on keeping the elections from being recognized. That's really their only hope at this point for having any say in Honduras' political future.
In other words, the only people who have anything at stake today in the elections themselves are the two main candidates for the presidency, Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos (from Zelaya and Micheletti's now very divided party) and National Party candidate Pepe Lobo, who barring a huge surprise should win today. Which one of them wins, in my opinion, really won't have more or less effect than the other on Honduras' future. It appears now there's more at stake on Dec. 2, when the congress votes on and likely rejects Zelaya's restitution.
At this point I really think the Resistance and the international community are out of options. The support of the United States was crucial in keeping the hope of Zelaya's restitution alive, and the Obama administration jumped the gun following the signing of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord in saying it would more than likely recognize the election results. Micheletti can pat himself on the back for signing that accord which gave the interim government ample loopholes to take advantage of. They were able to get Zelaya to agree to calling for a unity government that the interim government on its own got the right to decide and agreed to let the same congress that certified his ouster have the vote on his restitution without setting a deadline. That was crucial, because it let congress put the issue off until after the elections without drawing condemnation from the U.S., even though it was understood in theory that they would do it more promptly.
Polls close at 4 p.m. and I think the results may be known as early as 7 p.m., but that's probably optimistic. In the meantime I'll be here in the lobby of the Clarion Hotel with a few other journalists watching the local news and following the other blogs. Here's hoping Hondurans can find something to celebrate on an otherwise very uninspiring day in Central American politics.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Citizen Coup
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – My mornings here always start with a walk through downtown to a local café or restaurant where I get breakfast. I buy two or three newspapers on the way and spend most of the morning reading them so I have a thorough grasp of the local take on everything affecting the country.
After a few days of repeating this process, I realized how hard the media down here make it for anyone to have a firm grasp of the situation. Reading these newspapers is painful. They’re wishy washy, they’re biased and there’s no reason to believe a single one of them is presenting the truth, since they rarely use attribution anyway.
The two big papers that support the coup, El Heraldo and La Tribuna, each about 60 pages usually, both dedicate about 20 pages a day to election coverage. With all that copy, you’d expect the average reader to take away a firm interpretation of the previous day’s events, the issues at hand, and how feasible the candidates’ plans for accomplishing their goals would be.
Not in Honduras. What these papers want is for people to go vote, to make a point to the international community and to give yet another victory to the oligarchy that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya (who now resides in the Brazilian Embassy 10 blocks away from my hotel) and pays them to openly refer to his supporters as terrorists. In fact, relatively few of these articles focus on health, education, poverty, crime or any other part of the myriad of domestic issues facing Honduras.
As we get closer to Sunday’s elections, they way their coverage leans becomes more obvious. They preach about threats of a Zelayista boycott from unknown sources, a boycott they present as being well-organized and violent, intent on disrupting the vote in anyway possible to, in La Tribuna and El Heraldo’s words, “prevent our democratic celebration.”
And why would they say that, I wonder, when yesterday in an interview I did with Juan Barahona, the leader of the entire Resistance Front Against the Coup, he said leaders are specifically telling all Zelaya supporters to not vote and stay at home?
“We’ve told people to stay at home and not to vote,” Barahona said. “We won’t be protesting on election day.”
The mainstream media have not once reported that this is what the Resistance is telling people. Instead they’re trying to justify the army calling up 5,000 reservists for election week by fabricating a plot by the Resistance to turn out in large numbers to keep people from voting. The military could use support in the press, considering Andres Pavon, director of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras, recently came out saying the military is planning a “massacre” against Zelaya’s supporters. Pavon was also the first to predict back in the summer that a coup was being plotted against Zelaya.
On Wednesday, La Tribuna ran a full-page story glorifying Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos – who resigned as Zelaya’s vice president to run for the presidency – for walking through a Tegucigalpa neighborhood and ripping down posters that called on people not to vote Nov. 29. The posters said “No to the elections! Yes to a constitutional assembly,” the issue Zelaya was ousted from power over, “In the face of this electoral farce, we promise not to vote!” But the headline read “Elvin destroys propaganda that incites apprehension and fear.”
What? In America, the headline would have been “Cute publicity stunt, Elvin.” And even though voting is not mandatory in Honduras, today La Tribuna reported that government prosecutors are trying to find the people who made the boycott posters and press charges of “electoral misconduct” against them.
Last time I thought about it, voting wasn’t as important to democracy as simply doing what you think is best for the common good and not persecuting people who see differently from you. Democracy is defined in Honduras by those who support the coup as more a policy of “doing what our masters tell us.” And to them there’s nothing more undemocratic than letting a giant segment of the population make a peaceful political statement on the day of elections by refusing to vote for candidates they don’t believe in.
