Nicaragua Network

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 2007

Nicanet Delegation Views New Government’s Efforts

July 16-22, 2007

We were a moderately diverse group of activists, students, and teachers, including elementary school and college teachers, some retired and some still teaching. Our goal as a delegation sponsored by the Nicaragua Network was to learn about efforts to challenge what is known as the Washington Consensus, sometimes known as "the privatization of everything," the economic model imposed by the United States and the international institutions it dominates. We visited offices and centers of the new Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega as well as projects that have been serving for years as models of people-centered development. We found excitement and hope as well as the problems and concerns that come with sudden change.

Our first visit, on July 16, was to the "Edgar Lang Sacasa" Health Center where we met with Dr. Emelina Hernandez. Dr. Hernandez explained that the new government had made a number of changes in the way health care was delivered to Nicaraguans. From 1990, when the FSLN left office, until 2007, patients could see a doctor for free at public clinics but had to pay for all tests and medications. In health clinics and hospitals under the new government inaugurated January 11, prescription drugs that are on the national formulary are free as are laboratory tests, x-rays, etc. This has resulted in an enormous increase in the number of patients who have to be seen by the same number of doctors.

Dr. Hernandez told us that doctors in the public health clinics make only about US$260 per month and so most of them have private practices. Even though their contracts specified five to eight hours work at the public clinics, doctors would rush out after only three hours. When the new government told doctors that they would have to fulfill their contracts, they went on strike! Dr. Hernandez said that the Health Ministry fears that if the doctors are pushed to work too many hours on such low salaries (the lowest in Central America) they will begin to leave the country. Therefore a compromise is being worked out.

Our next visit was to the Nueva Vida Fair Trade Sewing Cooperative in Ciudad Sandino outside Managua where we met with the group's treasurer Zulema Mena. She explained that Nueva Vida is both a fair trade factory and a free trade zone factory. It is fair trade because it is owned by the workers but it has also been granted the benefits afforded to free trade zone garment assembly plants, i.e., it does not have to pay import or export taxes.

Mena told us that the factory has 48 workers. She said that workers can join the cooperative after three months working at the factory. They usually work for nine hours, Monday through Friday. When we arrived at the factory on a Monday afternoon most of the workers were at home resting after completing an order over the weekend for the Presbyterian Church USA.

Most of the coop's orders for T-shirts, camisoles, blouses, infant clothing, etc. come to them through Maggie's Organics where you can order individual items at: www.organicclothes.com. For orders of 300 or more, go directly to the cooperative's web page at www.fairtradezone.jhc-cdca.org/

Mena explained that 50 women who had lost everything in Hurricane Mitch in 1998 built the factory themselves beginning in 1999. The Jubilee House Community loaned them US$100,000 for materials and machinery which they are now paying back.

After visiting the "fair trade zone" at the Nueva Vida Coop, we drove to the Los Brasiles Free Trade Zone at the hour when the maquiladoras were letting off workers. The many thousands of workers pouring out of the zone made us aware of the contrast between the small number of workers benefiting from fair trade that we had just seen at Nueva Vida and the vast numbers of people, mostly young, who work under oppressive conditions at the big internationally owned factories.

After good food and a good sleep at the Kairos School (Kairos set up our meetings and provided our logistics) we set off the next morning for the National Engineering University to meet with Suyen Cordoba and hear about the University's alternative energy project. The program was begun by Sue Kinne who, with a group of enthusiastic students at the university, formed the Grupo Fenix. Grupo Fenix is a non-profit organization that supports renewable energy and sustainable development, especially in low-income communities. It is comprised of the university center; a private solar business SUNISOLAR, formed by the students; and a non-government organization (NGO), Association Fenix. In Sabana Grande and other towns, people who were handicapped by land mine explosions put together photovoltaic panels for use in rural communities. SUNISOLAR also establishes stations to recharge, using solar power, batteries for homes, schools and community centers. Users make a minimum payment and the battery provides power for lights and TV sets (but not for electric irons) for up to two weeks. Grupo Fenix also has an active volunteer program where individuals and groups from such institutions as the University of Dayton come to work with National Engineering University students and SUNISOLAR in all of their projects.

Our group was set to meet with Miguel de Castilla, the Minister of Education (and one of Nicaragua's most prominent educators), but it turned out that the day of our meeting was also the day that the new national literacy campaign was to be inaugurated and the Minister was too busy. We instead met with General Secretary Marlene Valdivia, third in command at the Ministry.

Valdivia told us that on January 11th, when the new government took office, families stopped paying fees for their children to attend elementary school. "It hasn't been easy," she said. So many more children registered, she said, that they have had to put children under tarps and in churches.

Under the so-called "school autonomy" program imposed by the IMF and World Bank on Nicaragua as a condition for loans and debt relief, the national government paid only half the cost of running most of the nation's schools. The rest of the money had to be raised in the communities, mainly from poor parents. Under that system, the national government made payments to the schools based on attendance so, in order to receive more money from Managua, teachers and principals reported inflated numbers of students. Valdivia said that upon taking office the new Minister of Education was told that there were 1.5 million students in the nation's elementary school classrooms. So, Valdivia said, "We hoped to register between 1.8 and 2 million." What was our surprise, she said, when the schools filled to overflowing but the numbers reached only 950,000!

