The Panama Papers is the least of Central America’s woes

The Panama Papers is the least of Central America’s woes

By Michael Deibert

16/06/2016 

FDI
 

Corruption, resignations, drug wars: the Mossack Fonseca leak – known globally as 'the Panama Papers' – may have made headlines, but Central America has far more pressing problems to address if it is ever to regain investor confidence.

(Please read the original article here)

When 11.5 million documents were leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in April, a host of politically connected international figures – and some politicians themselves – were revealed to be hiding their assets by sometimes dubious means. The impact was particularly strong in Latin America, especially on the isthmus of Central America, where several countries have been rocked by violence and allegations of shady business practices.

In recent years, Panama itself has worked hard to shed itself of the reputation as some sort of economic 'Wild West', which it acquired in the 1980s. During the 1983 to 1989 rule of dictator Manuel Noriega, Panama became known as a hub for laundering drug money profits for groups such as the Medellín cartel, the Ochoa family and others. Mr Noriega was arrested following the 1989 US invasion of Panama and served 17 years in prison in the US on drug-trafficking charges. He was subsequently extradited to France where he was also convicted of narcotics-related offences, and is now in a Panamanian jail.

Though Panama’s economy stabilised enough for several ratings agencies to boost its sovereign debt rating to investment grade, former president Ricardo Martinelli, who served from 2009 to 2014, ended up in exile in Miami on the run from embezzlement charges back home.

Slow-moving Nicaragua

North of Panama, Nicaragua is these days is ruled as a personal fiefdom by Daniel Ortega of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, in office since 2007 and showing no signs of leaving any time soon.

Mr Ortega’s ambitious plan to one-up Panama’s inter-oceanic canal with one across Nicaragua – which were announced with great fanfare in 2013 with an estimated cost of $50bn – have thus far come to nothing. Ostensibly the brainchild of Chinese billionaire Wang Jing, chairman and CEO of Beijing’s Xinwei telecoms company (an entity that had never before had any involvement in infrastructure projects of this magnitude), ground was broken for the canal’s construction nearly two years ago.

Today, however, amid howls of protests from environmentalists, human rights leaders and others, work on the canal is virtually non-existent, as is any explanation for when it may be continued.

El Salvador violence

In neighbouring El Salvador, a 2012 truce organised between the government of then-president Mauricio Funes and the country’s two main gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, saw murder numbers cut in half the following year. But Mr Funes’ replacement – former guerrilla commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén, like Funes a member a member of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front – abandoned the truce upon taking office in 2014, resulting in open warfare across the country between the gangs and the security forces.

Last year, El Salvador’s murder rate rose by a shocking 70% compared with the previous year: 6657 people died in what was by far the most deadly year since the end of the country’s civil war in 1992.

All this in a country with a population of just 6.4 million.

This year’s figures look set to surpass that, and Mr Sánchez Cerén’s government has taken the additional step of arresting some of those – including former government officials – who had negotiated the original truce. One long-time observer of the country described the government’s current policy as “madness”.

Guatemalan uncertainty

In Guatemala, Central America’s most populous country and its largest economy, three close confidants of former presidents Álvaro Colom, Alfonso Portillo and Otto Pérez were named in the Panama Papers, adding more uncertainty to what has already been an unsettled 12 months in the country.

Last autumn, then-president Mr Pérez resigned and was arrested the following day, following the apprehension of vice-president Roxana Baldetti, who had stepped down in August. Both are charged with running a criminal network known as la línea (the line) while in office.

Though the arrests of the country’s two most powerful politicians took place following massive street demonstrations throughout Guatemala, many believe they would not have happened but for the work of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-mandated body that has operated since 2007, charged with investigating criminal organisations and exposing their connections to the state. Led by Colombian judge Iván Velásquez Gómez, the swiftness with which CICIG, along with Guatemala’s Ministerio Público, brought about the downfall of the government was startling, especially given that Mr Pérez had only weeks left in office after 2015’s presidential election.