Over the last 10 years voter abstention has gone from 25 percent (in 1997) to 44 percent (in 2005), even before the country’s leaders oversaw the region’s biggest political crisis in decades. With most of the international community still undecided on whether to recognize the election results, the pro-coup media know very well that a lot of political leverage is at stake with voter turnout. And if voter turnout is lower than ever, who wants to place bets that the Zelayistas get blamed for scaring people away? The possibility that people think the two main candidates are opportunistic snakes in the grass (which they are) or that people expected the results to be fraudulent won’t even get mentioned.
There is potential for a terrorist attack come election day. One could even argue that Barahona knows it and that’s why he’s telling his people to stay away from the polls. There have been reported attacks with small explosives against various political parties’ offices around the country, but they’ve caused very little damage or gone off when no one was at the building. Also interesting is that not one of these stories has been accompanied by a photo of the reported damage. Every story about these incidents links them to the Resistance without ever once getting comment from a Resistance leader, including stories on the arrests of four men believed to be planning an attack against interim President Roberto Micheletti in El Progreso this week.
There’s a lot of uncertainty here, and the Honduran media have only fuelled it. I expect there will be some arrests on election day, but ultimately enough people will come out to vote, the losers will concede defeat, the Resistance will be painted as weaker than ever for not showing up (and all it took was the threat of a massacre, wimps), and eventually the Honduran elections will be recognized worldwide. On Dec. 2 the congress will probably vote against returning Zelaya to power, he’ll probably be tried for various crimes, the coup leaders will get away Scott free, and a dangerous precedent will be set for future left-leaning leaders. No matter who is elected, the true driving force of democracy here will remain in the hands of the privileged few and they’ll spend the rest of their lives patting themselves on the back for how they handled that one close call.
After a few days of repeating this process, I realized how hard the media down here make it for anyone to have a firm grasp of the situation. Reading these newspapers is painful. They’re wishy washy, they’re biased and there’s no reason to believe a single one of them is presenting the truth, since they rarely use attribution anyway.
The two big papers that support the coup, El Heraldo and La Tribuna, each about 60 pages usually, both dedicate about 20 pages a day to election coverage. With all that copy, you’d expect the average reader to take away a firm interpretation of the previous day’s events, the issues at hand, and how feasible the candidates’ plans for accomplishing their goals would be.
Not in Honduras. What these papers want is for people to go vote, to make a point to the international community and to give yet another victory to the oligarchy that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya (who now resides in the Brazilian Embassy 10 blocks away from my hotel) and pays them to openly refer to his supporters as terrorists. In fact, relatively few of these articles focus on health, education, poverty, crime or any other part of the myriad of domestic issues facing Honduras.
As we get closer to Sunday’s elections, they way their coverage leans becomes more obvious. They preach about threats of a Zelayista boycott from unknown sources, a boycott they present as being well-organized and violent, intent on disrupting the vote in anyway possible to, in La Tribuna and El Heraldo’s words, “prevent our democratic celebration.”
And why would they say that, I wonder, when yesterday in an interview I did with Juan Barahona, the leader of the entire Resistance Front Against the Coup, he said leaders are specifically telling all Zelaya supporters to not vote and stay at home?
“We’ve told people to stay at home and not to vote,” Barahona said. “We won’t be protesting on election day.”
The mainstream media have not once reported that this is what the Resistance is telling people. Instead they’re trying to justify the army calling up 5,000 reservists for election week by fabricating a plot by the Resistance to turn out in large numbers to keep people from voting. The military could use support in the press, considering Andres Pavon, director of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras, recently came out saying the military is planning a “massacre” against Zelaya’s supporters. Pavon was also the first to predict back in the summer that a coup was being plotted against Zelaya.
On Wednesday, La Tribuna ran a full-page story glorifying Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos – who resigned as Zelaya’s vice president to run for the presidency – for walking through a Tegucigalpa neighborhood and ripping down posters that called on people not to vote Nov. 29. The posters said “No to the elections! Yes to a constitutional assembly,” the issue Zelaya was ousted from power over, “In the face of this electoral farce, we promise not to vote!” But the headline read “Elvin destroys propaganda that incites apprehension and fear.”
What? In America, the headline would have been “Cute publicity stunt, Elvin.” And even though voting is not mandatory in Honduras, today La Tribuna reported that government prosecutors are trying to find the people who made the boycott posters and press charges of “electoral misconduct” against them.
