From JASKE%bat.bates.edu@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU Mon Mar 25 00:40:16 1991 Return-Path: <@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU:ACTIV-L@UMCVMB.BITNET> Date: Thu, 7 Mar 91 10:51:51 CST Reply-To: JASKE%bat.bates.edu@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU Sender: Activists Mailing List From: JASKE%bat.bates.edu@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU Subject: SfN: Segovia Sentinel #4 To: Multiple recipients of list ACTIV-L March, 1991...........THE SEGOVIA SENTINEL........................#4 THE SEGOVIA SENTINEL is a bulletin of news and commentary from northern Nicaragua, published by the NICALINE NEWS NETWORK (NNN), Esteli, Nicaragua. Please read it, broadcast it, publish it and pass it on. Please ask your local newspaper and radio station to subscribe. THE SEGOVIA SENTINEL can be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without permission. Please credit us and send a copy of what you publish. Send comments and questions to THE SEGOVIA SENTINEL, 3217 College Avenue, Berkeley, California, 94705. Our E-mail addresses are cdp!ni!nline (on Peacenet/IGC, Web and related networks) and robert@kermit.berkeley.edu (on EDU-net). THE SEGOVIA SENTINEL is posted on IGC's Carnet.nicanews bulletin board. BIRTHDAYS AND VALENTINES SS...The town of Esteli is well known not only for its cool climate, but for its cultural life as well. Alicia Concepcion, cultural correspondent for the SENTINEL, files this...SS At all hours of the day and much of the night, one can hear a strange chiming, creaking sound emanating from the central park in Esteli. It is the chorus of the swings, three sets of which sit at various points in this square of stone, grass and trees. On an average afternoon the air is filled with the sound of children swinging on them, or screaming as they play on the slides. The park's benches fill with men and women. Small boys hawk newspapers or walk around hustling shines with their boxes over their shoulders. Little girls sell sweets. Zenates (what the english name of this bird is I do not know) brazenly sing, screach and squeak in the mango trees. Esteli is filled with music. Down the main drag heading southwest, up a progressively narrower and more rutted road, in a place called "El Limon," lives a guitarist named Felipe Urrutia Delgadillo. Don Felipe is the most virtuous performer of the Segovian mazurka. As his last name implies, he is a thin man. He's also very tall, with a creased, angular face and a long nose shaped like the beak of a chicken hawk. Beneath the two foot-wide brim of his sombrero, a grey moustache sits on top of a broad grin. On February 8, Don Felipe and about fifty of his friends and family celebrated his birthday. "Seventy and a bit" is how old he says he is. Some say he's 74, but he looks like he could be eighty. Naturally, there was lots of music. A big cauldron of beef soup sat on a fire, strips of beef brazed on a grill and tortillas were plentiful. So was rum. Carlos Mejia Godoy, songster-poet and musicologist of the Sandinista Revolution, was there with his Palacaguinas. So were Francisca and Moncho, a local duet who run the town's cultural center, and Esteli singer-guitarist Noel Perez. People crowded into a big semi-circle in Don Felipe's dirt yard. Chairs were set up beneath the awning of his clay-tiled roof, against a backdrop of leather straps, sombreros, chicken feet, chains and irons, and portraits of Daniel Ortega and Camilo Cienfuegos. The "stage" was beneath the branches of an indian laurel tree. The most distinguished act that afternoon was the guest of honour himself. Don Felipe Urrutia Delgadillo and his Four Cachorros (lion cubs) have been playing at weddings, baptisms, dances and house parties throughout the Segovias for the past twenty years. They earn their living farming, and never charge for their engagements. The Four Cachorros are Luis Felipe Urrutia Arauz, Pedro Antonio Urrutia Arauz, Leopoldo Urrutia Arauz and Felipe Urrutia Delgadillo. The first three are the spitting image of their father -- tall, with long, narrow faces and noses like chicken hawk beaks. They all wear two foot-wide sombreros like their father. Don Felipe's music begs to be danced to. No time was lost. Men strided over to seated women. Francisca strided over to a seated priest, but he turned her down, under pressure. Don Felipe's "comadrona" (godmother), a dark old woman named Lola, danced with her nephew, a cowboy in jeans, boots and spurs. He held out his arm in a long arc around her waist, his brown sombrero in his hand, never touching her once. Up and down his feet pranced, and his spurs clinked. His grin was wide and devilish, and