POST by Eliezer: Nica Hard Knock Life

Eliezer whilst on tour in the USA with Capital on the Edge

Hello my name is Eliezer. This week I am going to tell you about my country and the place where I live.

I live within a community, in a town that is close to the capital of Nicaragua, Managua. My barrio is a very poor place and the people who live in my community often steal and are hungry all the time.

The people in my barrio work on farms. They live off the land – they are subsistence farmers. Whatever they grow, they trade or sell in order to have enough to live on. Many families have a single cow, which gives families milk to drink.

In our community there are many social problems. Most of the youth drink alcohol and use drugs. The young people, when they become dependent on drugs and/or alcohol, then need to steal in order to maintain their addictions. It’s a terribly difficult cycle.

My desire is to see my community be more responsible and caring of each other, so that our barrio can move forward and have a brighter future, without these social problems plaguing us. The landscape of our barrio is beautiful, I wish the people were too.

The most gorgeous element of our physical environment are the calm fields, which are rich with both flora and fauna.

The farmland is a tough place. Ever since I was really little, I have worked out in the fields with my grandfather. He has shown me that agricultural work is a very difficult job, but there are few occupational choices in Nicaragua for me, and so I help out with great joy.

Everybody in Nicaragua works very hard, but we earn very little. Ordinary items are very expensive and the President, Daniel Ortega, does not do anything to make it any better and so our town suffers.

In Nicaragua, most kids do not have parents because they do not have enough money to support their families.  Mothers, all alone and without help, seek to try and get ahead with and for their kids. For this reason, the trade of prostitution prospers. People cannot find jobs, because there are none (80% unemployment rate).

Nicaragua is the second poorest country in all of the Western Hemisphere (North America, Central America, the Caribbean and South America) and the poverty makes it difficult for families to be happy. This is the life we must endure.

I always ask God to help Nicaragua so that one day we can all have a much better life.

On the plane, AMERICA BOUND, Eliezer  (middle) with Yordy and Jose (Capital on the Edge)

Hola mi nombre es Eliezer

Esta vez les vengo a contar una historia de mi país y del lugar donde vivo

El lugar donde vivo es una comunidad en un pueblo cerca de la capital de Nicaragua. Es un lugar muí pobre donde ay mucha delincuencia y hambruna la gente de ay trabaja en el campo las personas viven de la agricultura y de la ganadería pero ay mucha corrupción la mayoría de los jóvenes toman licor y consumen drogas lo que hace que la juventud comience a robar para comprar mas y mas drogas es una situación muí difícil.

Yo quiero que algún día mi comunidad  sea mas sociable i que la gente haga algo i pueda salir adelante que pueda encontrar un mejor futuro sin tantas cosas malas , porque una de las cosas que caracterizan donde vivo es la belleza de su paisaje.

Lo más bello de mi lugar es la tranquilidad del campo es rica en flora y fauna es un lugar donde aprendes que la vida no es fácil.

Desde muí pequeño trabajaba en el campo con mi abuelo el me enseño que la agricultura es un trabajo muí duro pero que no ay muchos trabajo de donde escoger en mi país.

Toda la gente de Nicaragua trabaja mucho i gana muí poco las cosas son muí caras el presidente no hace nada para mejorar la situación y el pueblo sufre, en Nicaragua la mayoría de los niños no tienen padres porque los padres no tienen como mantener a sus familias y las madres buscan como salir adelante sola con sus hijos así que ay mucha prostitución porque la gente no encuentra trabajo y es porque no hay.

Nicaragua es el segundo país más pobre del mundo por eso es difícil tener una familia feliz esto es lo que pasa en mi país siempre le pido a dios que ayude a Nicaragua para que algún día podemos tener una vida mejor.

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This story was written by a Nicaraguan youth, and was voluntarily given to Capital on the Edge for publishing. The subject choice was his entirely. He has elected to write about his experiences for the glory of God and so that others may learn from his experiences. The translation of this work is performed voluntarily and not professionally, hence there may be some errors. Any decisive deviation from the text is in consultation with the author, and is done so to make clear the life events written about and to provide further information so that the story is more understandable.  

This story was translated by Lorenzy and edited by Jed.

