| Number 22 | March 24, 1999 |
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This Week: |
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Greetings, We returned two weeks ago from 5 weeks in Nicaragua. I was healthy as a horse the whole time we were there, then came down with a major cold the day after we returned. Go figure. (I'm better now, so stop worrying about me.) Later, Nygaard |
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We returned two weeks ago from 5 weeks in Nicaragua. I was healthy as a horse the whole time we were there, then came down with a major cold the day after we returned. Go figure. (I'm better now, so stop worrying about me.) In what I am fairly certain was a coincidence, President Clinton visited Nicaragua while we were there. We watched part of his speech on a TV which had been set up on the porch of a coffee cooperative that we visited. This cooperative is located on the slopes of Volcano Madera on the island of Ometepe in the middle of Cocibolca, the tenth-largest lake in the world. A very "remote" place; very rural, very poor. The visit of Clinton was watched by all with great interest. A man with whom I spoke told me that he thought President Clinton was a good president, very compassionate and caring. I wanted to say, "If you knew Clinton like I know Clinton..." but I just let him talk. Clinton's Central American agenda had essentially two components. The lesser component had the President making an appearance at the sites of the greatest damage from the recent hurricane, where he promised almost a billion dollars in U.S. aid for reconstruction in the region. I doubt that the President ever expected to be able to deliver such an amount and, sure enough, within a couple of days the Republicans in Congress indicated that the money couldn't be appropriated without cutting some other, less worthy, program - child nutrition, perhaps. Balanced budget, y'know. This response was duly noted in Nicaragua. So, this guy promises something he knows he can't deliver, with the expectation that the "opposition" party will assure that said failure to deliver will not be attributed to himself. The result? President Compassion comes off looking like a decent man with noble intentions struggling against the reactionary forces of the Right. So vote for Al Gore in 2000! Omigod, love him or hate him, this President is a political genius, dontcha think? The second, and more important, part of the President's agenda had to do with economics, as always. Essentially, the U.S. government wants to extend the North American Free Trade Agreement to all of Central America. He brought various functionaries along with him who labored in obscurity in the offices of the banks and financial institutions of the region during the President's visit. I say that they labored in obscurity because, as is usually the case, the television cameras find the happy-face speeches of Presidents much more compelling than those boring meetings where they only talk about dull stuff like tariffs, the environment, wages, profit repatriation, and zzzzzz.... How many of you readers are old enough to remember President Kennedy's speech where he uttered the famous phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner! Lots of people do remember that quote, and the warm response it received, but very few remember what his policies toward Germany actually were. Likewise, in the mountains of Nicaragua, the cameras were rolling as the President uttered his one sentence in Spanish: "Somos hermanos y nos ayudaremos." ("We are brothers and we will help each other." As with Kennedy, I'm sure this is all that most people will remember of the President's historic visit. Certainly this is what was on the lips of many of the people I spoke with after the President left. The down-and-dirty economic negotiations were thus relegated to the business pages, in stories that will be read by few and understood by even fewer. I close this week's edition of NN with the following opinion piece, which appeared in the Managua daily, "El Nuevo Diario," on Thursday, March 11, 1999, three days after President Clinton visited Nicaragua. Bear in mind that this is not some rag-tag left wing paper; this is one of the major Managua papers, distributed throughout the country. The translation was done by myself. More on Nicaragua in future Nygaard Notes. |
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by Orlando Nuñez Many years ago, the future invader used to call Ruben Darío [Nicaragua's revered 20th-century writer and poet] the most powerful leader in the land; but these words are out of touch with today's reality. Bill Clinton, president of the United States, found himself today in Nicaragua directing in person the details for the end-of-the-century party. For us, this story began five centuries ago, so many years of watchfulness that the loincloth covering our private parts ended up being no more than a forgotten blink. Conquest, colonization, wars of independence, decolonization, socialist revolution, wars and movements for national liberation, national capitalisms, Marshall Plan, Alliance for Progress, welfare states, Third-World socialism, Cold War and low-intensity war, the collapse of Communism and the abandonment of Keynesianism, armed invasions, firebombings throughout the world, civil interventions to adjust to the raising of the borders in the periphery, financial crises. What is this thing called "globalization?" the latest master asks the today's Third-World child. "The raising, master, of all borders, limits, and criticisms that used to protect us from the wolf," answered Little Red Riding Hood. "The lifting of the economic borders put in by the State in the war of unfavorable prices for our products and manufacturers, the removing of the political limits that the State used to set up to the exploitation of people and of nature, and finally, the lifting of the moral censure that protects the citizenry from the abuses of competition and the possessiveness of the capitalist system." "A single army!" the Sandinistas used to shout, "protecting the nation's borders." "A single army!" says Clinton, "expanding the borders of the World State and dismantling all domestic borders for the greater glory of its McDonald's and it's cheap and nasty junk." The end-of-the-century party is danced to the sound of a woeful song, and the final dance is performed by the nation-states. One by one, the presidents of two hundred local governments carry out this first ritual of the globalized nation, smiling and on their knees before the supreme monarch. In my white kingdom, says Clinton, a change of rooms or of lovers does not conceal the Indian sun nor the Mestizo moon. It's not important that my subjects have different languages, religions, or coins, as long as we all think in English, as long as we all worship one market, as long as we all count in dollars the time it will take us to sign the commercial treaty with the white devil that lives in the Bank in the basement of the northern caverns. "Who is Clinton?" the new generations ask. And the most believing of the believers to the most horrible losers answer: "President Clinton is a white and pure man from the kingdom of the West, without historical sin for the disappearance of millions of victims who are dying in the modern genocides, the owner and God of the Persian sky and the American land, the king of kings who has come to judge the sinful regimes that one day were bold enough to cut the fingernails of the invisible hand of the market in the black night of their national dreams, who has deigned to descend to the Hades of the Sandinista mountains, recently rid of the latest Marines, offering us redemption in the dawn of the next millennium, if we will repeat with them: "Regulation and protectionism only for the North Americans and only in order to maintain the system for the benefit of the transnational companies (vox Clinton, vox Dei), in spite of the Asian and Latin American financial crises and the depression of the real economies of the whole world and in spite of the social misery and the pillaging of nature." For our part, fine gentlemen, permit us to say: We think, and therefore we disagree with all of you. And in regard to your neoliberal orthodoxy, we prefer social and democratic control of the economy and of the market, in service of the welfare of all men and all women (vox Dei vox populi). And the voice of the people is still the voice of the workers and the people of the whole world. |