A New Revolution in Nicaragua:
Edu-Tourism!
by Paul Martin

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Most Americans associate Nicaragua with vague concepts like "political instability" (danger), "social unrest" (danger), and the "Third World" (poverty, overcrowded slums, disease and deprivation). These images and ideas have come about as the result of the US Government's campaign in the 1980s to crush the Nicaraguan Revolution and bring the Republic of Nicaragua back under its political and economic control. The campaign succeeded, and Nicaragua is now on a course of so called "neo-liberal" development which risks destroying most of what the Revolution and ecological conservationists would hope to preserve in Nicaragua. At the same time, non-profit and eco-tourism organizations are attempting to build an alternative model of sustainable development that will conserve Nicaragua's natural and cultural beauty. Below is a brief history of Nicaragua leading up to the present challenge she faces today and what one organization is doing about it.

History

Soon afterward, the Spanish arrived. They came as conquerors and exported thousands of Nicaraguan Indians to Peru as slaves for the precious metal mines. The Spanish brought disease and forced slavery. Many Indians "converted" to Christianity in an effort to become more acceptable to their conquerors and oppressors. Over time, intermarriage and sexual promiscuity between the races created a mixed or "mestizo" race which is the major ethnic group today in Nicaragua. English pirates largely controlled the Eastern side of Nicaragua during these colonial times, and they periodically raided the Spanish settlements in the west. Black slaves in the Caribbean escaped to Nicaragua and settled on the English speaking Atlantic side as well, along with the few native Indian tribes whom the Spanish had not conquered.

In the 19th century, the U.S. started to gain power and influence over larger and larger territories. Soon Central America was declared, along with the rest of the America's, part of Manifest Destiny's gift to U.S. hegemony. The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated in 1823, basically declared that the United States had interests in Latin America and the Caribbean that justified direct U.S. Government influence, control and military intervention if necessary. This was the beginning of a uninterrupted tradition which extends to the present day and which we saw enacted in the "Contra" war supported by the U.S. government in the 1980s.

Within Nicaragua, the middleman tradition was well under way. There were two rival factions established in Nicaragua during the colonial days. One, based in Granada, were the "Conservatives" who were primarily merchants. The other faction, based in Leon, were the "Liberals" who were mainly ranchers. These two factions were always fighting and overthrowing each others governments. The leadership of either one would sell out their national interests to a foreign power (the United States) in order to gain the upper hand. Frequently, one side would ask the U.S. to send Marines to help them defeat their enemies. The U.S. liked this set up because it allowed them to keep Nicaragua divided, dependent on U.S. intervention, and vulnerable to U.S. control. The U.S. basically tolerated, approved or installed whomever they wanted to run the country. Meanwhile, U.S. companies like United Fruit got great deals on land acquisitions, mining rights, and even control of banking and tax collection in Nicaragua.

Around 1855, the Liberals hired a U.S. adventurer named William Walker to lead his small mercenary army against the Conservatives. He won the battle and then tried to take over the country and prepare it for annexation as a U.S. southern slave state! Seeing the danger for them all if that happened, the Central American countries got together and kicked him out. With the Liberals disgraced, the Conservatives took over and ruled for 30 years while U.S. companies expanded their holdings. The conservatives built railroads, attracted European immigrants to their numbers, increased the mining of gold, increased coffee cultivation and started the cultivation of bananas for exportation. To do all this they enacted agrarian reform laws that either pushed Indians and peasants off their land or reduced them to sharecroppers.

Around 1893 a Liberal named Zelaya took over and ran Nicaragua as a dictatorship for about 17 years. He built a lot of infrastructure and tried to take back ownership and concessions previously given to U.S. companies and Banks through the U.S. Government. He insisted that Nicaragua had sovereignty over the possible canal route over Nicaraguan territory between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and was talking to the Japanese and English about building it. That was too much for U.S. territorial fears, and so the U.S. supported a Conservative uprising and intervened militarily to force Zelaya out of power.