No consultation

Guatemala’s current president, Jimmy Morales, was elected on the ticket of the Frente de Convergencia Nacional, a party founded by former military officers leaning to the extreme right of the country’s political spectrum. Both before and after Mr Morales assumed office, foreign investment in Guatemala has been marked by controversy. Projects such as the Escobal silver mine, owned by Canadian company Tahoe Resources, in the department of Jalapa, have sprung up with little to no consultation with indigenous communities (Guatemala has the highest indigenous population in Central America) and little transparency, and have frequently resulted in violent clashes.

More worrying still, in April a video surfaced from the Guatemalan department of Huehuetenango showing armed men claiming to be from new rebel group the Fuerzas Armadas Campesinas, vowing to oppose by force a hydroelectric project in the town of Ixquisís.

At the turn of the millennium many might have hoped that endemic corruption and violence were on the wane in the region, but events of recent months, among which the Panama Papers leak is only one, may well have investors thinking twice about Central America.

Books in 2009: A personal selection

During the past year, for the first time, I kept a record of all the books that I read. With the year drawing to a close, I thought it might perhaps be helpful to share my thoughts on some of the more notable ones that came across my path.

Best regards,

MD

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe’s elegiac and tragic story of the clash of cultures between Africa and Europe was every bit as moving now - after I have spent some time in Africa - as it was when I first read it in high school 20 years ago.

Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia by Harvey Arden

National Geographic writer Harvey Arden’s penned this quite beautiful account of his conversations with Aboriginal elders nearly 15 years ago, and when I traipsed through similar terrain earlier this year I found the respect with with it treats its subjects highly apt.

Fulgencio Batista: Volume 1, From Revolutionary to Strongman by Frank Argote-Freyre

This revelatory portrait of the formative years of Cuba’s pre-1959 leader portrays him as self-made, ambitious, ruthless, initially idealistic and then severely corrupted by power. The boy from a dirt-floor shack in Banes here stands as a fully-drawn personality as opposed to a mere slogan.

Reconstruction After the Civil War by John Hope Franklin

The eminent African-American history, who sadly passed away earlier this year, lays bare in an authoritative manner that “reconstruction,” such as it was after the American Civil War, was largely a fraud, with the South almost wholly under the control of reactionary southern whites. Highly relevant today, when a South Carolina congressmen sees fit to scream “You lie!” at the nation’s first biracial president during a congressional address.

Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of Jean Moulin by Patrick Marnham

The riveting story of the man who became the most iconic figure of France’s resistance to Nazi occupation is made all the more poignant by the realization of how isolated the resisters were under the boot of a brutal fascist military occupation and amidst the acquiescence of the French population as a whole. The grotesque excesses of revenge, score settling and ideologically-based brutality that followed the arrival of allied forces in France also make for a somber punctuation to this chronicle of human bravery and duplicity.

The Unknown War: The Miskito Nation, Nicaragua and the United States by Bernard Nietschmann

The gifted geographer Bernard Nietschmann worked strenuously for decades to help indigenous peoples chart their own fates. As a result, the longtime fixture at the University of California-Berkeley weathered criticism from comfortable foreign supporters of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government (whose treatment of said groups within their borders was brutal), but in this book he lays bare the epic quest for survival of this indigenous group in Honduras and Nicaragua, often caught up in power struggles between forces far beyond their control.

Stars of the New Curfew by Ben Okri

This book is a collection of haunting and often surreal short stories by one of Nigeria’s greatest living authors

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

A book as inspiring by its intellectual honesty as for its faith in solutions that common decency demands, Orwell’s account of the life of miners in the north of England - penned shortly before he departed to fight against the fascists in Spain - is also notable for its highly moral thesis that “the people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent...Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain pen.”

Indeed, and well said.

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

A fairly gripping novel of politics and thwarted romantic set in rural Turkey by this 2006 Nobel Prize winner.

Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System by Roberto Saviano

A stunning non-fiction work that earned its young Italian journalist-author a death sentence from Naples’ grotesque Camorra crime syndicate, this book pulls back the veil on the brutal face of Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy

Streets of Lost Footsteps by Lyonel Trouillot

A short work delivered by multiple narrators during the final apocalyptic battle between the cadres of the dictator Deceased Forever-Immortal and the followers of the Prophet, this novel by one of Haiti’s most gifted authors (and winner of this years’ Wepler Prize in France) should be put alongside the writings of Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis and Gary Victor as required reading for those seeking to understand Haiti beyond its bare history. Originally published as Rue des Pas-Perdus in French.

Zapata and the Mexican Revolution by John Womack, Jr.

A highly valuable if somewhat somewhat jarringly passionless account of the storied Mexican revolutionary, this 1968 book nevertheless should stand as an example of genuine scholarship about a politically controversial figure in an era (our own) where academia is often conspicuously lacking in such virtues.

2008: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

I was fortunate enough this past year to report from five continents, something of a personal milestone for me. The work began in Paris and continued throughout Africa, including several months in the Democratic Republic of Congo which left me distressed at the plight of the civilians there and the international community's apparent inability or unwillingness to end their suffering. It continued with a return to Central America, where I was left charmed by Nicaragua, though dismayed at its political situation, and found Guatemala, that most evocative of Latin American countries, seemingly drowning in an ocean of blood and a hail of bullets. The results of my investigation into the causes of the latter will appear in the Winter 2008 edition of the World Policy Journal, published by the World Policy Institute in New York City.

Though such events do not leave one overly optimistic for the future, there was one notable cause for celebration this year: The election of Illinois Senator Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, the first African-American to hold that post. Obama’s election resulted in scenes of jubilation in the United States and beyond, and served as a powerful "answer," in Obama's words, to "anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy." After the eight disastrous years of the administration of George W. Bush, it is my hope that Obama lives up to the slogan that he used throughout his campaign, change we can believe in. The United States and the world at large certainly needs it.

Based in Australia for the next few months, where the affects of climate change are increasingly present, I hope that my travels in the coming year will enable me to report on a more humane, more just and more responsive world, where that which unites us as humanity proves stronger than that which divides us, and we prove ever less susceptible to those who would exploit such divisions.

What follows is my entire oeuvre of reportage from the year 2008. Hopefully it will be of some interest, and the stories of those contained within will hold some resonance.

Much love,

MD


The Cuba problem: A review of The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution by Daniel P. Erikson for the Miami Herald (7 December 2008)

Trial of Muslims grips Australians for the Washington Times (30 November 2008)

ECONOMY: EU Involvement in DRC Mining Project Draws Protest for the Inter Press Service (28 October 2008)

Mixed signals: What is an investor to make of Africa? for Foreign Direct Investment (7 October 2008)

Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline for Tierramérica (6 October 2008)

Nicaragua’s poisonous political brew for Folha de Sao Paulo (31 August 2008)

"Haiti Is Going From Catastrophe to Catastrophe": Michael Deibert interviews Chavannes Jean-Baptiste for the Inter Press Service (28 September 2008)

Congo: Between Hope and Despair for the World Policy Journal (Summer 2008)

Distilling the ties between Bacardi and Cuba: A review of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba by Tom Gjelten for the Miami Herald (14 September 2008)

TRADE-AFRICA: New Technology to Sever Timber's Link to Conflict? for the Inter Press Service (8 August 2008)

CULTURE-ETHIOPIA: Debate Swirls Around Fate of Holy Sites for the Inter Press Service (3 July 2008)

A Glittering Demon: Mining, Poverty and Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo for CorpWatch (26 June 2008)

POLITICS: Is Democracy Dangerous in Multi-ethnic Societies? An interview with Frances Stewart, Oxford University Professor of Development Economics for the Inter Press Service (26 June 2008)

POLITICS-ETHIOPIA : A Tangled Political Landscape Raises Questions About African Ally of the U.S. for the Inter Press Service (21 June 2008)