at one point someone yelled out that he'd have to work harder to win the elderly lady's heart. The crowd laughed and clapped. Lola's mouth was tense, as if restraining a grin. For a local named Tirso Aurelio Monterrey, the moment was too much to bear. Mumbling with excitement, he finally shouted the words out: "Vive Sandino!" The words jolted Lola. Her arm shot into the air and she smiled widely. This was a revolutionary crowd. In this moment, in this small corner of Nicaragua, deep in the Segovias, in the shadows of an indian laurel tree, Nicaragua seemed once again as proud and virtuous as it was when Sandino roamed the land. Don Felipe had been playing guitar for half his life when The General of Free Men passed through Esteli. It was late 1933 or early 1934, he reckons. Sandino and his lieutenants must have been on their way down to visit General Moncada in Managua. There, on the lip of the Tiscapa Lagoon, on February 21, 1934, Augusto Cesar Sandino was killed by Anastasio Somoza Garcia, doublecrossed by Moncada. Don Felipe never actually spoke with Sandino, but recalls that he looked like a "serious" man and was "really little, tiny, tiny." He also recalls that Sandino stayed in the house of Antonio Molina, a "sympathizer" of his in Esteli. According to Ulises Gonzalez, mayor of Esteli, who plays guitar mazurkas too, Molina was a Liberal like Sandino, like Somoza. He was an old "Somocista," Gonzalez says. From the ranks of Sandino's Army for the Defense of National Sovereignty sprang many songs. Don Felipe learned some of them. In 1961 or 1962, after a ten-year hiatus from music, he was "discovered" by Ulises Gonzalez. Gonzalez telephoned Carlos Mejia Godoy, founder of something called "The Song Brigade." Godoy, who comes from a family of musicians in Somoto, northwest of Esteli, was busy "rescuing" (rescatando) traditional language, stories and songs at the time, and agreed to come to Esteli and record Don Felipe. "To talk about Felipe Urrutia is to talk about the dignity of Nicaraguan music," Carlos Mejia told the crowd at Urrutia's birthday party last February 8. Hearing was believing. Don Felipe and his Cachorros played polkas and waltzes. Felipe sat down and played several mazurkas, guitar pieces of astonishing delicacy and grace which he says were brought over by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. The greatest act of the afternoon, however, was Carlos Mejia himself. Godoy wrote the Revolution's greatest songs: about how to take apart and clean a rifle, "The Lady From Telpaneca," "Christ Was Born in Palacaguina," "Comandante Carlos," "La Consigna," "Esteli," and the Sandinistas' two great hymns -- the "FSLN Hymn" and "Nicaragua, Nicaraguita." Carlos Mejia is also a collector of popular words and expressions, and incorporates these into his songs, much to the delight of audiences. As the sun set over the mountains to the west, impaling the indian laurel tree on shafts of light, Mejia Godoy danced and pranced with his accordion on his knee, stopping often to stab his finger in the air or raise his hand to his cocked ear. Godoy was accompanied by Urrutia's four sons and by the Palacaguinas. These were not the original Palacaguinas. Enrique Duarte left some while ago to form his own groups -- Melo and the Princes of the North. The Princes accompanied Daniel Ortega on the campaign trail last year (Duarte co- authored "El Gallo Ennavajado"). Only Silvio Linarte (guitar) and Humberto Quintanilla (guitar and mandolin) remain with Godoy. The new members of the Palacaguinas are classically trained flautist Raul Martinez, who has worked with Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy (Carlos' brother) and Mancotal, and guitarist Ofilio Picon. Picon, 33, has a voice that's powerful and sweet and sang several of his own melancholic compositions, one of them entitled, "How Many Sad Stories Go Round Through the Metro?" When Carlos Mejia and the Palacaguinas were through, people began to filter away. For some, it was a bitter moment. Tirso Aurelio, who'd been drinking, swore and called Mejia Godoy "a damned Somoteno" with no right to talk about the dignity of Esteli. Esteli has its own musicians, thank you, who haven't been given their proper due. "No jodas!" (bugger off), he growled -- a favourite expression of his. Godoy had asked for it. At the beginning of the afternoon, in a brief speech alluding to the post-electoral posture of the Frente Sandinista, Godoy had called for "the launching of this new process of self-criticism." One of the principal beefs of artists like Godoy is that radio stations here play nothing but foreign music, Mexican and Columbian stuff, tons of gringoized latin music, or