Notes from Ground Zero Nicaragua

Paul Baker

My old Victor Jara T-shirts are at last beginning to show their age. Holes are appearing here and there and, although his marvelous smile still sings out, the colors are beginning to fade. They're nearly twelve years old, after all. I remember designing them at Yani's house in Pasadena,
while Jane and Denis, the friends from Source Books who published "Song in High Summer", printed them in their backyard. I've worn them consistently since then, so they've really done pretty well. Sad to see them fade, though. However, with luck, and gentle washing (not a Nicaraguan specialty with our cold water/cement washboard system!), they'll maybe last another
twelve years. By that time, hopefully, we'll have reclaimed September 11th. On the day
itself and for weeks afterwards, Nicaraguan TV was wall-to-wall exploding planes - the tentacles of CNN reach exceeding far. Fair enough, perhaps - the attacks in New York and Washington were certainly terrible, the footage infinitely dramatic. But, however horrific the actual events, they also meant that George Bush and the US infotainment machine could hijack
September 11th, probably without even realising it. Thus, the Chilean mothers, husbands, wives, who are still longing for some - any - news of their disappeared loved ones as their own nearly thirty year search drags remorselessly on, have had even the very date of their kidnap/murder stolen from them. The CIA/Pinochet coup, a genuine act of barbarism if ever there was one, was determinedly aided and abetted by the US, with lapdog Britain once again along for the ride. Ghastly as the plane attacks were - can you imagine having been a passenger? - the US (often leading the charge for the rest of the North) has been consistently guilty of assisting in atrocities
which cut the Twin Towers down to their true size on the global scale. Of these, Victor's beloved Chile, 11th September, 1973, was just one. The shattered remnants of brave Nicaraguita all around us here mark another. As you know, at least 30,000 innocent people died during the
Sandinista '80s, most of them children, while maybe another 100,000 were seriously wounded - all these out of a total population of just 3.5 million, and all thanks to the US-sponsored war and economic embargo. (It's not just raggedy-tee-shirt leftovers like myself that condemn this war, by
the way - it was adjudged "terrorist" by the very world courts which the US/UK have been rolling in behind their own causes ever since.) So, in these self-righteous times, perhaps we should be reminding the US government (and people) that Nicaraguan children are still waiting for the
$17 billion (£12 billion) worth of war damages which were supposed to flow from that court decision, but which were disappeared in their turn when King Bush I "persuaded" the post-revolutionary Chamorro government to back off. A bargain with the devil indeed; today, as Nicaragua spirals ever further into poverty, such a sum would neatly pay off its purported
international debt (unjust [and repaid many times over] though that is) and leave a good solid US$10.5 billion (plus a serious chunk of interest) to get the country back into shape. Instead, and through the North's deliberate intervention, Nicaraguans have suffered twenty years, first, of
proxy war, and, latterly, imposed neo-liberalism, with their ongoing legacies of death, despair, expectant landmines, privatization and concomitant cuts in social services. The original world court judgment still stands though, and, if the Earth survives our northern lifestyle long enough, history should eventually redress the balance. Unfortunately - as with the original slaughtered indigenous peoples of Manhattan - that'll be scant comfort for those millions who actually live(d)- and die(d) - through the pillaging and the massacres, the shut-down schools and the "free"
market speculation in the price of rice and beans.

Here - almost as if anticipating the challenge to explain these latest September 11th attacks - one of the most exciting recent developments has been the North-to-South "Eco-Debt" movement. That is, the organized recognition of the very real, enormous (and constantly growing) debt the North owes the South, especially in ecological terms. (What're those figures again? 20% of the world's people (ab)using 80% of the world's resources?) It's "exciting" because eco-debt begins to turn the world right way up at last, replacing cold charity with due justice in the debt forgiveness game. The other day I was up in one of Nicaragua's gold-mining towns, La Libertad, Chontales. (Gold!? Nicaragua!?!) "Freedom" is a curious name for a town that has effectively been enslaved by Northern greed virtually from birth (but then we European conquistadors invented double standards/speak long before "plausible deniability" even hit the stage.) La Libertad is pleasant enough, cool and breezy after Managua's sticky heat, but it's dirt poor. Or rather im-poverished, poverty being "thrust upon it." While New York got - and gets - the gold, La Libertad got - and gets - the mercury and cyanide residues used in its extraction. The place provides a perfect paradigm for Nicaragua itself (and so many other "Third World" countries), at once wonderfully wealthy and appallingly impoverished. Not by any divine dispensation, but by the lifestyle demands of the 20%. As one South American environmentalist calculated, "The European gentlemen who took our gold and silver were self-professed Christians. We can be sure, therefore, they didn't intend to steal them; they must just have been borrowing. Good Christians ourselves, we'll give them fifty years of grace, and then charge interest at a modest 10% per year." On that basis alone (and only on the precious metals extracted between 1650 and 1800) he calculated the North owes the South "more than the weight of the entire planet itself". And that's just for the trinkets (ornaments account for 80%+ of gold extracted); it doesn't begin to factor in the true costs - for example, the lives of the slaves who died in the mines, and/or the poisoned rivers and lands left for local people to drink from and to plant. Slavery no longer obtains in little Freedom, of course. Of course. That's all in the past, we're told. Even if this were true, who decides? Who decides where "the past" begins and ends? In fact, child labor still exists in Nicaragua, and the women who toil for "slave wages" in Managua's blue jean factories can only use the bathroom when their (foreign) bosses say so. Slavery by any other name ... On top of that, every Nicaraguan child is born with an Original Debt first committed not even by her parents but by some earlier bygone dictator in collusion with eager Northern bankers. Who would dare to say that the money and valuables ripped from the Jews murdered in Auchswitz and Belsen belong to the past and are therefore unrecoverable? Or that the destruction the slave traders of Bristol and Boston inflicted on whole African communities was from another time and therefore no compensation need ever be considered? Just let Nicaragua try telling that to the World Bank, when it claims yet more interest on Somoza's debt! As far as "the past" is concerned, the victim must call the tune, surely; after all, s/he has paid the piper a thousand times over. However, OK, if not necessarily Christian, let's be reasonable at least.

While the pious cant of the US/UK "anti-terrorism" rhetoric enables us to revisit the USA's own record of abuse, the original September 11th and Rebeca's $17 billion (editor’s note: Rebeca is a young Nicaraguan), no one is going to pay us back just yet. Especially not now with "Star Wars" back in the ascendant. Like equal rights and women's suffrage, it'll take time for the reparations movement to get thoroughly under way. But, in the meantime, how about, "The pious baloney stops here."? Past injustice should at least parley into just present, Christmas is the perfect time for "free" trade to give place to "fair" trade. For despite the fact that the North's eco-debt continues to mount as Nicaragua's soaring forests and their still-thriving indigenous peoples are daily cut down by our civilization's insatiable demands for coffee and cheap timber, pulp paper and the plumpest of prawns, this little forgotten corner of our tiny, exquisite planet remains a good place to be, first, to see what "globalization" means at everyday ground zero; and, second, to begin, slowly, slowly, to glimpse the possible dawn.

The views expressed herein are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of billybytes.com