Yo ho ho...

The sun burnt my back to the point where my skin began to bubble. A coral cut open the bottom of my mildly fungus-infected foot. And I lost my voice as a result of spending at least four hours hollering like a pirate.

I would say that my time on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua was an overwhelming success.

There are places on this planet too beautiful to describe. La costa Caribe de Nicaragua has an abundance of them. We got a little taste of the area's beauty last week and I can't wait for more.

Our trip to the coast was made in effort to learn about the differences between the eastern and western halves of Nicaragua. To say that these two regions of the country are different is a gross understatement. In fact, to say that they are different worlds is only mildly closer to the truth.

To make an extremely long and complicated story short, what is now the autonomous region of Nicaragua was once its own nation. It has its own language (six of them actually), its own ethnic make up, and its own traditions. The region has its own history as well, but that history is bitterly intertwined with the history of Nicaragua as a whole. Initially a solely indigenous region, the Caribbean coast was later made into a thriving British protectorate, used to aid to the English in their struggles against the Spanish in exchange for protection and trade. However, this symbiotic relationship was not to last. In the beginning of the 19th century, the western half of Nicaragua had won its independence from Spain. With the Monroe Doctrine coming into effect around the same time, the United States had asserted that the whole of North and South America was its domain. As a result, Great Britain was given the boot from the area that is now the autonomous coast of Nicaragua. By 1894 Nicaragua, then only in consisting in the western half of the land mass, was engaged in open war with Honduras and the decision was made to occupy the then sovereign region of the eastern coast. Suffice to say, a few shady deals and a couple of popular insurrections later and the Caribbean Coast was incorporated into Nicaragua, expressly without the consent of the people that lived there.

The decades that followed this usurpation of power were far from pleasant for the people of the coast; their languages and customs were outlawed, their lands were taken, their resources were plundered, generals and military men from the capital in Managua were undemocratically installed as political leaders, and the people of the communities were relegated to the status of second class citizens at the very best. A part of the motivation for this maltreatment can be traced to the historically adversarial relationship that existed between the eastern and western peoples; the former being employed to fight in the interest of the British crown and the latter for Spain. But another aspect of motivation is the presence of racism that often flies below the radar of Nicaraguan social problems.

The Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua is visibly distinct from the west in many respects, particularly its ethnic make up. The coast has black people. Lots of black people, lots more than any other part of the country. They are the descendants of enslaved peoples once held by England. Following the expulsion of the British, many of these families assumed control of the farms and businesses that their captors once maintained. In conjunction with their ability to speak English, the Afro-descendants of the coast were able to establish profitable trade relations with the United States and surrounding ports, particularly in New Orleans. The government in Managua, however, was far from proactive paragon of diversity and executed a number of laws that discriminated against Nicaraguans with particular skin complexions or ancestral backgrounds. The same sort of treatment was applied to the many indigenous groups of the area as well.

This was the socio-political context of the coast for decades. Not until after the Sandinista revolution of 1979, did the people of the region receive a glimmer of hope for change. It came in the form of an offer from the new government. The offer stipulated that the people of the coast had the right to make their wishes known and needed simply to articulate those wishes to the new power structure and work could commence. The people of the coast jumped on the opportunity. Their nearly unanimous answer was autonomy. That was the easy part. Just about everyone wanted a return, to whatever degree it was possible, to the way of life and the freedom the coast enjoyed in the centuries before western domination. The hard part was coming up with a definition of autonomy everyone could agree with. Some argued it should only be for the indigenous populations. Some argued it should only be for the African descendants. And still others argued that the only real autonomy was autonomy for all those living on the coast.

The process of defining autonomy took nearly a decade to come to fruition. The counter-revolution engulfing the rest of Nicaragua during this period inflamed the debate to levels of extreme violence when the predominant positions in the argument were artificially associated with agendas of the country's disputing factions. In 1986, consensus finally arrived in the form of a definition asserting that autonomy was the, ¨...The recognition and effective exercise of the historical rights of the indigenous peoples and ethnic communities of the coast of Nicaragua in the context of national unity.¨ This definition was then translated into a number of laws intended, in theory, to reflect the notion autonomy in legal writ. Unfortunately, true autonomy has yet to arrive for the people of the coast. A recent report investigating the laws of autonomy in the region alleges that 85% of the laws guaranteed by the government are not being fully realized.

I find this allegation incredibly intriguing. If it is in fact true, then I would say a serious miscarriage of justice is being perpetuated on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. I have recently found out that I am not going to receive authorization to return to El Salvador for my final month long independent study project. Ironically enough, this is because the phenomenon I sought to study in El Salvador, namely the presence of gangs in the country and the violence that follows in their wake, has risen to level where my security as a student in the region cannot be adequately guaranteed. As a result, I am going to be returning to the coast with more questions about this struggle for autonomy. I want to know what rights in particular the people of the coast feel they are being denied, who is responsible for withholding those rights, and what efforts are being made to rescue them.

That and I want to get a killer tan.

A pirate´s life for me...

La costa...

Carnival...

We went to a ¨carnival¨ in downtown Managua
last weekend. I think it would be more accurately
described as, ¨The biggest, craziest, seven-hour shit show in history.¨ I loved it.