latinized gringo music, but little of his stuff. Cultural workers in Nicaragua with less clout than Godoy -- the vast majority of them, in other words -- gripe that people like Godoy get all the breaks. Only a handful have the chance to perform at top venues, be recorded, travel abroad, capture audiences, make money and so on. This was a big topic of discussion on the evening before Valentines Day (Lovers Day, they call it here), over at Tirso Aurelio's house. How nice it would be, exclaimed Ofilio Picon, who'd come to play a gig, if he had the same contacts in Canada as Carlos Mejia has in Spain. Francisca shared her frustrations about running the Casa de Cultura, about how the FSLN has lost touch with its base, how too much happens as spontaneous initiative, no one leading. Francisca's comments speak volumes about the Revolution. The very people who criticize it for being vertical themselves call out for leaders. And yet, the cultural scene here in Esteli is as popular, grassroots-driven, rich, varied, spread out, democratic and accesible as one can imagine. Certainly more so than in Managua. The Valentines Eve gig was held at Esteli's Casa de Cultura, a large piece of property with a swimming pool and bar formerly owned by the Somoza family. The place was packed with young people dressed in their favourite "American" fashion. Admission was free, so even the urchins of Esteli were there. Most everyone seemed to be searching for a partner. Young women whispered amongst themselves and held each other by the fingers. Young men now free from the fears of military conscription wandered restlessly. Several jumped or were pushed into the pool. On a stage backlit with red light, a young couple danced seductively to the song "Dreammaker." A handful of others played guitar and sang. Ofilio Picon was the guest act. Picon, who says his solo career is more fun than playing with the Palacaguinas, demonstrated his proficiency on the guitar. Noel Perez, who also wishes he had the breaks that Carlos Godoy has, sang romantic tangos and boleros from the thirties and fourties, and then played the song "Esteli" as a Valentines dedication. HOOCH, HERBS AND NATURAL BRILLO SS...Dave Kattenburg is a cooperant with the Berkeley-based group SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE, working as an advisor to the National Center for Popular Traditional Medicine, in Esteli. He is a regular contributor to THE SENTINEL, and sends us this...SS Nicaragua is a nation of shopkeepers. Surely, Carlos Fonseca must have recognized this. All up and down my street, my neighbors have set up little "tiendas" -- variety stores -- in their homes. To be sure, the phenomenon is a national one. There's hardly a home these days where a pair of Honduran bluejeans or baby slippers hasen't been hung from a rafter, or where Soviet sardines and Guatemalan tomato sauce don't sit collecting dust on a shelf nailed to a wall. I wanted to get something to eat, so I headed for a store at the corner north of where I live. As I approached, I realized that a young woman sitting at the entrance to her house, right directly across from where I live, could see me. Her family has just converted their front room into a shop. I have been pulled inside on a number of occasions and told of all the things I can now procure by simply strolling in my bare feet across the rubble and dirt in front of my door. Sofia recently yelled out to me that I can now buy onions there. She's urged me to shop there regularly. I feel I should. I try to shop exclusively in my neighborhood, at the smallest and most humble variety stores. But this time I just wanted my rice and cheese from the best-stocked place for that. Surreptitiously, I walked up to the variety store on the corner, got what I wanted and strolled back down to my front door, stealthily, with my rice and cheese held closely to my belly so Sofia couldn't see. I was not stealthy enough. "Jaime!," I heard behind me. This is what Sofia calls me. I don't know why. I turned around slightly. She was waving her open palm up and down. This signifies "come over." I put my cheese and rice inside and returned outside. Sofia was at her door, on the threshold of her front room. Like many front rooms in Nicaragua, this one has been turned into a humble shrine to consumerism. She offered me a tortilla, but I declined. Then she whispered something low. "You want some cususa?" "Oh!," I chimed. "You have cususa?!" Everyone leaped from their chairs a bit and Sofia's finger flew to her lips. I immediately recognized my gaffe and peered out the door, up and down the street, to see if anyone had heard. Across the street, next to my house, a Sandinista militant named