Last time I thought about it, voting wasn’t as important to democracy as simply doing what you think is best for the common good and not persecuting people who see differently from you. Democracy is defined in Honduras by those who support the coup as more a policy of “doing what our masters tell us.” And to them there’s nothing more undemocratic than letting a giant segment of the population make a peaceful political statement on the day of elections by refusing to vote for candidates they don’t believe in.
Over the last 10 years voter abstention has gone from 25 percent (in 1997) to 44 percent (in 2005), even before the country’s leaders oversaw the region’s biggest political crisis in decades. With most of the international community still undecided on whether to recognize the election results, the pro-coup media know very well that a lot of political leverage is at stake with voter turnout. And if voter turnout is lower than ever, who wants to place bets that the Zelayistas get blamed for scaring people away? The possibility that people think the two main candidates are opportunistic snakes in the grass (which they are) or that people expected the results to be fraudulent won’t even get mentioned.
There is potential for a terrorist attack come election day. One could even argue that Barahona knows it and that’s why he’s telling his people to stay away from the polls. There have been reported attacks with small explosives against various political parties’ offices around the country, but they’ve caused very little damage or gone off when no one was at the building. Also interesting is that not one of these stories has been accompanied by a photo of the reported damage. Every story about these incidents links them to the Resistance without ever once getting comment from a Resistance leader, including stories on the arrests of four men believed to be planning an attack against interim President Roberto Micheletti in El Progreso this week.
There’s a lot of uncertainty here, and the Honduran media have only fuelled it. I expect there will be some arrests on election day, but ultimately enough people will come out to vote, the losers will concede defeat, the Resistance will be painted as weaker than ever for not showing up (and all it took was the threat of a massacre, wimps), and eventually the Honduran elections will be recognized worldwide. On Dec. 2 the congress will probably vote against returning Zelaya to power, he’ll probably be tried for various crimes, the coup leaders will get away Scott free, and a dangerous precedent will be set for future left-leaning leaders. No matter who is elected, the true driving force of democracy here will remain in the hands of the privileged few and they’ll spend the rest of their lives patting themselves on the back for how they handled that one close call.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Amid boycott, Honduras prepares for vote
Bamaragua note: This is a shortened version of a story that will run in the Nov. 27 edition of The Nica Times
By Mike Faulk
Nica Times Staff
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – There's more on the line than just the presidency when Hondurans go to the voting polls this weekend.
On Nov. 29, five presidential candidates are set to square off in an election that is expected to boil down to two candidates, the conservative National Party's Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, who has a commanding 16 percent lead in the polls, and center-left Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos, who severed as vice-president under deposed President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya.
All of the candidates are running on platforms that call for improvements to education, health and safety in Honduras.
But the real issue heading into this weekend's elections is the future of Honduras' democracy, and whether or not the elections will be able to restore any credibility or legitimacy to the country's embattled political system.
Since the June 28 coup against Zelaya, Honduras has been entangled in Central America's worst political crisis in decades.
Many countries in the region have said they won't recognize the elections unless Zelaya is restored to the presidency before Sunday. Congress announced last week it will vote on the ousted president's temporary restitution on Dec. 2 – a move Zelaya rejects as a violation of the agreement he signed earlier this month with de facto President Roberto Micheletti.
Still, many Hondurans are hoping a strong turnout at the polls will help bring constitutional order back to their country, while winning back recognition and cooperation from the international community.
A Cid-Gallup poll published last month showed that 73 percent of Hondurans hope the elections will be the solution to the five-month-old political crisis.
But as election day approaches, that now looks like tall order, according to Roberto Reyes, spokesman for the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. Voter turnout has declined over the last decade, with just 56 percent of the country's 4 million eligible voters casting ballots in the 2005 elections, Reyes said.
Sunday's voter turnout could be much less, as Zelaya's supporters call for a national boycott of the elections.
Reyes said the presidential election has turned into a fight for the hearts and minds of Hondurans – Micheletti supporters insist the elections will prove the democratic system still works in their country, while Zelaya's supports insist the whole thing is a sham.
Ever since the coup, Reyes said, there's been an ideological war waged in the streets.
“On the day of elections, we'll see who wins the battle,” the electoral spokesman said.
By Mike Faulk
Nica Times Staff
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – There's more on the line than just the presidency when Hondurans go to the voting polls this weekend.
On Nov. 29, five presidential candidates are set to square off in an election that is expected to boil down to two candidates, the conservative National Party's Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, who has a commanding 16 percent lead in the polls, and center-left Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos, who severed as vice-president under deposed President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya.