Economy: Venezuela, ALBA, Nicaragua - Past, Present & Future

In Nicaragua, ALBA became an everyday reality for millions of people. Though critics argue it’s impossible to account for the estimated $2.6 billion in ALBA aid that entered Sandinista coffers over the past six years, that money did allow the government to stabilize the country’s desperate energy sector by increasing power production and putting an end to daily blackouts. ALBA also provided electricity subsidies for low-consumption households, transportation subsidies for the working poor, and fellowships for university students. It funded road construction through dust-clouded barrios, provided roofing materials for leaky shanties, monthly cash handouts for thousands of government employees, and other assorted eleemosynary programs for the poor and not-so-poor.

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Politics: Nicaragua in Permanent Prayer for Chavez

Maduro, who warned incessantly about right-wing plots and foreign conspiracies to destabilize the country, seemed rather destabilized himself as he lashed out repeatedly at the opposition,  accusing them of being “traitors” and “enemies of the country” who were conspiring to create chaos in Venezuela to justify a foreign intervention by the “imperialists.” As proof of the international conspiracy, Maduro announced his government has expelled U.S. embassy official David Delmonaco for plotting to destabilize the country.

Maduro also talked about forming a specialized scientific commission to prove that Chávez’s cancer was the result of an “attack by his enemies.” Maduro said his government already has “lots of clues” to prove that Chávez’s cancer was some sort of act of biological warfare against the Venezuelan revolutionary leader.

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POLITICS: Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, Dead

"It has been reported in Venezuela that President Hugo Chavez has died after a long battle with cancer. Vice President Nicolas Maduro reportedly took to Venezuelan television to announce the 58-year-old had passed away.
He had been suffering an undisclosed pelvic cancer since June 2011 and had undergone four operations in Cuba. His last surgery was on December 11 and he had not been seen in public since."

This report could POTENTIALLY be huge for Nicaragua, as they depend on Venezuela for so much - particularly in terms of their relationship through ALBA.

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Education: Nicaragua asks Cuba to Help Revamp Education

“The textbooks are embarrassing... They present a story where everything the Sandinistas did was good and everything everyone else did was bad. It’s not history; it’s indoctrination of eight- and nine-year-olds.

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Politics: Sandinistas consolidate single-party rule in Nicaragua

A tin-pot election that started with the frightening possibility of electing a zombie governmentculminated in an overwhelming victory for the ruling Sandinista Front early Monday morning amid allegations of dirty tricks, official mischief, voter exclusion, political tomfoolery, post-electoral violence and system collapse...

As of early Monday morning, gangs of Sandinsitas and Liberals were clashing in La Paz Centro (León), there were reports of gunfire in Sebaco (Matagalpa) and Santo Domingo (Chontales), and bouts of violence in Jinotega. In addition, Núñez says the Sandinista Front reportedly cut the electricity in municipality of La Libertad (Chontales) when it started to appear that the PLI was going to win the mayor’s office in President Ortega’s hometown...

...the “zombie parties”—the ALN, APRE and the Conservative Party—are verifiably undead. In virtually all of the rural municipalities, the three phony parties won only one or two votes each. That means that not even the family members of the dead candidates voted for their deceased relative as a final gesture of loving memory.  The shameful electoral performance by those three parties offers compelling mathematical proof of their inexistence and—incidentally—of the CSE’s corruption...

The biggest opposition complaint yesterday was over inconsistencies in the voter registries. Many voters claimed their names had mysteriously disappeared from the voter registration lists posted at the voting centers where they had voted all their lives. Others complained that their names appeared on the main voter registration posted on the front wall of the voting center, but not on the list at the voting booth, which prevented them from casting their ballot.

The voter-registration problems are so chronic in Nicaragua that the phenomenon has its own name: “raton loco”—named after the voters who are made to run around like one of the three blind mice trying to figure out where they are supposed to vote (see how they run)...

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More than 20% of Nicaraguans who tried to vote Sunday were excluded from the polls because they did not appear on either of the two voter registries, according to a preliminary report by electoral watchdog the Institute for Development and Democracy (IPADE).

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Politics: Sandanistas eye Total Control of Nicaragua

Some 200 councilman candidates running for office this Sunday have died, according to estimates by the Independent Liberal Party (PLI). Fortunately, only two of them actually died during the campaign; the rest passed away long before their names were randomly plucked from an outdated voter registry to serve as ballot-fillers for the zombie parties that the Sandinista Front keeps locked in the barn to create an image of democratic pluralism during election season.