Jorge sells liquor legally. Jorge's daughter lives next door with her husband, a senior officer of military justice for the Sandinista Army. Fortunately, no one had heard. Sofia hustled me through the back door of the front room and into the bedroom area. There were two beds. Behind one of them, Sofia stooped low and filled me a glass of clear liquid. I brought it to my nose first and took a whiff. The cususa was fragrant and fruity. I took a sip. Smooth, sweet and alcoholic, it was. This was traditional Nicaraguan hooch, distilled in much the same way as the Nahuas and Chorotegas and Sumos distilled it, >from corn, a thousand years ago. How sacred I thought, and toasted Coyolxauqui. Sofia had no idea what I was talking about. Given its pleasant taste and alcoholic nip, the nicest thing about Sophie's cususa is its price. As of February 11, 1991, it cost only eight million cordobas a liter. The U.S. dollar at that time was worth five million on the black market, which meant I could take one of Jorge's empty bottles and fill it up with Sofia's cususa for half the price of a bottle of Flor de Cana! This is exactly what I did. That evening several people came over to share it with me. In spite of my secretiveness, they were all in front of Sofia's door before too long. She knew what was up, and was trying to sell them cususa too. One of them, a chap named Filiberto who works with medicinal plants, turned out to know her. Before too long they were talking about the root of a plant called calaguala (Polydodium calaguala), which not only is good for the kidneys, but can be fermented like corn. I have tasted Filiberto's calaguala, and it's not bad. So while Sofia makes money distributing cususa for a wholesale bootlegger, she saves money buying calaguala for her kidney problem -- or what she imagines is a kidney problem. Several days after the drinking session, she invited me out back behind the house where she grows about a dozen species of medicinal plants, including apazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides), Hoja de aire, basil, aloe, achiote (annatto), lemongrass and altamiz (Ambrosia cumanensis). Sofia, like many Nicaraguans, has an eye for plants, and not just those that are medicinal or fermentable either. There's a vine growing beside my house with a large fruit shaped like a cucumber, but much larger. I thought it was cucumber once and cut the fruit open, but found it strangely honeycombed and dreadfully bitter. Later, Sofia caught me as I was entering my house and asked me if she could have some of my "paste." I was more than happy to oblige her. Paste, as it turns out, is Luffa cilindrica. When the fruit dries completely, the green skin can be chipped and peeled off. The pulp becomes a fibrous mass with the feel of a synthetic sponge. That's exactly how it's used here. The mass is slit, releasing black seeds, and then cut up into natural brillo pads for scouring pots and pans or scrubbing one's back. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY SS...Dylan Chance has been wandering through the shantytowns of Managua, sounding people out about the state of Nicaragua one year after Violeta Chamorro's upset victory. Here are his findings...SS When election polls opened in Nicaragua on the morning of February 25, 1990 -- one year ago -- virtually everyone expected that Daniel Ortega would trounce Violeta Chamorro, candidate of the right, thus foiling the U.S. in its final attempt to destroy the Sandinista Revolution. But in the biggest upset in Latin American history, Chamorro and her 14-party UNO alliance trounced Ortega. Three-quarters of a million Nicaraguans had apparently decided that there was no point in continuing with their revolution if the U.S. was dead set against it. Their decision seemed wise at the time. Washington had bankrolled Mrs. Chamorro's campaign to the tune of over ten million dollars. It seemed probable that George Bush would call off the war and economic and trade embargo if she won. The war did end, sort of, and with it the trade and economic embargo. But Washington never has much interest in shelling out the cash that's necesssary to reconstruct countries it wrecks. The profit margin would be small. When the Persian Gulf crisis erupted, Bush quickly funneled money in that direction, far away from Nicaragua. Washington's disinterest in helping Nicaragua recover economically, and the increasing demands of international banks (all of them complicit in U.S. government policy) that Nicaragua "pay of its debts," has come as a cruel blow to Nicaraguans. Reality one year after Chamorro's victory came as a particularly cruel blow to one infant girl, late in the morning of February 