All of the candidates are running on platforms that call for improvements to education, health and safety in Honduras.
But the real issue heading into this weekend's elections is the future of Honduras' democracy, and whether or not the elections will be able to restore any credibility or legitimacy to the country's embattled political system.
Since the June 28 coup against Zelaya, Honduras has been entangled in Central America's worst political crisis in decades.
Many countries in the region have said they won't recognize the elections unless Zelaya is restored to the presidency before Sunday. Congress announced last week it will vote on the ousted president's temporary restitution on Dec. 2 – a move Zelaya rejects as a violation of the agreement he signed earlier this month with de facto President Roberto Micheletti.
Still, many Hondurans are hoping a strong turnout at the polls will help bring constitutional order back to their country, while winning back recognition and cooperation from the international community.
A Cid-Gallup poll published last month showed that 73 percent of Hondurans hope the elections will be the solution to the five-month-old political crisis.
But as election day approaches, that now looks like tall order, according to Roberto Reyes, spokesman for the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. Voter turnout has declined over the last decade, with just 56 percent of the country's 4 million eligible voters casting ballots in the 2005 elections, Reyes said.
Sunday's voter turnout could be much less, as Zelaya's supporters call for a national boycott of the elections.
Reyes said the presidential election has turned into a fight for the hearts and minds of Hondurans – Micheletti supporters insist the elections will prove the democratic system still works in their country, while Zelaya's supports insist the whole thing is a sham.
Ever since the coup, Reyes said, there's been an ideological war waged in the streets.
“On the day of elections, we'll see who wins the battle,” the electoral spokesman said.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The King Quality Nine
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - I got here around 1 a.m. last night after a calamitous bus ride from Granada.
I rode with King Quality, which on a sign in Spanish says it provides "the royal elegance of the ground plane." Whatever. It was an hour late picking me up. Nine of us were supposed to meet a connecting bus once we crossed the border into Honduras that would take us to Tegucigalpa, but said bus wasn't at the rendezvous point when we arrived. After half an hour of chewing out the fine King Quality staff, who wanted to leave us there to find and pay for some other means of getting to Tegucigalpa at 10 pm, they did just that. Nine of us stuck in the middle of nowhere, about two hours from Tegucigalpa, stuck in the parking lot of the Hotel Oassis. Guess who the only gringo was?
We were there for an hour and a half, maybe two, until finally some of the guys talked this man with a big truck into hauling all of us up through the mountains. Two other guys decided they'd just rent a car. I threw the most into the pot for us to get out of there, so they insisted I take a seat inside, where there was room for three passengers. The other four, all of whom fortunately had jackets, huddled down in our luggage in the back and then we were off.
I got to my hotel around 1 am, but woke up in a pretty good mood this morning. Traveling around always puts me in a good mood, especially since the climate is much more temperate in Tegucigalpa compared to Granada's inferno.
If anything has ever taught me that time is money, it's been working freelance. With that said, look at the time, adios.
I rode with King Quality, which on a sign in Spanish says it provides "the royal elegance of the ground plane." Whatever. It was an hour late picking me up. Nine of us were supposed to meet a connecting bus once we crossed the border into Honduras that would take us to Tegucigalpa, but said bus wasn't at the rendezvous point when we arrived. After half an hour of chewing out the fine King Quality staff, who wanted to leave us there to find and pay for some other means of getting to Tegucigalpa at 10 pm, they did just that. Nine of us stuck in the middle of nowhere, about two hours from Tegucigalpa, stuck in the parking lot of the Hotel Oassis. Guess who the only gringo was?
We were there for an hour and a half, maybe two, until finally some of the guys talked this man with a big truck into hauling all of us up through the mountains. Two other guys decided they'd just rent a car. I threw the most into the pot for us to get out of there, so they insisted I take a seat inside, where there was room for three passengers. The other four, all of whom fortunately had jackets, huddled down in our luggage in the back and then we were off.
I got to my hotel around 1 am, but woke up in a pretty good mood this morning. Traveling around always puts me in a good mood, especially since the climate is much more temperate in Tegucigalpa compared to Granada's inferno.
If anything has ever taught me that time is money, it's been working freelance. With that said, look at the time, adios.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Back to Honduras
Hey everybody, I've been given the opportunity to do more freelance and head back to Tegucigalpa for a few weeks to cover the elections in Honduras. It should be a good experience for me as a reporter and just as an outsider getting to watch this crucial moment in that country's history unfold. It also means I'm headed back into an unending chorus of car horns and smog, but I think Tegucigalpa had actually grown on me by the time it was all said and done in October. Hotel Granada, Room 5, here I come again.