Valdivia explained that the schools had turned into small businesses in the attempt to raise money to support themselves. "Dismantling this is proving to be very hard," she said, adding that some schools still charge small fees. She stated that US$110 million has had to be assumed by the Ministry of Education with the ending of the school autonomy system. When asked where the government will get the money to replace the funds lost, she said that "Many friendly countries are ready to help," naming Spain, Venezuela and Mexico.

While we had hoped to be able to meet with an official at the Nicaraguan Water and Sewerage Company (ENACAL), that proved impossible. However, we were able to meet with the Nicaraguan Consumers' Defense Network whose national coordinator, Ruth Herrera, had been named head of ENACAL. Gonzalo Salgado told us that Nicaragua's constitution guarantees that public utilities remain in public hands. In spite of this, privatization of Nicaragua's public utilities began in 1990, he said, and telecommunications and electricity were privatized.

Because former coordinator of the Consumers' Defense Network, Ruth Herrera, had been named head of ENACAL, we were very curious to ask about her ability to put an end to the possibility of water privatization in Nicaragua. Salgado said that it would be wrong to say that all possibility of water privatization is closed off. The General Water Law was passed by the National Assembly and that established that water distribution will always be in public hands. However, he explained, sources of water could be given in concession to corporations. “We have to educate people about their rights to public resources,” he said, “and about their obligation to conserve them.”

Almost as an afterthought he added, “Don't be afraid of the Councils of Citizen Power [the new vehicle for citizen participation at the community level being promoted by the Ortega administration]; there are many legitimate and positive ways to promote participation.”

The next day, July 18, we set out early by van for San Ramon in the Department of Matagalpa to follow the “Ruta Justa del Café” best translated as the “Fair Trade Coffee Route.” Our first stop was the office of the San Ramon Union of Agricultural Cooperatives (UCA-San Ramon) where we met with Javier Galo. He told us, “Everything that we've accomplished is a result of solidarity and fair trade. Without those, our coffee farmers would be in Costa Rica or the United States as workers.” In the 1980s the revolutionary process encouraged the formation of cooperatives, he said, but in the 1990s many of them were broken up. He went on to say, “Our union was formed in 1990 to help cooperatives hold on to their land. By 1994 we had made contact with the fair trade movement. We and other unions of cooperatives created an export company, CECOCAFEN, in 1997. In 2001, coffee prices went way down causing the bankruptcy of many large growers but we survived!”

About 25% of CECOCAFEN's coffee is sold as Fair Trade, 25% as organic, 20% as specialty coffee, and the remainder (30%) is sold on the conventional market because of lack of demand for fair trade coffee. We learned that Starbucks is pushing to have large coffee plantations certified as Fair Trade growers. For the three components of Fair Trade, namely economic equity, environmental responsibility and social supports for farmers and their families, the large growers would like to substitute simply a fair price. Galo urged us to oppose any such changes.

We next travelled to the nearby village of La Reina to visit the Danilo Gonzalez Cooperative. Emelda Rayos, a member of the board of the cooperative, meeting with us in a small school house as the children were leaving for home and lunch, told us that her cooperative was formed by 53 members of which 23 were women. The cooperative owns 1,112 acres of which 390 are in forest. Of the remainder, each cooperative member family works 8.5 acres, planted mainly to corn and beans and 3.4 acres of coffee. The rest is farmed collectively or left fallow.

Rayos said that it was very important to them to sell to the Fair Trade market, adding, “We believe that it is the reason we have been able to survive; we've been able to renovate 136 acres of coffee and build houses.” She said that they get their seeds from their own coffee plants, those growing successfully at the highest elevations. The school benefits children from pre-school through second grade.

Our next stop was at the community of Yucul, where the Denis Ernesto Gonzalez Foundation has been working since the coffee crisis of 2001. Sandra Lopez, director of the Foundation, said that it works in eight communities including Yucul. She introduced Segundo Centeno, who explained that the work of the Foundation began in his community when the price of coffee fell and thousands of suddenly unemployed coffee workers put encampments on the sides of the region's highways to protest the fact that they and their families had nothing to eat. The idea of the agricultural projects for the coffee pickers began with the women, he said, adding “We've grown; both men and women. We feel good and are working, thanks to international solidarity.”

Centeno explained that they grow corn and beans for consumption and for sale on the local market. He added that they are now growing vegetables and fruits as well as some coffee. They are learning to grow more and more organic, he said, and working on soil conservation, including terracing on the slopes.

Lopez added that the Nicaragua Network had helped to get the agricultural projects going at the time of the coffee crash and helped to publicize the work of the Foundation which helped them get support from other groups.

When asked about the Zero Hunger Program of the new Ortega administration, Lopez said that it was unclear how it would work because at first the word went out that the program would work through existing non-governmental organizations and then later that it would not. She said that she hoped Zero Hunger would take into account the experience acquired by the organizations working with peasant farmers in recent years.