From 1912 to 1926, the U.S. stationed Marines in Nicaragua to oversee the governments of their choice, governments that didn't insist on Nicaraguan independence from U.S. domination. When, finally, the U.S. decided to withdraw its military presence, the Conservatives staged a coup and a civil war broke out again. The U.S. responded by intervening on the side of the Conservatives and landed marines once again in Nicaragua. Finally, after frustrating the movement of Liberal troops, the U.S. made an offer that the Liberals couldn't refuse and they accepted a deal to let the Conservatives rule in exchange for political and monetary concessions. One General named Sandino (for whom the Sandinistas were named), however, refused to accept the deal. Calling the U.S. "Yanqui Imperialists" and the Liberal generals "traitors to their country," he took to the hills with his men and waged a successful guerrilla war against occupying U.S. marines from 1926 to 1933.

In the shadow of many dead U.S. Marines, the U.S. Government was under domestic and international pressure to withdraw its overt military presence. They realized that they couldn't win a guerrilla war against Sandino so they trained native troops called the National Guard to take over the Marine's role against him. In 1933, the Marines withdrew putting a man named Anastasio Somoza in charge of the National Guard. Sandino had always declared that he would put down his arms if the U.S. left Nicaragua and free elections were held. The Nicaraguan President invited Sandino to peace talks and Somoza treacherously ambushed and killed him. Soon afterward, Somoza made himself president of Nicaragua.

The Somoza family ran a dictatorship supported by the U.S. Government from 1937 to 1979. The U.S. was happy to have a manageable and friendly government in power that kept the peace, kept Nicaragua friendly for U.S. business exploitation, and protected U.S. political sovereignty in Central America. The Somozas always came out on the politically correct side of the U.S.'s international concerns and so were guaranteed their job by Washington. For instance, though an ardent admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, Anastasio Somoza promptly became anti-fascist when the U.S. declared war against the Axis in 1942. One U.S. President, begrudgingly recognizing that Somoza wasn't exactly presiding over a democracy, was quoted as saying, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's OUR son of a bitch." As a result, the U.S. was a major financial supporter of Nicaragua's narrowly distributed prosperity during the 50s, 60s and 70s.

A young patriot assassinated Anastasio Somoza Garcia in 1956, leaving the political power in the hands of his two sons, Luis and Anastasio. Undeterred, over the following two decades the Somozas ended up owning the vast majority of the best lands of Nicaragua (their land holdings equaled the size of neighboring El Salvador), as well as most of the major domestic farms and factories, the airline, construction companies, warehouses, shipping lines, even the Managua cemeteries! Virtually nobody got a job without the rubber stamp of some Somoza family member. Somoza family members held the primary government posts; public and foreign donated funds were frequently used to finance the development of Somoza businesses. Development was limited to the capital and the other primary cities while the countryside remained in a near primitive agricultural plantation state.

Revolution

After the overthrow of the dictator was complete, the Sandinista leadership made it clear that they wanted to rebuild their destroyed and bankrupt country using a mix of private capitalism, state ownership and socialist principals. The U.S. applied its usual litmus test: if the Sandinistas weren't controllable, they were a threat. The Sandinistas declared Nicaragua a sovereign and non-aligned state, much like Zelaya had done 90 years earlier. The U.S. saw the same threat. If they are not with us, thought U.S. President Reagan's advisors, they will fall into the hands of the Soviet Union and threaten our territory as Cuba did. If they don't do what we tell them to do, and we let them get away with it, the other oppressed populations of Latin America will see that we are weak and they too will rebel against their military governments and our sovereignty. Then we will be even more vulnerable to the Soviet's being able to take them over and threaten our "back yard." We have a moral obligation to stop the Sandinistas before the cancer of communism spreads to all of Latin America!

It didn't matter that the U.S. could have lived in peace with Nicaragua by continuing to be its largest importer of sugar and its largest supplier of manufactured goods upon which it was dependent. If Nicaragua could be politically independent and be in control of its own territory and wealth, the loss of control would have been disastrous for the geopolitical control of the U.S., and control for the U.S. had always been the issue. We just couldn't risk letting those people screw up and sell their country out to the Soviets or any other country like they had done to us for so many years. We knew their nature. We had seen it throughout centuries. They were whores when it came right down to it, and we weren't about to let any other john get in bed with them. The idea of being non-aligned was nice, but we didn't believe it for a minute. And what if they really did stay non-aligned and prosper? That would have proved that the U.S. was just the big voracious bully that they said we were. Either way, the power, prestige and credibility of the U.S. system of domination was at stake. The implications were obviously unacceptable!