Ethiopia's Urban Poor Cannot Afford To Eat: Interview with Abera Tola, Director of Oxfam's Horn of Africa regional office for the Inter Press Service (21 June 200*)

TRADE-AFRICA: EU Seeks to Subdue Competitive China for the Inter Press Service (15 May 2008)

RIGHTS: In South Africa, Zimbabwean Refugees Find Sanctuary and Contempt for the Inter Press Service (4 May 2008)

"We Mustn't Think as South Africans That We Have Won the Day": An interview with Bishop Paul Verryn for the Inter Press Service (4 May 2008)

DRC: With Rebel Leader's Indictment, a Tentative Step to Accountability for the Inter Press Service (1 May 2008)

HEALTH-DRC: Water Everywhere, But Is It Safe To Drink? for the Inter Press Service (24 April 2008)

POLITICS-DRC: Cautious Calm Settles Over War-scarred Ituri Region for the Inter Press Service (17 April 2008)

Why I am voting for Barack Obama for Michael Deibert, Writer (15 April 2008)

Extraction from chaos: Embattled by war and corruption but laden with large deposits of diamonds and copper, DR Congo is largely avoided by investors. Might that change? for Foreign Direct Investment (10 April 2008)

The Fruits of Reform: Mozambique, whose history has been blighted by a long liberation struggle and years of civil war, is starting to reap the benefits of recent macroeconomic reforms for Foreign Direct Investment (10 April 2008)

Failure To Renew DRC Expert's Mandate Draws Criticism for the Inter Press Service (1 April 2008)

POLITICS-DRC: In a Governmental Vacuum, Yearnings for a Lost Empire for the Inter Press Service (21 March 2008)

A Review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment for Michael Deibert, Writer (16 March 2008)

A Humanitarian Disaster Unfolds in Eastern DRC for the Inter Press Service (1 March 2008)

Fidel's view: A Review of Fidel Castro: My Life by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet for the Miami Herald (27 January 2008)

Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline

Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline

The Garífuna culture, a "masterpiece" of human heritage according to UNESCO, could disappear as the result of the privatization of Central America's beaches.

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

MIAMI, Honduras, Oct 6, 2008 (Tierramérica).- "The Garífuna were the best sailors in the world," says Jermonino Barrios, standing barefoot on this slender thread of land between the Laguna de Los Micos and the blue Caribbean Sea.

Barrios, 67, a former soldier, speaks proudly of his ethnic group, whose members are scattered across Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

"Before, we had 200 or 300 Garífuna living here; now there are only a few," he tells Tierramérica.

"They went to the United States for work, and other places," he explains with a note of regret, gazing back at the collection of thatched-roof huts lazing under palms trees that front the crashing surf.

In the tumultuous history of Europe's incursion into the Americas and the trafficking of slaves from Africa to its shores, their are few stories as dramatic or moving as that of the Garífuna.

Read the full article here.

Nicaragua’s poisonous political brew

Nicaragua’s poisonous political brew

By Michael Deibert

(A slightly difference version of this article appeared in Portuguese in the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo on 31 August 2008)

Masaya, Nicaragua – At the Museo y Galería de Héroes y Mártires in this city in Nicaragua’s southern heartland, the faces of young patriots who gave their lives to break this impoverished country out of its tradition of despotism gaze out at visitors from photographs lining the walls.

Amidst the firmament of Central America’s political upheaval in the latter half of the 20th century, this city, an hour south of the capital, Managua, played a decisive role. In February 1978, the Masaya neighborhood of Monimbó launched the opening salvo in what would become the final uprising to topple dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Somoza would be driven from office a year later and the the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), a left-wing guerrilla movement, rode triumphantly into Managua in a victory which would energize insurgencies throughout the region.

Today, one of the most visible leaders of that 1979 revolution, the FSLN’s Daniel Ortega, is again president, having been re-elected in 2006 after being ejected from that office during elections in 1990. The FSLN has transformed itself into one of Nicaragua’s two largest political parties, but the nation’s political landscape has undergone a great metamorphosis in the interim years.