5. She was sleeping on a mattress in the Boer "asentamiento" or shantytown, just east of Rigoberto Lopez Perez stadium in Managua. Her mother was off at work, selling things in the Eastern Market. A bulldozer sent out by mayor Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo to clean out squatters ploughed into the humble shack, tumbling her about. The next day it was rumoured throughout Boer that the infant was dead, but no one knew for sure. The mother had disappeared, along with her belongings. Barrio organizer Mariano Mejia later told me that the infant had in fact died, but that the mother had left and her whereabouts were unknown. She did not want to press charges. She only wanted to leave. Her little girl had come into the world shortly after Violeta Chamorro's inauguration, and had died before the first anniversary of the elections. There are about a hundred asentamientos of wood, cardboard, plastic and zinc scattered throughout Managua. Many of them are located in the "ruins" of Managua, the remnants of the great 1972 earthquake, when according to Managuans most of the city's residential problems began. Today, there are more shantytowns than ever. Many of Nicaragua's unemployed and underemployed live there. Some 80,000 homes need to be constructed in the capital, community organizers say, but there is a brutal recession in the construction industry. Ironically, many unemployed construction workers live in places like Boer. Here are some of the recorded comments of people in the Boer and Santo Domingo asentamientos: "The hospitals used to have medicines," says Anna Rosa Vivas Rodriguez, originally from Monimbo, Masaya, now a vendor in the Eastern Market, sitting beside her shack in Santo Domingo. "Today, President Violeta Barrios is in charge...I went to the German hospital (Carlos Marx hospital). I have inflamed ovaries, and they told me that they didn't have gauze, they didn't even have alcohol. They didn't have anything. Not even anesthesia to operate on me. So what is the government of Nicaragua doing with the taxes that we market people at the Eastern Market are paying?...Arnoldo Aleman, that cripple, he wants to throw us out. Thank God he has a six-floor house, perhaps, because perhaps he lives by exploiting the people of Nicaragua...Thank God he has a place to live. We have a humble hut of cardboard because we're very poor. We have no resources. We need to have him listen to us, or come and face us, because we're going to wait for him here...we're prepared to pay for our house with Nicaraguan money. We don't use the dollar. He uses it, because he has his money, maybe, and that's his God, that person, Arnoldo Aleman, his money, his dollars. He thinks that with his dollars he'll go to Eternal Glory...The land is the people's. Here it's the people who are in charge!" One well dressed man stood in front of his house of wood and cardboard, trimming traces of a lawn. "We're prepared to fight to the end," he said. "We're not asking any (political) party for help. We're not in any party fight. What we see is the reality of things. What we see is the injustice he's committing, Aleman, with the people here, with Nicaraguan people...The asentamientos before, with the government before, there weren't that many problems, because there were guaranteed houses and yards, and each family built their house...There wasn't any problem with sabotage against houses. Now, with this new government, people are beginning to be mistreated." Maria Isabel Urbina stood in front of the shack where she lives with her husband, a carpenter, and three small children, in the Boer asentamiento. She sews. Barricades had been set up to block bulldozers. "They say they're going to use this land to build businesses, centers for I don't know what, tourism. This is the pretext they've used for not responding to the housing problem...We're not asking that they give a lot to everyone. Just sell the houses to us. We'll pay, as they say, every fifteen days, or month...If it's because the mayor doesn't want to see these houses because they're little humble shacks here, in the middle of the city, well, we haven't been able to make more or less nice houses because we don't know if they're going to kick us out or leave us...Let them sell us the plots of land, and we'll immediately begin to construct nice, decent houses that aren't ugly...We've installed light ourselves. This is why the light is weak. At 7 at night the light is pretty dim. It's hard to see, but here we are, surviving, while we see what happens. They gave support to the poor when the Sandinistas were here. They never really tried to throw people out like that. Throw them out to some other place, without