My bus leaves at 10:30 am Tuesday morning, and by all estimates it should take me 10 hours to get to Tegucigalpa (which means "Silver Hill" in the former native tongue.)
Adventure!
My bus leaves at 10:30 am Tuesday morning, and by all estimates it should take me 10 hours to get to Tegucigalpa (which means "Silver Hill" in the former native tongue.)
Adventure!
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Fridays with Vindell
Bamaragua note: I have never read the book that I just referenced in the title of this blog entry. I have considered it though.
My conversation teacher Karen has been bringing in a radio journalist friend named Pedro Vindell to speak with me the last two Fridays. Pedro is in his 60s, can speak at a rate that's almost painful for a non-Nicaraguan to try and keep up with, and unlike most journalists wears his colors on his sleeve. When I met him his small eyes greeted me from under the shade of a baseball cap bearing the image of Che Guevara, and he wore a T-shirt with the image of Sandino, the symbolic torch of a revolution that would be waged under his name 40 years after his death. Vindell was a student of Marxism well before the Sandinista revolution, he even went to Russia to study it, and took up arms alongside the Sandinistas early in the 1970s. He was captured by the Somoza dictatorship on two occasions and faced months of torture in prisons, including the ole electrodes to the genitals trick, before he was sent into house arrest. Some fellow revolutionaries helped him sneak out though, and soon enough he was back in the mountains near Esteli fighting against the dictatorship. When the war was over he became a founding member of El Nuevo Diario, a left-leaning national newspaper that still competes with the equally popular and more right-leaning La Prensa. He also worked for the official Sandinista newspaper La Barricada, which Salman Rushdie once fairly described as "the worst newspaper I've ever read."
Before I continue I think I should lay down my take on the revolution here, which ended July 19, 1979 when Somoza fled, taking all the reserves in the Central Bank with him, and the Sandinistas marched into Managua to take the capital without a fight. It led to years of counter-revolution by guerrillas openly funded by the U.S. government and former President Ronald Reagan, who was hands down the most malicious president Latin America as a whole ever had to deal with. Of all the horrible acts committed by the dictators this region has suffered through, a number of them propped up by the U.S. government, the things Ronald Reagan personally saw done to Latin America throughout the 1980s ranks right up there with the slimiest of them all. Cheers to the great Republican hero.
The Contras never seemed to have much direction. Their philosophy was sort of a "Hey let's burn ferries and power plants, let's put land mines in the middle of ports and highways, specifically target and terrorize rural communities, and if they fear us enough, fuck, maybe we could make ourselves president!" They were trained in Honduras, and funded by the U.S. They had such little support around Nicaragua that the Sandinista government adopted a policy of distributing AK-47s to families throughout the country no matter what their political persuasion was. That's how confident they were in their widespread support, and the policy paid off. But the war destroyed Nicaragua's economy, left thousands more dead, and created a tired populace that knew if it voted the Sandinistas out and elected a candidate openly backed by the U.S., there would finally be peace, and that's just what happened in 1990. The Sandinistas were never what they were painted to be by the media or the politicians in the U.S. They weren't radical communists, they were socialists, and even that's a loose usage of the term. But there was too much hysteria over the idea of "another Cuba" after a tired and abused people overthrew a very real dictator, and Henry Kissinger and Reagan and Bush and the CIA and the whole gang of cowboys saw to it that Nicaragua would "do as we say," which is what the U.S. ambassador literally told some top Nicaraguan officials one time.
The newest twist, and tragedy, in Nicaragua's story is that Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista revolutionary leader re-elected president after almost 20 years of Liberal Party rule, is using more and more underhanded tactics to preserve his power. He had a Sandinista supreme court remove the ban on consecutive re-elections, used fraud to steal numerous municipal elections for this party in 2008, and has a paid army of small-time thugs who break opposition protests. Anyone who travels the highways in Nicaragua also notices a strange trend, that every light post or bridge is colored red and black, the colors of the Sandinistas. There's less and less space between the interests of one party and the power of a "unified" government. The revolution that rooted out the beast is itself growing claws and salivating.