“I was wounded fighting against the Contras,” says Lopez Davila, a 42 year-old cab driver plying his trade along Monimbó’s fume-choked lanes, referring to the remnants of Somoza’s Guardia Nacional and others, sponsored by the United States, that fought to drive the FSLN from power until peace accords were signed in the early 1990s. “But now, the politicians are all the same thing. We don’t believe in any of them.”

Even before returning to office 18 months ago, Ortega had solidified his position as the head of an increasingly centralized FSLN over which he and a small coterie of family members, and advisers exercise virtually unchallenged control. Despite Ortega’s continued inveighing against global capitalism in his speeches, the FSLN’s left-wing vanguard role has been replaced in economic matters by a more measured approach, seeking, for example, to increase production through a program of low-cost loans to farmers in what is still a largely agrarian society.

Diminished opposition

Ortega’s political machinations in recent years have attracted more attention than his government’s fiscal policies, however. These have ranged from plastering the nation with billboards lauding himself and his party to, critics charge, colluding with Nicaragua’s judicial and legislative bodies to bar his adversaries from any chance at the lever of power.

In June, Nicaragua’s Consejo Supremo Electoral (CSE) ruled that two small opposition parties, the Partido Conservador (Coservative Party, Nicaragua’s oldest political party) and the left-wing Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (Sandinista Renewal Movement or MRS), a party founded by FSLN dissidents in 1995, were ineligible to compete in municipal elections due to be held around the country in November. The official reason given by the CSE was that the two parties had not completed sufficient paperwork to contest the elections, though several other parties with similar problems were not stricken fron the ballot.

Government detractors claim the move is an attempt by the FLSN and its nominal opponent in the upcoming election, the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC), to rig the ballot in their favour. The decision by the CSE, which is stacked which loyalists of both Ortega and PLC leader Arnoldo Alemán, to bar Eduardo Montealegre, a former PLC member who came in second to Ortega in the 2006 elections, from the leadership of his newly-formed Alianza Liberal Nicaragüense party, would seem to reinforce their fears. Montealegre has since humbly rejoined the PLC.

A similar decision by the CSE to suspend elections in three municipalities in Nicaragua’s rugged Región Autónoma del Atlántico Norte area - a former Contra stronghold where local indigenous tribes have a history of hostility to the government in Managua - until April 2009 has already provoked rioting there in which a dozen people were injured.

“This arbitrary exclusion of these political parties is a real threat to the health of democracy in the country,” says Gonzalo Carrión Maradiaga, director of the Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos, a non-governmental organization that seeks to promote civil, political and economic rights. “This is completely calculated because together these parties form a threat to the FSLN and the PLC, and the fundamental motivation is to force Nicaragua into a bi-party system.”

Unlikely alliances

Carrión’s words might seem unduly fevered were it not for the fact that, in 1999, it was revealed that Oretga and Alemán had in fact entered into a secret political pact, giving the duo vast powers in Nicaragua’s Asamblea Nacional, where the FSLN currently holds 38 seats and the PLC 25 seats in the 92-member body. Beyond carving up political patronage jobs between FSLN and PLC supporters, el pacto, as it as known, has also enabled the two parties to exercise great influence over judicial institutions such as the CSE.

The rotund Alemán, a former president, was convicted in 2003 of corruption during his 1997 to 2002 tenure as Nicaragua’s chief of state. A 2004 report by the Berlin-based Transparency International, an organization that monitors governmental corruption, listed Alemán as one of the ten most corrupt leaders in the world, having an embezzled an estimated US$100 million from Nicaragua’s state coffers.

Initially sentenced to 20 years in prison, Alemán now dwells under expansively-defined house arrest near Managua, continuing to travel around the country to conduct political meetings. Given his weakened position, political observers in the country have likened Alemán’s current state as ranging from junior partner with Ortega in the alliance to the president’s “prisoner.”