So, from 1980 to 1990, the Reagan's administration did everything it could to crush the Nicaraguan revolution through military and economic aggression, intimidation, and threat. The CIA recruited, armed and trained a guerrilla force using former Nicaraguan National Guard and conscripted Nicaraguan peasants who were directed to destroy schools, health clinics, agricultural cooperatives and socially useful infrastructure, and to kill teachers, health workers, government officials, preferably in gruesome ways. The U.S. imposed a strict trade embargo with Nicaragua and tried to block Nicaragua's attempts to secure financial aid and loans from West-Block countries. Only the fear of "another Vietnam", the intense work of international solidarity organizations, and a large international volunteer presence in Nicaragua kept the U.S. military machine at bay. Nevertheless, by 1990 the Nicaragua economy was in such a poor state that Nicaraguans just wanted an end to the Contra war and embargo at any cost. The cost, as was made known by the U.S. Government, was to vote out the Sandinista party and vote in a U.S. friendly Government that would be eligible for U.S. aid. The people voted in the new government, the U.S. economic embargo since 1982 was dropped, and the Counterrevolutionary army knew they had to bargain for peace because the CIA wasn't going to be picking up their tab anymore.

The government that took office in Nicaragua in 1990 knew they had better play ball with the U.S. and their major creditor, the World Bank. During the 80s war and economic blockade, Nicaragua had accumulated a huge foreign debt and now to receive more aid, the World Bank forced them to install austerity measures which controlled inflation and reduced government spending, particularly on health, social services, and small farmer credit. The system was restructured to accommodate large corporate investors and encourage the selling off of public assets to private companies. (Ironically, the Chamorro government of that time, withdrew Nicaragua's claim to many millions or perhaps billions of dollars of war reparations from the U.S. government which had been won in the World Court in 1985.) Whereas during the revolutionary period when there was work and everybody ate and had medical care, but there were few consumer goods, under the new system, the consumer goods came in, but now employment and money was scarce, public services were cut back, and people could barely afford to feed their families. Those Nicaraguans who had fled to the U.S. during the 1980s returned and made claims on lands that had been put to use by those who had remained. Once again, as before the revolution, the best lands started become concentrated and unavailable for production as a wealthy land-owning minority started to assert itself while the poor majority found itself increasingly cut-off from the economic benefits of their country's natural wealth and productivity.

Nicaragua's history shows how Nicaragua has repeatedly been divided and conquered by U.S. political and business interests in alliance with local Nicaraguan elites. Today, Nicaraguans who spent the 1980s in the U.S. training camp for consumerism and commercialism, Miami, have returned to Nicaragua to bring what they believe everybody wants and needs: U.S. style monopoly capitalism, i.e., unbridled "free market" consumerism. Before sanitation services, medical clinics or new schools, the U.S. sanctioned government and the monied re-immigrants installed cable TV for all, so the poor could see what they were missing. As has happened in our country, consumer lust and materialist values are being programmed into an undereducated public to make it a eager new market for imported consumer goods. The majority is barely surviving, but they can see Roseanne and Flowbee infomercials in Spanish, by God! It won't be long before they too are killing each other for the status of expensive Nike sneakers and that hot new private-sector industry - prisons - will open up whole new vistas for economic growth. Already, in the capital, gangs and drug use is up, although not at a level of that in the U.S. or Costa Rica, another successful consumerist land of pseudo-prosperity.

Despite their vulnerable circumstances, many Nicaraguans continue to have a sense of justice that is a deep part of their indigenous culture and a recent experience during the revolutionary time. Many concerned non-profit programs of sustainable development survive and continue to advocate for development that won't destroy the environment and culture of Nicaragua, which, at its roots where it is Nicaraguan, is diverse and beautiful. There are pristine beaches, rolling green hills, huge volcanic lagoons, majestic mountains in still silence, the 10th largest fresh water lake in the world with hundreds of islands, rich winding rivers, rainforests, and much more. The culture of the Niquiranos and other tribes still lives in an indigenous hospitality and warmth that you just don't find in developed countries. Though much of the population lives in poverty, there is relative safety even in the big city where you are hard pressed to find the machinegun toting police you see in many Latin American countries. When you're in Nicaragua, you feel the humanity that is missing in the United States where more and more of what is human is deemed socially unacceptable and then sold back to the neurotic public in the form of "new" products and services.

