|
|
 |
 |
| Central American University - UCA |
 |
|
Number 126 | Enero 1992 |
 |
|
|
Nicaragua
NICARAGUA BRIEFS
Envío team
CONTRACEPTIVES IN SHORT SUPPLY
Nicaraguan gynecologists and health educators recently sounded the alarm when the country's health centers suspended the free provision of contraceptives. In 1990, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) reported that only 27% of Nicaraguan women use some contraceptive method, a statistic likely to fall in the coming months because of this new policy.
Dr. Ana María Pizarro, a specialist at the Bertha Calderón Women's Hospital and director of Sí Mujer, a women's health and legal clinic, comments that "in the primary health care centers run
by the Ministry of Health, nothing is available, not even condoms." Pizarro says that, during the
1980s, MINSA offered free contraceptives at the country's health centers as part of its maternal-infant health program, but now "that program is completely paralyzed."
The most commonly used contraceptive methods in Nicaragua are birth control pills and IUDS, both methods that can pose serious risks to women's health. Pills and IUDS can be purchased in private pharmacies or clinics, but at prices that are often prohibitive for poor or working class women—a month's supply of pills, for instance, can cost as much as $10 or $12. With a growing consciousness about AIDS, condoms are increasingly available, but many women say it is difficult to convince men to use them.
According to PAHO statistics, 900,000 women in Nicaragua are of child-bearing age, and over 187,000 of those will give birth this year—many because there are simply no alternatives available to them.
ARMS IN, DRUGS OUT
Responding to allegations made public in the trial of former Panamanian General and head of state Manuel Noriega that Cubans, using Nicaragua as a base, were involved in drug trafficking during the 1980s, Daniel Ortega has challenged the US to call him as a witness in the case.
"I would like to go and testify, to demonstrate who was promoting drug trafficking at that time," declared Ortega, adding that "Reagan and CIA and other US officials were involved in supplying arms to the contra forces; they're the international criminals." Ortega echoed the accusation made by some journalists during the 1980s that CIA planes carrying arms to the contras made the return flights to the US full of drugs.
CHEMICAL CLOUD
On the shores of Lake Xolotlán, as the pre-Colombian indigenous peoples called Lake Managua, sits the Penwalt plant, in operation since the early 1960s. Penwalt produces caustic soda and chlorine, and exports its products throughout Central America, posting some $3 million in annual earnings. The plant's waste products include mercury and chlorine gas, and neighborhoods in the vicinity are often unwilling hosts to a fine mist of the gas, as the plant expels its excess into the atmosphere.
What has been an ongoing problem for many took on the proportions of a potential disaster in the early morning hours of November 20, when a worker at the plant, as part of the neutralization process inherent to the production of caustic soda, released eight tons of chlorine into the air in the space of a few hours. In so doing, he broke with all the standards established by the plant itself. Official reports say that there were "anomalies" in the attempt to transfer the chlorine to the neighboring chemical plant Hercasa, and that the worker made a unilateral decision to release the gas into the atmosphere. That decision sent a poisonous cloud directly over the populous, working-class neighborhood of Ciudad Sandino, some three kilometers west of the plant.
The cloud affected hundreds of Ciudad Sandino's residents. "I was asleep, when I woke up feeling like I could hardly breathe. I began to cough, and my throat and eyes were burning," said Zoila Christophe. Lucrecia Centeño, who is asthmatic, said, "It's been a year since I had an attack. In the early morning I began to vomit, I felt nausea and my whole body was trembling." She and her elderly mother were taken to the Lenin Fonseca Hospital for treatment. Yet another woman later died from complications relating to the chemical cloud. Although Penwalt did initially distribute some medication to the affected population, the plant has refused to compensate the victims.
According to the National Civil Defense office, a branch of the army in charge of dealing with both natural and manmade disasters, this is the first accident of this scale at Penwalt. One official described it as "an accident waiting to happen," second in scope only to a 1984 accident at the Proagro pesticide warehouses.