This has caused some important revolutionary leaders to part ways with Ortega and found a separate Sandinista party, but not Vindell. He speaks of Ortega with the same look of sugary sweet admiration a child may have for his mother. But at least he doesn't completely sugarcoat his reaction to the administration's slow move towards dictatorship. Those small-time Sandinista thugs who attacked me in front of the U.S. embassy would say Ortega not facing term limits means "the people can now decide who they think is best to run the country." Vindell's reaction to the decision, when I asked him about it, was, "I love it. It means we'll be in power for at least 40 more years."
I try to talk to him more about journalism because I can tell he gets uncomfortable after a while of questioning him on how he could support the government's outlandish acts, but I can't help it. I've been mesmerized by the political situation here ever since I was stared down by that mob of thugs masquerading as genuine protesters, the fire of immunity from the Sandinista police forces flickering in their eyes in front of this lone gringo, whose ambassador dared say that he was "troubled" by the supreme court's decision on reelections. I could almost hear the embers bursting. Those people didn't have the first clue, Vindell is well-educated on what's happening, and it takes a very strange if not equally dangerous attribute to go along happily with what you know is a subversion of everything your revolution once stood for. Or maybe winning the war on paper took enough of his soul and body to not complain anymore afterwards.
I stepped out onto the second floor balcony of my Spanish school last Friday to take a break after we'd wrapped up our talk. A breeze picked up and my sweaty forehead thanked it. Then I saw Vindell pass by under me on his dusty bike, peddling slowly, waving at an old friend or two also strolling gently by the horses and carriages in Granada's central park. He looked completely at peace, more with the air of a cow chewing grass in the shade than a man in denial that his country is slowly unraveling once again.
My conversation teacher Karen has been bringing in a radio journalist friend named Pedro Vindell to speak with me the last two Fridays. Pedro is in his 60s, can speak at a rate that's almost painful for a non-Nicaraguan to try and keep up with, and unlike most journalists wears his colors on his sleeve. When I met him his small eyes greeted me from under the shade of a baseball cap bearing the image of Che Guevara, and he wore a T-shirt with the image of Sandino, the symbolic torch of a revolution that would be waged under his name 40 years after his death. Vindell was a student of Marxism well before the Sandinista revolution, he even went to Russia to study it, and took up arms alongside the Sandinistas early in the 1970s. He was captured by the Somoza dictatorship on two occasions and faced months of torture in prisons, including the ole electrodes to the genitals trick, before he was sent into house arrest. Some fellow revolutionaries helped him sneak out though, and soon enough he was back in the mountains near Esteli fighting against the dictatorship. When the war was over he became a founding member of El Nuevo Diario, a left-leaning national newspaper that still competes with the equally popular and more right-leaning La Prensa. He also worked for the official Sandinista newspaper La Barricada, which Salman Rushdie once fairly described as "the worst newspaper I've ever read."
Before I continue I think I should lay down my take on the revolution here, which ended July 19, 1979 when Somoza fled, taking all the reserves in the Central Bank with him, and the Sandinistas marched into Managua to take the capital without a fight. It led to years of counter-revolution by guerrillas openly funded by the U.S. government and former President Ronald Reagan, who was hands down the most malicious president Latin America as a whole ever had to deal with. Of all the horrible acts committed by the dictators this region has suffered through, a number of them propped up by the U.S. government, the things Ronald Reagan personally saw done to Latin America throughout the 1980s ranks right up there with the slimiest of them all. Cheers to the great Republican hero.
The Contras never seemed to have much direction. Their philosophy was sort of a "Hey let's burn ferries and power plants, let's put land mines in the middle of ports and highways, specifically target and terrorize rural communities, and if they fear us enough, fuck, maybe we could make ourselves president!" They were trained in Honduras, and funded by the U.S. They had such little support around Nicaragua that the Sandinista government adopted a policy of distributing AK-47s to families throughout the country no matter what their political persuasion was. That's how confident they were in their widespread support, and the policy paid off. But the war destroyed Nicaragua's economy, left thousands more dead, and created a tired populace that knew if it voted the Sandinistas out and elected a candidate openly backed by the U.S., there would finally be peace, and that's just what happened in 1990. The Sandinistas were never what they were painted to be by the media or the politicians in the U.S. They weren't radical communists, they were socialists, and even that's a loose usage of the term. But there was too much hysteria over the idea of "another Cuba" after a tired and abused people overthrew a very real dictator, and Henry Kissinger and Reagan and Bush and the CIA and the whole gang of cowboys saw to it that Nicaragua would "do as we say," which is what the U.S. ambassador literally told some top Nicaraguan officials one time.
