Las Jaguitas

This has been one of the hardest blog entries for me to write by far. There have been plenty of thoughts running through my head these days, but getting it all down on paper has been a real challenge. You see, I cut my right hand while sharpening my machete the other day, and so for now I’m forced to grip the pen with my first few fingers and without the help of my thumb…

It was just after 6am, the hour that I show up to work each day, and I’m crouched down running my file over the machete preparing to do some serious damage to the overgrown brush I was sent to chop down with my other coworkers. After 95% of the machete is razor sharp, and I’m putting an edge on the very tip, the machete slips, and the nice sharp edge slides down the side of my hand. “I told you to be careful,” Armando remarks, without a hint of compassion, despite the blood running off my hand and onto my pants. “Hold still,” says Juan as he takes a small rag and wraps it around my thumb to slow the bleeding. Luckily it wasn’t bad enough to need stiches, so now it’s just slowly healing.

So I was actually able to find a job. It’s at a nearby farm that has 25 acres of plantain, coffee, and orange trees planted. We start work at 6am, and finish about noon everyday. It also has plenty of big, beautiful cedar and mohagany trees, among others. It’s really a beautiful place to work. In fact, the other day while working in the coffee, a howler monkey shit on me. Sure it smelled bad, but one has to be thankful to work in an environment as wild as this one is. Most days at work, my five coworkers and I are “volando machete,” or “flying our machetes,” which turns out to be unfortunately accurate sometimes, as I´ve seen the machetes slip out of someone´s sweaty hand as we´re working. We pass the days cutting down tall grass, maintaining and harvesting the plantains, and cutting grass for the horses to eat in the evenings. And as a reward for our hard work, we get paid a daily wage of 95 cordobas, or about $3.50. When I was working overtime on the cargo ships, I could make that in eight minutes…

Several friends of mine that I´ve come to know over the years of visiting this pueblo on TCU Spring Break trips helped me build my house. Misael, my closest friend here in the community, and his family had some empty space on their propery, and they graciously allowed me to set up shop there. The walls and roof of the house are made of sheet metal, and the floor is dirt, which classifies more or less as a lower middle class house here. Nicer houses are made of cinder block with a concrete floor, and poorer houses are made sheets of vinyl and bamboo. My kitchen is tacked on to the side of the house, where I light up the firewood each time I want to cook. The latrine and bathing areas are behind it. The most grueling aspect of the construction was digging the latrine. The hole is one meter by one meter wide, and all of the locals insisted that I dig it five meters deep. I think it will take me the rest of my life to fill it halfway up, but considering they´re the experts on latrines and not me, I went along with what they said. I don’t think I´ve ever sweat so much in my entire life, as I did digging that damn hole.

During the month or so that I was building my house, I stayed at a nearby retreat center that is run by several nuns. While I was there, there was an eight day retreat based on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and since one of the nuns invited me to attend, I decided to go. The Jesuit priest who directed the retreat was exceptional, and an expert at helping you to see the darkness inside of yourself and your own participation in the evils and injustices of the world. I, as well as many of the other participants in the retreats are fans of liberation theology, and tend to blame a lot of the injustices of the world on corrupt governments and large corporations. However, this priest helped all of us to see how we too are guilty, and need to struggle each day to recognize the injustices we create in the world, and the ways we oppress others.

Around that same time, the massacre in Las Jaguitas occurred. It didn´t make international news, but here in Nicaragua, it was a big deal. Basically, the police had set up a drug bust, and dressed themselves in civilian clothes and ski masks. They positioned themselves in a certain dangerous part of town, and prepared to stop a car that they believed to be full of drug traffickers. As the car approached, and the driver saw the masked men, he tried to speed off. The police opened fire, shooting to kill, and were quite successful. However, the car wasn´t being driven by drug traffickers, it was being driven by an innocent man and his family. They had tried to speed off, believing the masked men to be assailants, and only the father survived the police´s onslaught. The wife and children died. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega offered his condolences, but was quick to justify it as collateral damage of the ever important was on drugs. The policemen involved were convicted of negligent man slaughter instead of homicide, and received a very light jail sentence. No highly ranked official was ever tried.

Needless to say, much of the country was up in arms over the lack of respect for life and coverup by the police and government (which are basically the same entity here). One night while talking with a friend of mine, we began to argue about the situation. What aspect was the most troubling? What was the most threatening to the people of Nicaragua? Was it the fact that the innocent children were slaughtered, or the fact that the police apparently had orders to shoot to kill without the need to identify the targets, much less send the suspects to trial before being convicted? We argued from all different angles, each one of us convinced of our correctness. Soon I realized that I was evening listening to what my friend was saying, but instead only trying to craft my argument so that I could be declared the victor and show my intellectual superiority. I wasn´t interested in finding the truth of the situation, only in defending my pride. And then it dawned on me: my thought process in that situation was probably the exact same as President Ortega´s when he learned of the Las Jaguita´s massacre. I´m sure that as soon as he heard, he began crafting his argument to best defend his and his government´s position. Looking how to hide the weaknesses in his argument. How to protect his pride and power. I´m sure he wasn´t interested in listening to the opposition´s opinion, or seeking out the truth of the situation. The very same thought processes that I was following in my argument were the same ones that President Ortega utilized to make a mockery out of the justice system of Nicaragua and disrespect the innocent, slaughtered family. Had I been in his shoes, drunk with power and my own pride, I might have done the very same thing.

It made me think back on my retreat a few months ago, and how the priest challenged us to look inside of us each day to seek out the evils we hide inside. If we want to fight the injustices of the world, we must first fight the injustices within. We are all part of the problem, and we must all be part of the solution. It´s easy to throw stones at Daniel Ortega from a distance, and blame all of the country´s problems on him, but it´s a lot more difficult to stop and look inside and seek out the ways that I too am part of the problem. The corrupt governments and huge corporations are guilty, and we, as the society that supports and protects them, are guilty too. As Ghandi once said, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.