Civil Defense authorities have recommended the creation of an Environmental Control Office with full-time monitoring of pollution levels, to be located on the plant site and financed by Penwalt itself, along with a fund to compensate potential victims of any future accidents. An alternative recommendation is to move the plant to an unpopulated site.
Environmentalists have long called on the government to close Penwalt which, like many third world industries, has systematically violated international standards, knowing that the country can ill afford to lose the hard currency it generates. Environmental groups cite not only the continuing problems with chlorine gas, but the role of mercury in polluting, perhaps to the point of no return, Lake Xolotlán and the groundwater near the plant.
As envío went to press, Minister of Economy Silvio de Franco said the plant would be "gradually" shut down, and that by mid-1992 its operations will cease. Yet Radio La Primerísima reports that Penwalt authorities have contacted similar plants in the region, asking them to refuse to sell caustic soda to Nicaragua, in an effort to force the government to keep the plant open.
DISARMAMENT BRIGADE FORMED
A special brigade to carry out the task of disarming the different armed bands operating in Nicaragua's rural areas was formed in early November. It is made up of 280 men, including recontras, recompas, demobilized contras, laid off Sandinista army soldiers as well as current members of the army and police. The brigade, operating under army supervision, will receive six weeks of special training. Its first mission will be to assist in the safe collection and transport of the coffee harvest in the departments of Matagalpa and Jinotega.
The bunks outfitted for the brigade include mattresses and sheets that read "Sandinista Popular Army," which initially discomfited the former contra and recontra members of the brigade. Neither the recontras nor recompas had any desire to talk to each other in the first days of training, according to Barricada, and those who made the first attempts at bridging the gap were scoffed at by their own colleagues. Within a week, however, they were all eating and hanging out together in what was described as a "surreal" example of national reconciliation.
CHOLERA: ONE, AND COUNTING
After months of preparations by the Ministry of Health, dire predictions about the shape of a cholera epidemic in the country and a deluge of public service announcements explaining what cholera is, how it is spread and how to prevent it, the first case of cholera in Nicaragua was recorded in a place where virtually nobody expected to see it. A seven-week-old infant living in a squatter settlement only yards away from the US Embassy on the northwestern edge of Managua was diagnosed with cholera on November 11.
Nicaragua had expected the first cases to hit along the border area with Honduras and make their way into the country along the Pan-American highway. Minister Ernesto Salmerón said, "In this case, the behavior of the disease is not normal, but in fact is bizarre." Health experts are still not sure precisely why the disease showed up where it did, and some felt that its appearance so far inside Nicaragua means that the country is sitting on an epidemiological powder keg. Salmerón hypothesized that a fly carrying the virus landed on the breast of the mother and thus infected the nursing baby. The infant is now out of danger.
A medical brigade, composed of military doctors and MINSA personnel, set up a field testing and control center in the barrio, and is assisting the population to take ongoing precautions to prevent any further outbreaks of the disease.
After the first case, there were reports of several others in the same barrio, as well as in Bluefields, all of which turned out to be false alarms. There is much speculation about why no other cases have been recorded to date. One reason given is that diarrhea, one of the key symptoms of cholera, is so common in Nicaragua that many people may not be receiving accurate diagnoses. Sooner or later, health authorities warn, the disease is bound to
erupt into a full-scale epidemic.
ROLLING BACK FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION
Education Minister Humberto Belli announced in mid-November that, effective with the 1992 academic year, all public school students will be required to pay a monthly fee—five córdobas (US$1) for primary students and ten ($2) for secondary students. Belli said the new fees would raise some 30 million córdobas ($5 million) to finance the enactment of the law regulating the teaching profession.
But Mario Quintana, national head of the teachers' union ANDEN, called Belli's decision "unconstitutional" and complained that ANDEN had not been consulted. Article 119 of the Nicaraguan Constitution guarantees free education to all students through the primary grades. Quintana added that Belli is also violating the agreements reached between the Ministry of Education (MED) and ANDEN to end the teachers' strike last May.