The newest twist, and tragedy, in Nicaragua's story is that Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista revolutionary leader re-elected president after almost 20 years of Liberal Party rule, is using more and more underhanded tactics to preserve his power. He had a Sandinista supreme court remove the ban on consecutive re-elections, used fraud to steal numerous municipal elections for this party in 2008, and has a paid army of small-time thugs who break opposition protests. Anyone who travels the highways in Nicaragua also notices a strange trend, that every light post or bridge is colored red and black, the colors of the Sandinistas. There's less and less space between the interests of one party and the power of a "unified" government. The revolution that rooted out the beast is itself growing claws and salivating.
This has caused some important revolutionary leaders to part ways with Ortega and found a separate Sandinista party, but not Vindell. He speaks of Ortega with the same look of sugary sweet admiration a child may have for his mother. But at least he doesn't completely sugarcoat his reaction to the administration's slow move towards dictatorship. Those small-time Sandinista thugs who attacked me in front of the U.S. embassy would say Ortega not facing term limits means "the people can now decide who they think is best to run the country." Vindell's reaction to the decision, when I asked him about it, was, "I love it. It means we'll be in power for at least 40 more years."
I try to talk to him more about journalism because I can tell he gets uncomfortable after a while of questioning him on how he could support the government's outlandish acts, but I can't help it. I've been mesmerized by the political situation here ever since I was stared down by that mob of thugs masquerading as genuine protesters, the fire of immunity from the Sandinista police forces flickering in their eyes in front of this lone gringo, whose ambassador dared say that he was "troubled" by the supreme court's decision on reelections. I could almost hear the embers bursting. Those people didn't have the first clue, Vindell is well-educated on what's happening, and it takes a very strange if not equally dangerous attribute to go along happily with what you know is a subversion of everything your revolution once stood for. Or maybe winning the war on paper took enough of his soul and body to not complain anymore afterwards.
I stepped out onto the second floor balcony of my Spanish school last Friday to take a break after we'd wrapped up our talk. A breeze picked up and my sweaty forehead thanked it. Then I saw Vindell pass by under me on his dusty bike, peddling slowly, waving at an old friend or two also strolling gently by the horses and carriages in Granada's central park. He looked completely at peace, more with the air of a cow chewing grass in the shade than a man in denial that his country is slowly unraveling once again.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Pierre Sendero: Waltzing
The moon shone through the clouds like a dying candle dripping wax over Granada's potholed streets. Beneath it a song of ex-patriots, international students, others with a dime to waste wailed on and on about their respective consequences in a drunken tune the privileged couldn't hear. And in the shadows stood the whores and the crackheads providing backup, snapping their fingers, blowing kisses, whispering, hissing. An audience of colonial architecture wiped the tears and the sweat from its face in helpless silence. And there I was, Pierre Sendero, out of cigarettes, out of patience, out of words, wishing something would end this charade and put all of us out of our misery.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Gettin' busy
Since I've "reached my destination," whatever that means, I'm going to drop the datelines on these blog entries unless I'm making a post from outside Granada.
This post brought to you by exhaustion, frustration and anxiety. The breakfast of champions.
I feel like I've done a lot of everything and a lot of nothing since I've arrived here. I'm behind on my blog writing, my journal writing, my journalistic writing and my PR writing.
PR writing?
Yes. I signed up to volunteer with a local volunteering organization named La Esperanza. Originally I was interested in helping teach English in local schools, but it's in the middle of the semester right now and when I told them I'm a journalist they immediately wanted to use my experience with writing to help publicize them outside of Nicaragua.* So I've gone to a few volunteer meetings and met some very nice people in the last week, but so far I'm still not sure what I'm going to produce for them and how I'll distribute it. I'm excited about it though. It's my first venture into PR writing and maybe if I like it and produce something good I could try to do it for a bigger organization, as long as it doesn't involve working alongside one single PR hack I've ever interviewed in my life ever. There's a few exceptions to that, but I don't have time for shout-outs.
I'm working on a story right now about how cuts to the national budget are making public funding for higher education almost non-existent, prompting students to take to the streets for protests that would make members of Students for a Democratic Society wet their pants. Burning tires, flaming effigies and home-made mortars are a theme in the streets of Managua whenever this time of the year comes around. These kids mean business. My biggest hurdle with this story is getting a single government official on the phone pertinent to this situation to talk to me and give me numbers about this year's budget cuts. You have to call people again and again and again in Nicaragua to get any kind of response. You even have to ask why someone isn't in the office, because a lot of times a secretary will say "So and so isn't here, but give me your number and he'll call you right back" without mentioning that he's not in the office because he's actually out of the country for a month. When you do get someone on the phone, it's like hearing a broken record. Everybody, even the students, have a party line on this issue. If your question reaches beyond what they've memorized, they'll just as soon repeat what they already told you and act like it's good enough for at least 1/2 a point on the quiz I'm giving them.