Ortega’s deal with Alemán is not the only striking about-face that the FSLN leader has performed.

For a leader who once was the public face of a revolutionary movement promising equality between the sexes, few early acolytes could have pictured the FSLN, with Oretga at the forefront, joinning together with Nicaragua’s Catholic and evangelical churches as the most strident public proponents of the country’s draconian abortion law, one of the most restrictive in the world. Enacted in 2006 with the full support of the FSLN in congress, the law bans abortion completely, even in cases of rape, incest or life-threatening pregnancy, rights which Nicaraguan women had enjoyed for more than 100 years. Any healthcare workers who aids a women in obtaining an abortion can be imprisoned for up to 14 years.

The move left many former supporters feeling betrayed.

“The Sandinista revolution had a political and social pact with women, and this is treason to women and it is treason to the former program of the FSLN,” says Sofía Montenegro, Executive Director of the Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres and a former editor of Barricada, the official FSLN newspaper during the post-Somoza period. She has since become a fierce critic of Ortega and the FSLN.

“Women got involved not only because they were against the dictatorship, but also because the offered total emancipation for women and the end of discrimination against women,” Montenegro asserts. “The proposal of the revolution was that women would be integrated fully into the society. The fact that they have taken away something that has been so long established is unbelievable and absurd.”

Despite such policies, while abroad, at least, Ortega – who routinely brands his foes as “traitors” in the pay of the United States - has thrown in his rhetorical lot with two of Latin America’s two most strident leaders Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa of Ecaudor, who have also often been accused of critics of veering towards authoritarian methods to bolster their own political positions. Follwing the death of Manuel Marulanda, one of the leader’s of Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group, Ortega eulogized Marulanda as “a brother” at the Foro de São Paulo conference of left-wing parties earlier this year. The FARC is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and the European Union.

The political landscape today

Ortega’s government still has its supporters, though they are increasingly hard to track down.

“Sincerely, the FSLN are the only party that understands the needs of the people,” says Benito Vilchez, the 47 year-old caretaker of the Combatants and Collaborators Historic Association in the northern city of León. Like the museum in Masaya, the building hosts a modest collection of photographs, yellowed newspaper clippings and political banners commemorating the struggle against the Somoza regime and the Contras, though with a stridently pro-FSLN political slant

“In 16 years of neo-liberal government, - they did nothing to help us,” says Vilchez. “We can see clearly that this is a government for the poor people.”

Perhaps more irritating to Ortega than his critics in the civil society is the nascent FSLN dissident movement as typified by the MRS. As a political force, the MRS finally began to come into its own under the aegis of Managua mayor Herty Lewites during the 2006 elections, during which Lewites opposed Ortega for the presidency. For his transgression, Lewites , who was running a strong third in opinion polls, was expelled from the FSLN. He subsequently died of an apparent heart attack just before the presidential ballot.

“There is a drastic difference between the FSLN today and the FSLN of the 1980s. The only thing that in common is the name,” says the MRS’ current president Enrique Sáenz, a deputy in the Asamblea Nacional. “Corruption is a big part of the (current) project. There is rhetoric of helping the poor, while a small group is in fact enriching itself.”

Echoes from history

Amidst the mutual recriminations, Nicaragua’s modern political history remains dominated by two narratives of power. The first is that of the Somoza dynasty, which the Sandinistas finally succeeded in bringing to its knees three decades ago.

Anastasio Somoza García, appointed head of the newly-created Guardia Nacional during the 1909-1933 occupation of the country by the United States, ruled the country for over 20 years, his tenure ended,when Nicaraguan poet Rigoberto López Pérez, assassinated him León in 1956. Followed by his son, Luis Somoza Debayle, who ruled the country until his death in 1967, the Somoza family mantle was then taken up by another son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, had of the Guardia Nacional. Even among the ranks of Latin Americas most corrupt caudillos, the actions of the Somozas, which included pocketing most of the relief aid that poured into Nicaragua following a devastating 1972 earthquake, rank near the top.

