Active volcano is a metaphor for a country that may explode
More than 120 people have been killed in Nicaragua since April in a popular uprising against the country’s president Daniel Ortega and his government. Political commentator Daran Hill visited a country where the Sandanistas’socialist utopia has become an
“AMIGO, nobody here has a problem with gringos. They have a problem with Ortega. If someone will be shot, will be me, not you.”
With that reassurance, I booked a local tour guide, glad to be out of the prison hotel where I had been confined for the previous evening.
Coming to Nicaragua had been a last-minute decision.
I’m a travel addict and had been in Costa Rica and Colombia so, with a few days to spare, I took the plunge and did something which I had never done before. I visited a country to which travel was expressly discouraged by the Foreign Office.
In short: “The FCO continues to advise against all but essential travel to Nicaragua.”
My plane into Managua, the sprawling lakeside capital, was virtually empty, maybe one in 10 seats having been taken. This did not disturb me unduly. Neither did my extended period at the immigration desk, which seemed to last twice as long as anybody else. I ascribed the slowness to my lack of Spanish rather than the questioning about the hotel where I was staying.
The immigration officer was interested that I was going to Masaya. I had chosen the small town because it was near a national park and a particularly volatile volcano.
It had seemed like a wiser option than going to Managua, since trouble so often flares up in the capital rather than small towns.
I am not so naive as to wander into a war zone without proper thought. I knew the death toll in the previous six weeks had reached double figures, with the police and army using snipers to take out protestors. What I did not anticipate was that, by the time I arrived, the epicentre of the protests would have shifted to Masaya.
It seemed calm when I arrived. The edge-of-town hotel was deserted, but I put that down to the general troubles. It was only when I asked the owner about the easiest way to get to the supposedly picturesque town centre that things changed. He looked panicked and emphatically insisted I stayed at the hotel because there had been rioting in the centre the previous night.
It was only later that I found out that the town-centre hotels and restaurants had been caught up in it. This explained why, when I retired to the hotel bar as the sole patron, that my ice-cold Victoria Frost was served in a darkened room with just one spotlight in place. Clearly it was policy not to communicate to the night outside that the hotel was open and functioning. My stint in the bar was brief and I retired to ponder my next move and read more about the situation I had virtually stumbled into.
My brief research into why the political situation had deteriorated in Nicaragua in the previous two months showed the flashpoint was an austerity-type pension reform bill, a measure so toxic it was subsequently dropped. This had, rather stereotypically, led to street protests in Managua and other places, aimed at the broader political elite.
President Daniel Ortega is, however, a survivor. He led the Sandinistas in a left-wing revolution in 1979, beat the Contras and the USA in the following decade, and won a civil war. Out of power in the 1990s, he returned to the presidency more than a decade ago and his wife has now assumed the position of vicepresident. They seem, from reports and conversations, to have centralised the state around themselves and consolidated their power base. The protests, it was explained to me in ensuing days, were as much about Ortega himself as they were about the pensions issue.
These points were particularly reinforced to me when I spoke to a local guide by phone the following morning. Byron showed up enthusiastic and proud of his country. Yes, he had lost a lot of business in the recent months, the tourism economy having plummeted, but that didn’t dampen his zest for life. For the rest of the day he took great care and great pride to explain so much about the history and culture of Nicaragua. It set out to me more clearly than a map ever could why central America was broken into so many relatively small Spanish-speaking states. Nicaragua may only have six million people, but it is as different from its neighbours Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador as Wales is compared to the other parts of the UK. Indeed, perhaps like the UK as a whole, the common language is the biggest link.
Visiting the volcano with him was almost a physical metaphor for the nation. The empty national park, the jungle teeming with life, the giant mouth of the active volcano emitting smoke and noise and fury. It almost seemed ready to blow at any second.
Above the belching chasm was a hill with a large cross, placed there almost five centuries ago when a Catholic priest named and blessed the volcano. It seemed that the Catholic Church had tried to pacify everything in the country, and was still doing so as it tried to negotiate peace between power and protest. It didn’t seem to be working. While I was there, some people tried to burn down the cathedral in Managua. Each side blamed the other.
The rest of my time in Nicaragua was based in the beautiful town of Granada, the epicentre of ex-pat life, which seemed a total counter-balance to Masaya. Twenty kilometres felt a much bigger distance. In the cobbled streets of Granada there were few problems and protests, even if the tourist economy had been badly damaged.
Talking to some new friends, Kevin and Sarah, who had relocated from Texas to the traveller’s oasis, it became clear to me that Nicaragua was still a land of opportunity and excitement.
As we partied in a nearby nightclub with the beautiful people, it struck me that even in a country in the middle of turmoil there was plenty to celebrate and plenty to ignore. I was pleased to have moved hotels to Granada. The same night five more died in Masaya, just a short road drive away.
Well, not so short maybe, if you factored in the roadblocks on the main roads. On most of the central routes out of Masaya there were continuous protests by masked and armed youths intent on disrupting the commercial life of the country. Pay them a dollar and you get through. But not everyone has or wants to spend that dollar.
Sipping a fine local rum with a Belgian guy who had spent much of his life in and out of Nicaragua, we chewed the fat. To a gringo busybody it seemed like a revolution was under way. My drinking companion was less convinced. Even if Ortega had lost support among parts of the army and the commercial sector, he still controlled most of those twin pillars, as well as the legislature, the party and the electoral court.
“Ortega is a Nica. There is nowhere he can go,” was the wisdom shared with me.
I was not limited in the same way. I am not a Nica and, although I did not cut short my stay, it didn’t cross my mind to stay in Nicaragua for longer than I had planned.
As Byron headed for the airport and we took the back streets to avoid the roadblocks and make my flight on time, my departing emotion was one of happiness that I had visited somewhere so fascinating and welcoming. It isn’t a destination that would have appealed to everyone – or indeed many people – but one thing that really pleased me was to have experienced a place so full of politics and passion.
It was, in so many ways, 5,000 miles away from Wales.