Edu-tourism

NSS began by spearheading a movement for ecologically sustainable non-destructive development in Nicaragua based on the idea of "eco-tourism." As modeled by programs like NSS, eco-tourism is the visitation of Nicaragua by "eco-tourists" with the intent to explore and experience her natural ecology and traditional cultures without also causing a negative impact that disrupts and harms the land and culture of the native people.

The ideal of eco-tourism is where the tourists and service providers consciously strive to minimize disruptive effects on the local environment and community by, for instance, not demanding or providing motorized transportation where for centuries only footpaths have existed, or not demanding or permitting the erection of a Macdonald's fast food restaurant where the local cuisine has always been served from small family-owned restaurants, or not demanding or permitting the erection of an eyesore high rise hotel on a beach-side location where small scale family-owned hotels already exist, or not excluding the native people from participation in the tourist economy unless they learn to speak English and dress like Europeans. The idea is to bring a moderate amount of people from "developed" countries to Nicaragua to enjoy the native goodness of the country and people without changing the basic culture or ecology to do it. However, as is being discovered in various countries, eco-tourism's utopian image does not live up to its inevitable consequences in an unregulated free market. Once the number of tourists reaches a certain level, the environmental and cultural impact becomes negative very quickly, thus negating the whole concept of eco-tourism. The reality is that any new industry seems good until it grows beyond its healthy stage of application.

Therefore, NSS offers an "edu-tourism" program to educate our students about the real underlying issues which determine the best choices for economic development in countries like Nicaragua. Within that process, we offer an "edu-tourism" experience for foreign students while modeling organizational development that can be applied to local productive activities such as agriculture and industry. The ideal would be to encourage an popular native-centered development process with public investment directed toward supporting locally-owned productive activities. Unfortunately, within the private property of land system, the natural incentives are toward resource monopoly and macro-economic policies that strongly favor the land-owning class at the expense of productive capital investment and labor.

The real change that is needed can only be accomplished within an economic system which ensures the equitable distribution of socially created land rents (monopoly profits) and the guarantee of full tax-free income for private labor and capital investment. Such solutions seem impractical in the mono-thought developed world but become practical reality for NSS students who see revealed first hand the cause and effects of poverty in Nicaragua and the credible possibility of their remedy.

Apart from the economic education of the NSS program, the fun of edu-tourism in Nicaragua is leaving your own cultural structures behind and being accepted as part of the land and people you are visiting, getting back to nature and the natural part of yourself that is conserved in traditional Nicaraguan culture. European and U.S. citizens are attracted to eco-tourism in Nicaragua because it allows them to experience nature and themselves with a minimum of governmental interference and social taboos. Nicaraguans are unique in their relaxed, interested and accepting approach to the human condition. From politics to sexual relations, everything is subject to conversation, comment and humor.

A basic part of eco-tourism is learning to communicate in the language of the host country. Nicaragua Spanish Schools provides Spanish language classes and excursions for students to visit the many interesting and wonderful sites in Nicaragua. By striving to learn the native Spanish language and understand the culture, NSS students are more visitors than tourists. They come to be with the people, talk with them, share their experience, rather than just passing through viewing the natives as part of the landscape. Nicaraguans appreciate this and it adds to the feeling of respect, warmth and fraternity felt between visitors and hosts.

Part of NSS' model of development is fair distribution of eco-tourism income and reinvestment in local communities. The money that NSS schools earn goes directly to teachers and host families and locally owned service providers and creates a fund for common benefit of all involved. Each school in turn helps support social, ecological or cultural development programs in its community. NSS strives to diversify its services and service providers to distribute income benefits as widely as possible throughout each community where NSS schools are located. In this way, one dollar imported into Nicaragua has a multiply effect in the popular economy.

Many people look around at our own country and bemoan the problems that false prosperity has brought us. We are choking on our materialism and suffering all kinds of environmental, social and psycho-emotional ills, and this we want to share with the rest of the world. NSS wants to model a different kind of development in Nicaragua that conserves traditional relationships between people and their land and neighbors as the primary relationship that defines the culture. That, in great measure, is what the developed world has lost, but what countries like Nicaragua still have. For that reason, Nicaragua is a valuable reference for our fading memory of what life used to be before the beginning of the age of mass marketing and alienating consumerism. NSS hopes that through the educational aspect of our program, the experience of our students in the Nicaraguan community will open the door to positive inquiry and the possibility of intelligent action to deal with the real causes of poverty which progress and development in and of themselves cannot cure.

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