At the other end of the spectrum, looming over Nicargua’s political discourse (and literally over Managua in the form of a giant, silhouetted statue), is the figure of Augusto César Sandino, perhaps the greatest hero in Nicaragua’s modern political pantheon.

A guerrilla leader against the United States in the first half of the 20th century, Sandino was a curious candidate for a national emblem. In addition to his anti-imperialist activities, Sandino was also an adherent of the Escuela Magnetico Espiritual de la Comuna Universal, a hodgepodge of spiritualism and political thought created in Argentina by a Basque electrician. Sandino the rebel was killed by the elder Somoza’s Guardia Nacional in 1934.

Despite his imperfections, it is Sandino’s mantle that most sides in the struggle in Nicaragua want to claim for themselves. The FSLN named themselves after him, while the MRS use Sandino’s iconic floppy hat as their emblem.

Amidst this battle of ghosts, historical relics and modern-day controversy, Nicaragua’s beleaguered populace has watched consumer prices climb 23 percent this year and expect costs to spiral even farther, and they may be growing weary of the backdoor deals of its endlessly scheming politicians.

Managua’s once busy downtown on the shores of polluted Lake Xolotlán, remains ghostly and deserted, much as it was following the earthquake of 1972. In the Plaza de la Republica, billboards of Ortega proclaim Hacia el sol de la Victoria (“Towards the sun of victory”). Alongside them, the city’s ruined old cathedral, casting a watchful eye over the country’s stunted economic and political growth, gazes down upon three diminutive street children and two stray dogs as the unlikely retinue makes their way across the otherwise deserted plaza, pushing a wooden cart piled high with rubbish. The cathedral’s once-grand clocks remain stopped at 12:35, the time of the earthquake.

Oretga y Aleman y Somoza son la misma cosa reads graffiti scrawled outside of the nearby PLC headquarters, which no one has yet bothered to paint over.

Ortega and Aleman and Somoza are the same thing.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).

Postcard from Belize

After traveling on three boats and a bus, we arrived in the idyllic and largely deserted town of Plancencia, ambling out to meet the Caribbean waves here in Belize. It has been a long journey, one that has brought us face to face with many of the joys and difficulties of modern Central America, from Nicaragua's radiant towns and warm people facing down a cynical and corrupt political elite, to Guatemala continuing in the grip of hidden armed groups with links to current and former military officials, teetering on the edge of collapsing into the hands of drug traffickers.

The region remains stunning in its natural settings, with mist-shrouded hills, great mountain lakes and seductive stretches of Caribbean coastline along which Landino, Garifuna and indigenous cultures blend in an appealing potpourri. The politics, however, remain troubling.

Watching Barack Obama's stirring, emotional and intelligent speech from a hotel room in Guatemala, in the shadow of a lovely ochre-hued colonial church, and recently seeing snatches of the Republican convention on television, where an overwhelmingly white crowd saluted the stage with cowboy hats in a gesture that to this white, working-class boy was shockingly reminiscent of the fascist salutes of old, one is reminded of how much work there is left to do in the world.

Times and needs are changing and we must change with them. A sunset and the lilt of reggae tonight, and tomorrow to work once again.

La Gran Sultana

We arrived in Granada, Nicaragua, a few days ago, passing through the over-touristed and sterile climes of Costa Rica and leaving behind Panama’s rainy Bocas del Toro and its capital’s enchanting San Felipe district. Now in the land of Rubén Darío and Augusto Sandino, but also of Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the disgraceful pacto between the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional and the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista, we have found something lacking Nicaragua’s more affluent neighbor to the south: A country with a great soul and a sense of its own history.