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Politics: First Lady Bewitches Nicaraguans

Murillo’s fame is related to her visibility, power and influence over the Sandinista Front; she even determines the party’s dress code, lexicon and music repertoire (the first lady writes the lyrics to all the Sandinistas’ campaign songs). Indeed, Murillo’s influence over the Sandinista Youth is like that of the hip-hop and rap stars of the early 1980s who influenced the way a whole generation of urban-dwelling teens dressed, spoke and loitered. Murillo, however, drops lyrics about peace, love, fraternity and unity.

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Politics: Iranian Ambassador Hosts Dinner Party for Lawmakers

In 2007, Iran promised to build a $230 million hydroelectric plant and a $350 million deep-water port on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. Though neither project happened, Iran’s overtures of friendship with Nicaragua have been cause for concern and speculation in both the United States and Israel.

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Politics: Nicaraguans Don't Want to Follow Chavez Toward Socialism

As Ortega’s approval ratings and popularity continue to soar, an overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans say they are feeling confident about the country’s direction and future. Indeed, 73% of those polled say they are pleased with Ortega’s leadership—a remarkable turnaround from four years ago, when the same polling firm found that 70% of Nicaraguans thought Ortega was leading the country in the wrong direction.

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Politics: Will a Chavez Victory Fulfill Nicaragua's Megaproject Dreams?

“Chávez needs to focus on increasing his country’s level of oil production and investing in logistics for the future. This project is a no-brainer; it’s the perfect arrangement because Nicaragua is an ideological ally and the refinery will give Chávez strategic access to the Chinese market, ” says Nicaraguan political analyst Arturo Cruz, President Daniel Ortega’s former ambassador to Washington and a professor of political science at INCAE.

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Politics: Nicaragua Warms to Chinese Investments

Nicaragua’s leftist government, which has diplomatic relations with Taiwan, is seeking to lure investments from China - in part to offset a possible loss of support from its regional ally Venezuela. 

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Politics: Coming Soon... Nicaragua's One Party Political System

The ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which since 2007 has eliminated virtually all democratic checks and balances by consolidating single-party control over all four branches of government and state institutions, will be going for a royal flush in November.

The party controlled by President Daniel Ortega and his omnipresent wife has stated that it expects to win “by an avalanche” in essentially every municipality. That prophecy, which will most likely come true, will be a deathblow to municipal autonomy (or what remains of it) and fulfill the president’s publically professed dream of converting Nicaragua into a one-party system.

The opposition fully expects the elections to be farce. The PLI says it’s participating in the process to document the fraud and to convert the spectacle into a “platform for rebellion.” 

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Politics: Nicaragua Exits from U.S. Military School

Stirred to action after the assassination on March 24, 1980, of Archbishop Óscar Romero by a right-wing death squad in El Salvador, Father Roy Bourgeois founded the U.S-based SOAW, and has been campaigning since 1990. He has called the school a “symbol of United States foreign policy whose role is always the same: to protect U.S. economic interests and control the natural resources of Latin American countries.” 

Opponents of the school point to a number of figures in Latin American history who have received training and then committed human rights abuses. Recently, graduate Pedro Pimentel Ríos of Guatemala was sentenced to a symbolic 6,060 years in prison for his actions during the 1982 Dos Erres Massacre that resulted in more than 200 deaths in that country. In total, 11 dictators have attended the school, from Argentina’s Leopoldo Galtieri, to Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt, whose scorched earth campaign has been classified as genocide by a U.N. commission. 

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Crime: Accused Mexican Drug Ring, posing as media, on Trial in Nicaragua

The 18 Mexicans said they were journalists from their country’s main television broadcaster, Televisa. They wore the company T-shirt, and the six vans they drove into Nicaragua bore the orange Televisa logo.

The vans contained equipment including computers and cameras. Oh, and also $9.2 million in cash hidden in secret compartments and traces of cocaine.

The exposure of the 18 has proved one of the most vivid illustrations to date of the well-known but often unseen spread of Mexican drug operations deep into Central America, long a conduit and increasingly a base of storage, production and marketing for Mexican cartels.

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Economy: The Nicaragua Canal

The Nicaraguan Congress, controlled by Ortega's allies, approved a bill on July 3 authorising construction of the inter-oceanic canal project, a joint public/private venture in which the state will have a 51 per cent stake and offer the remaining 49 per cent to countries, international organisations, corporations or individuals... Nicaragua is studying six potential routes, all of which traverse a section of Lake Nicaragua and one that would have ships navigate a portion of the San Juan River, the Nicaraguan-controlled waterway that forms the country's border with Costa Rica.

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