giving them a house, a roof. If they threw someone out who had a place, they sent them to another place, that was clean, and bit by bit they'd install water, light and all that. Now they want to throw us out of here and they don't give us any security." "They say there's democracy," said a widow in Boer. "O.K. So we have the right to everything...I have six children. They took away my four poles. They knocked them down. Took them away (each one cost five dollars)." "These lands are bare," said one man. "Neither the Somocistas nor the Sandinistas dedicated themselves to improving this. Now that there's someone who needs this land -- we're Nicaraguans, we're not foreigners, we're Ni-ca- ra-guans -- why don't they let the people occupy land that belongs to Nicaragua? To the people? Dona Violeta says that she's going to provide everything, offer work, and here, now, it's been a year and there's no work here. In Nicaragua there's no work. We don't have anything to do!" "She lives well, eats well, sleeps well," said a woman, "and we don't know how we're going to live. Look at these people, how they are! Without water, without light!" "What the government wants here is a civil war," said Jesus Sequeira Garcia, 22 years old, originally from the central department of Boaco, the only person interviewed who identified himself as a Sandinista. Most everyone else denied party affiliation, or expressed anti-Sandinista views. "It's against all the poor and in favour of all the rich. And if it wants war, it'll have it, cause we Nicaraguans, we have blood! We've gone through ten years of war and we're not afraid. If there isn't a war with bullets, we'll have a war with tongues, cause we're good at that too. If Arnoldo Aleman wants a war with the poor, he'll have a war." "We're not Sandinista," said a woman. "We're not Violetista either. What we want is that he (Aleman) sell us (our house). We'll accept gladly. He should sell to us, but in cordobas. 'Chanchero'(garbage, old cordobas), as they say popularly. A just price. Because here, in reality, we're not in the United States, earning dollars. He's asking for dollars...In the year that this woman is going to complete, nothing's been seen. It's worse than when Daniel Ortega was here. Cause with that woman, what did she promise, taking over the presidency? That she'd help the people. That she'd help the poor. That she'd give a roof to whoever didn't have a roof. She's a woman who calls herself Catholic, moving all the beads of a rosary, but she doesn't even know what that means." "Nothing was done by the Somocistas," says Armando Arce, an organizer with the "Front for Popular Struggle," a group which unites 58 asentamientos throughout Managua. "Much less by the Sandinistas." "The Frente Sandinista hasen't offered any support to the poor," says Jose Daniel Bermudez, another FPS organizer. "What the Frente Sandinista fights and struggles for is for their own property. That's the struggle of the Frente Sandinista. Occupying the name of the poor. Of all of us. It's a lie, what's been said nationally and internationally, that they support the poor -- that's a lie. We characterize ourselves as members of the Front for Popular Struggle. The Front for Popular Struggle works for the survival of the poor." I spoke with Domingo Sanchez Salgado -- "El Chaguitillo" -- legendary founder of the Nicaraguan Socialist party and now a Sandinista deputy in the National Assembly. Sanchez Salgado is a lawyer and provides legal assistance to Managua asentamientos. He charges a small sum. He says he opposes free service. He set up a "Commission in the Defense of the Poor," and works together with the Sandinista "Communal Movement." According to Sanchez Salgado, people should not be seizing land like in Boer and Santo Domingo, but the municipality has no right to throw them out either, certainly not bulldoze shacks. He was enfuriated by the bulldozing incident, because he had only just spoken with Arnoldo Aleman, and Aleman had presented a plan to him for transferring the squatters to a better place. When I asked Chaguitillo about the Front for Popular Struggle, he got very agitated and screamed "MAP! MAP!" (Movimiento de Accion Popular...Nicaragua's Marxist-Leninist party). "They're ultraleftists, anarchists, agitators," he yelled. I suggested that people had to do something about their situation. He grabbed me by the arm and accused me of being a member of the MAP. Later, two members of the Communal Movement smiles and said that Chaguitillo's comments were personal. They told me that they are working together with other political forces who support squatters, including MAP, to find a solution to the housing problem.