We spent the night at the Casa Materna in Matagalpa and after a good breakfast in the morning we learned from Director Jeronima Ubeda about how the center functions. Ubeda told us that the center was formed 16 years ago and has provided care to 11,800 pregnant women, most of them with high-risk pregnancies who need to give birth in the Matagalpa Regional Hospital rather than at home. She said that the term “high-risk” includes twins, breech births, very young or very old mothers and other conditions. The women are referred to the Casa Materna by health centers and 200 midwives in five municipalities in the Department of Matagalpa. Ubeda said that the Casa Materna has a training program for rural midwives, many of whom are illiterate. There are also talks at the center on family planning, hygiene, and literacy.

Because it was July 19th, we left the Casa Materna early to get ahead of the caravan of buses from the Department of Matagalpa heading to Managua for the rally in celebration of the 28th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. We arrived at Kairos in time for lunch and siesta before setting out for the Plaza de la Fe for the rally. The crowd was enormous (probably half a million people), packed shoulder to shoulder, and very festive. We stayed for fireworks and several early speeches before returning to Kairos to watch Daniel Ortega's speech on television.

Speeches were given first by the three visiting heads of state, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Martin Torrijos of Panama, and Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. In his speech, Ortega said that “The world is living a new moment. It's true - this global capitalism, headed by the US empire, has enormous strength, but ... united, the people of Latin America, Africa, Europe and the US (because in the US there is a movement of courageous people who are demanding that US troops leave Iraq) together and united we will have new victories!"

The next day we set off early for Esteli where we were met by Elvin Castellon, technical director at the offices of the Federation for the Integral Development of Peasant Farmers (FEDICAMP). The Nicaragua Network had hosted Castellon at our annual meeting in Washington, DC, in 2006 and sponsored a speaking tour in which he spoke to groups and colleges across the United States. Castellon introduced us to Miguel Marin, the president of FEDICAMP. Marin said that FEDICAMP is what is called a “second level organization” which accompanies eleven local organizations in ten northern municipalities. He told us that 57% of the beneficiaries of FEDICAMP's projects are women.

Elvin Castellon told us about FEDICAMP's environmental programs. “All our projects are organic,” he said. We promote soil enrichment, family gardens, and the planting of trees that contribute to family consumption such as mango, avocado, banana, etc., he said. FEDICAMP has planted 1.2 million trees and is in the process of planting 250,000 more.

“Because there is a scarcity of water we protect watersheds and help families build cisterns to capture rainwater,” he added. An improved cook stove, he said, costing $38 can cut the normal consumption of firewood down from an average of 20 sticks a day to from three to five sticks and this can make a large difference in a whole village.

Castellon said, “During the last sixteen years [since the Sandinista electoral loss in 1990] organizations like ours were formed to fulfill functions that should be the role of the state. We hope that this new [Sandinista] government will begin to do the tasks that we try to do.”

We then visited the United Hands Women's Collective Farm near Condega, affiliated with FEDICAMP, where we met and talked with the women. They explained to us how they use a natural pesticide instead of chemical pesticides as well as vermiculture (composting with worms) to make their soil more fertile. The women also have a tree nursery where they grow seedlings of mahogany and acacia as well as fruit trees. We all had a chance to plant trees in memory or in honor of a family member or friend.

After spending the night in Condega, we visited a model farm of the Center for Rural and Social Research, Development and Promotion (CIPRES) in Pueblo Nuevo. Norman Alfaro, coordinator for the northern region, introduced us to Lucila Gomez and her husband Pablo Lopez. Gomez is the treasurer of the Cofradia Cooperative which has 38 members and is one of seven that CIPRES works with in Pueblo Nuevo. Four of these cooperatives are composed only of women and three are mixed.

Gomez told us that each member of the cooperative started out with a pregnant cow, a pregnant sow, hens and a rooster, a bio-digester and seeds for crop diversification. She said that she and her husband had already given back one calf for the cooperative fund and that the black calf we saw in his small corral was their second. Each member also must give back two piglets and six chickens.

Alfaro emphasized the importance of organization and support, both horizontal (among cooperative members) and vertical (between cooperative members and CIPRES technical assistance). Without this, peasant farmers cannot identify problems and advocate for themselves. He said that he hoped that the Ortega administration's Zero Hunger Program, based on the CIPRES model, takes this principle into account. He said that the Ministry of Agriculture was running the program now, although CIPRES helped organize in the northern area of the country.

This was our last visit. We had had many meetings and visited many sites which challenged the Washington Consensus and which attempted to build a different model based not on adding to the wealth of the stockholders of the transnational corporations but on increasing the well-being of the majority of Nicaraguans. We found that the government's new programs in education, health and rural poverty reduction were moving forward even though the road was not easy. And we found projects begun outside the government sphere continue to work successfully.

When we did an evaluation of the whole trip there were some who wanted fewer meetings in offices and more site visits and others who thought that the balance of meetings with government officials or NGO leaders and travel to factories and cooperatives was just right. All agreed that more exercise needed to be planned into the schedule, given that we were taken everywhere in a (very comfortable) van and had very little chance to walk. We will take these and other recommendations into account when we plan the next Nicanet delegation!

By Katherine Hoyt with the help of members of the delegation