The fees are one more blow for many impoverished families who are already stretching their budgets and imaginations to somehow keep their children in school. Cándida Bojorge, mother of three school-age children, says the new measures "will really affect me; my husband earns 300 córdobas a month, and we already have to buy school materials, and buy the kids clothes and shoes. We'll probably have to take two of them out of school." Her children attend a public school in poor physical repair, with virtually no resources, and are already paying a voluntary fee for school upkeep.
Responding to Belli's announcement, former education minister Father Fernando Cardenal declared that "the key issue is that this is a violation of the Constitution; if we allow this today, it will be 5 or 10 córdobas, but next year it could be 50, or 100, córdobas." He added that "we are facing a government that is promoting a neoliberal economy, and they need a privatized, elitist educational system."
Several days after Belli's announcement, a MED adviser admitted that it was a first step in the process of privatizing education. Francisco Arellano said, "There is a trend towards privatization in the country today, and I don't think we should see it in negative terms." Arellano called the concept of free education "paternalistic."
ABORTION DEBATE HEATS UP
In his homily of November 24, Cardinal Obando y Bravo called on the government to take action against Nicaragua's rising abortion rate. He compared abortion to torture, asking why there was not an outcry against abortion, as there would be with torture. Obando's homily comes on the heels of the late October declarations by Dr. Rafael Cabrera, who attributed the growing number of abortions to "a well-organized and clandestine criminal element." Quoted in La Prensa, Cabrera blamed the problem on "the feminism promoted by the previous regime," and said a feminist movement in the US "has its guns trained on Latin America... and we Nicaraguans must be on the alert."
Cabrera met with a swift and fierce response from well-known journalist Sofía Montenegro, who wrote in Barricada, "Hallelujah! La Prensa has finally realized there's a problem with abortion." Montenegro goes on to lament the fact that Cabrera and La Prensa complete ignore PAHO statistics about the link between abortions and maternal mortality. In May, the Bertha Calderón Women's Hospital reported a maternal mortality rate of 405 deaths (for every 100,000 live births), up from 100 deaths in 1983-84. Over one-third of those deaths are due to complications among women seeking help after a botched attempt to abort illegally.
Montenegro asks, "Is it feminism that is responsible for this, or the neoliberal policies of massive unemployment, privatization and cutbacks in social services that are forcing more women to turn to abortion?" Responding to Cabrera's accusations against women's clinics, which he says are performing abortions and must be shut down, she charges that many "respectable" doctors who speak out against abortion publicly are performing them in their private clinics, for a fee of US$300-$500. Some women's organizations, she maintains, would be only too willing to expose their names. "We'll have to see who throws the first stone," she warns.
PASTORAL LETTER TAKES HARD LINE
The Nicaraguan Bishops' Conference issued a pastoral letter on November 23 in which it strongly criticized Violeta Chamorro's government for not taking a hard enough line to deal with various social problems that have arisen. "The government seems incapable of carrying out justice," the letter says. "So many crimes and terrorist acts continue with impunity... [a situation] more lamentable when it is covered up with the excuse of a desire for reconciliation and peace." Though the bishops generally applaud the stabilization program and moves towards massive privatization, they contradictorily charged that "free market activity cannot create or maintain the conditions for justice and social peace." They also attacked military spending, "unjustifiable in a country that has been pacified internally and does not have any conflicts with its neighbors."
In what some observers interpreted as a slap at Minister of the Presidency Antonio Lacayo, the bishops said that the church "cannot favor the formation of restricted leadership groups who, because of personal interests or ideological motives, usurp the state's power." Praising the letter, National Assembly president Alfredo César told journalists that it indicated support for his political positions. Lacayo, on the other hand, defended the government, declaring that the decision to use force is a very complex one that must be made carefully and on a daily basis. Lacayo criticized the bishops for not condemning recontra commander Indomable's ongoing military actions in the north, which are hindering the coffee harvest, key to the government's export program.
Several analysts commented on the politically charged nature of the pastoral letter, one noting that it read as if Vice President Virgilio Godoy had written it.
Writing in Barricada, commentator Roberto Fonseca called the letter's wording on the media "threatening" and a "declaration of war" against the media. The letter calls on "Christian and Catholic businessmen to not use media that have opted for immorality as a source of profit."
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America