Granada, a city modeled on its eponymous namesake in Spain and so elegant that it earned the nickname La Gran Sultana, skirts the edge of Lago de Nicaragua beneath the looming rise of the Volcán Mombacho outside the city. Lovely one-story Spanish adobe buildings front lanes on which both horses and automobiles roll by at a leisurely pace. Once burned to the ground by the American adventurer (privateer might be a better word) William Walker, the city rebuilt itself splendidly and remains a fine place to enjoy a sip of 18 year-old Flor de Caña rum or the delicious chocolates produced by the city of Matagalpa, just to the north. My novia and I have enjoyed wandering its streets in advance of several days of hard reporting work this week and a journey to the Región Autónoma del Atlántico Norte starting this weekend. A trip to the surrounding pueblos blancos yesterday brought us into contact with the noted spiritualist Andrea Peña Aguirre and the natural healer William Mena in the historic village of Diriomo. All in all, my first trip to Nicaragua, a country I have long wanted to visit, has already proven greatly rewarding from both a historic and aesthetic perspective.

High noon has arrived and the flâneur in me calls.

Remembering Andy Palacio

In the fall of 2003, I lived in Guatemala for a time while covering that country’s presidential election. My work reporting on the electoral contest between former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and his opponent Óscar Berger, and the legacy of the country’s terrible 36-year civil war, took me to many parts of this often almost surreally beautiful place.

In Guatemala City, I spoke with people like Jose Ruben Zamora, editor of Guatemala's El Periodico newspaper, and listened to his struggle trying to function as an independent, investigative journalist in a country where clandestine forces attacked him physically and regularly threatened him with death. I traveled through the breathtaking but tragic Triángulo Ixil, the homeland of the Ixil Maya nestled in the Cuchumatanes mountains, interviewing Indians and religious officials about their experiences during the war and during the then-current rule of Rios Montt’s political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG). I ventured into the lush jungle of the Petén to interview former members of the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil (PAC) that Rios Montt had set up in the 1980s as a kind of civilian paramilitary against the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) rebels, as if the military’s scorched-earth attacks against Mayan civilians weren’t enough.

But I also saw the pleasant side of Guatemala, and one of the most lovely parts began with a voyage down the Rio Dulce on a small boat, fecund vegetation hanging from the opposite banks, on my way to a small town named Livingston on the Bahía de Amatique. Quite different from the indigenous and mestizo culture that dominated elsewhere in Guatemala, Livingston was in fact home to the Garifuna, the descendants of Amerindian tribes and African slaves who live scattered in coastal settlements in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua, speaking an Arawakan language as well as an Spanish and often Caribbean-accented English.

When my boat pulled up to the jetty, a dreadlocked old man threw a rope around it and said “You don’t have to worry no more. You’re in Africa now.” I spent quite a few days in Livingston, decompressing from several stressful weeks reporting, and I got to see a bit of the Garifuna and their culture, which often included pumping Garifuna-language music blaring out of the speakers at hotels and restaurants. It was a constant echo in the background when I would stop to chat with the matrons sipping lemonade at the Café Bar Ubougarifuna.

Many Garifuna worry that their culture - the unique language, the music, the history, the very way of life - is disappearing amidst the influence of other Caribbean styles and, particularly, North American hip-hop culture.

No one in recent years did more to promote Garifuna culture than the songwriter, singer and guitarist Andy Palacio. Born in a small coastal village in Belize in 1960, Palacio defiantly sang the vast majority of his songs in Garifuna, and utilized distinctive Garifuna rhythms in his compositions. Named a UNESCO Artist for Peace last year, he also released an outstanding album, called Wátina (which means “I called out” in Garifuna) in 2007. Buoyant, uplifting, yet at the same time, thoughtful, music. Palacio’s recent success has helped spur a revival of interest in preserving Garifuna culture, not least of all among the Garifuna themselves.

Andy Palacio passed away, far too young, of a massive stroke and heart attack on Saturday evening. An eloquent spokesman and passionate artistic champion for an often-marginalized people, Andy Palacio’s loss will be deeply felt, but all his work at promoting and helping to preserve Garifuna culture will not be forgotten, not least of all by this journalist. When my African sojourn finishes this fall, it may very well be time to visit with the Garifuna again, and listen closely to what they and their music have to tell the world.

Ayo, Andy Palacio.