So who knows when I'll finish thatfucking thing. It's making me more and more testy as my deadline approaches. That and the fact I'm having trouble understanding Nicaraguans more than any other nationality I've met on this trip. They speak fast, there's a lot of slang and they drop a lot of letters randomly in their speech. It can be especially complicated when I'm talking to someone on the phone. For that reason I've signed up for two hours a day of one on one conversation classes here in Granada. My first class was today, we had a pleasant conversation about Granada and I understood my teacher perfectly, but that's because she spoke like a normal person. I told her I need these conversations to go faster and with a lot more street dialect thrown in. We'll see how tomorrow goes. I'll take these classes for at least a week and if I still haven't improved my Nicaraguan Spanish maybe I'll just pay a crackhead on the street to ramble at me for two hours a day (though they already do that for free.) That would do the trick.
So like I said, I'm finding ways to keep myself busy and yet somehow not getting a whole lot done so far. Part of it also is that Granada is just a very calm and attractive (and often scorching hot) place to waste the days away in a hammock under a coconut tree with the fan blowing on you. I haven't had any desire to get out of the city yet, though I do at least want to visit the volcanic island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua as well as San Juan del Sur on the Pacific and the more colonial Leon to the north. A trip to Costa Rica to see my old Tico Times editora Meg Yamamoto and amiga superior Gaby Diaz might also be necessary (OK, so I do have time for shout-outs.)
Mitad y mitad es suficiente.
*The asterisk was to let you fine readers know that telling people you're a journalist is a lot like telling someone you're a lawyer or a tax collector. It's something you avoid mentioning at all costs for a variety of reasons.
This post brought to you by exhaustion, frustration and anxiety. The breakfast of champions.
I feel like I've done a lot of everything and a lot of nothing since I've arrived here. I'm behind on my blog writing, my journal writing, my journalistic writing and my PR writing.
PR writing?
Yes. I signed up to volunteer with a local volunteering organization named La Esperanza. Originally I was interested in helping teach English in local schools, but it's in the middle of the semester right now and when I told them I'm a journalist they immediately wanted to use my experience with writing to help publicize them outside of Nicaragua.* So I've gone to a few volunteer meetings and met some very nice people in the last week, but so far I'm still not sure what I'm going to produce for them and how I'll distribute it. I'm excited about it though. It's my first venture into PR writing and maybe if I like it and produce something good I could try to do it for a bigger organization, as long as it doesn't involve working alongside one single PR hack I've ever interviewed in my life ever. There's a few exceptions to that, but I don't have time for shout-outs.
I'm working on a story right now about how cuts to the national budget are making public funding for higher education almost non-existent, prompting students to take to the streets for protests that would make members of Students for a Democratic Society wet their pants. Burning tires, flaming effigies and home-made mortars are a theme in the streets of Managua whenever this time of the year comes around. These kids mean business. My biggest hurdle with this story is getting a single government official on the phone pertinent to this situation to talk to me and give me numbers about this year's budget cuts. You have to call people again and again and again in Nicaragua to get any kind of response. You even have to ask why someone isn't in the office, because a lot of times a secretary will say "So and so isn't here, but give me your number and he'll call you right back" without mentioning that he's not in the office because he's actually out of the country for a month. When you do get someone on the phone, it's like hearing a broken record. Everybody, even the students, have a party line on this issue. If your question reaches beyond what they've memorized, they'll just as soon repeat what they already told you and act like it's good enough for at least 1/2 a point on the quiz I'm giving them.
So who knows when I'll finish that
So like I said, I'm finding ways to keep myself busy and yet somehow not getting a whole lot done so far. Part of it also is that Granada is just a very calm and attractive (and often scorching hot) place to waste the days away in a hammock under a coconut tree with the fan blowing on you. I haven't had any desire to get out of the city yet, though I do at least want to visit the volcanic island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua as well as San Juan del Sur on the Pacific and the more colonial Leon to the north. A trip to Costa Rica to see my old Tico Times editora Meg Yamamoto and amiga superior Gaby Diaz might also be necessary (OK, so I do have time for shout-outs.)
Mitad y mitad es suficiente.
*The asterisk was to let you fine readers know that telling people you're a journalist is a lot like telling someone you're a lawyer or a tax collector. It's something you avoid mentioning at all costs for a variety of reasons.
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