Nicaragua Contrast

About a decade ago, I made plans to lead a study tour on the geography of coffee to Nicaragua. I would go in January 2006, and then perhaps take the same concept to another country. As anybody who knows me is well aware, I fell in love with the place, and as I write this I am planning my ninth visit for January 2015. My wife has gone with me twice, and I am pleased -- as are my Nicaraguan friends -- that our daughter will be going with me this time.

My comfort in bringing both students and family members is my answer to the most common question I get about my travel there: "Is it safe?" Of course, no place is perfectly safe; murders happen even in our bucolic home town in New England. But Nicaragua is much safer than most people north of the Rio Grande would imagine, and is in fact among the least dangerous places in Latin America, despite having one of the highest levels of poverty.

As violence in Central America drives a refugee crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, it is important to understand the geography of that violence -- it is prevalent in four countries, three of which have been the "beneficiaries" of U.S. involvement. In What About Nicaragua?, Tim Rogers describes some of the reasons that Nicaragua is not part of the current crisis. (Thanks to my student Tom for finding this article!)

The article is not just cheerleading for the Sandinistas -- he points out some of the very real problems with Ortega's strange second run as president. But the article does call into serious question how and why the United States has continued disastrous policies in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Central America crime rates -- map by Fusion.

Behind the Citgo Sign

One benefit of the extreme traffic delays caused by Winter Storm Saturn on a Friday back in March was that I had a lot of time to listen to the radio in our own trusty Saturn as I alternately slid, slogged, and sat between our home and our daughter's school. I now write in October, as I discover this article in my "draft" folder. I was prompted to look for it as I read an excellent student paper on Venezuela. It is a coincidence that world attention will soon be on a stadium that sits just below the Citgo sign in Boston!

In addition to a lovely story about the Iditarod, I heard this thought-provoking piece about the recently departed and scarcely mourned president of Venezuela.


Whenever I think about Venezuela, my first thought is of a friend we had in college, with whom my future wife Pam was able to visit the country in 1986, when its economy was prospering and its politics were of no great interest. Unlike many of its neighbors, Venezuela had tilted neither very far left nor very far right at that time, so I actually knew very little about it at the time. I often wonder what our friend's middle-class family thinks of all the changes since Chavez came to power in 1999, and whether they are even still in Venezuela.

My second thought about Venezuela is always of Jimmy Stewart mispronouncing its name in the 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life. As he thumbs through a stack of notices for possible adventures abroad, he mentions Ven-zuh-WHALE-uh oil fields.

A Boston Icon, based
in Caracas

Pam's visit to Venezuela came four decades after this cinematic nugget, and we hardly even noticed the country's purchase of a 50-percent stake in Citgo that year. In between, Venezuela had helped to found OPEC as a way to gain some influence over the rate at which oil was being exploited, and thereby increase its share of the wealth in the core that was being built by the depletion of oil in the periphery. Its purchase of a retail network allowed for vertical integration to capture an even greater portion of the wealth generated by its oil. In  2000, one of the first achievements of the newly elected Chavez was to purchase the remaining shares of Citgo, making a familiar U.S. brand part of Venezuela's national patrimony.

This January, I was in Nicaragua in the days leading up to Chavez' latest inauguration, and speculation about his longevity -- including the possibility that he was already dead -- intensified. It was during this time that Julia Sweig wrote a cogent analysis of the Chavez period for The Atlantic, in which she observes that:

The 14 years of his tenure coincided with a consensus across the continent favoring socially inclusive economic growth, democratic representation, and independence from the U.S. national security and foreign policy priorities of the previous century. 

In the United States, opposition to Chavez at the highest levels of government was thoroughly bipartisan, further evidence that in their acceptance of the status quo in the world economic order that was established at a hotel in New Hampshire so long ago.

Victoria's Real Secret

This image recently appeared on the very popular, self-deprecating So Mexican page on Facebook. The post and most online comments reference the pulga -- flea-market -- as a bargain-hunter's dream that is widely appreciated in Mexican-American communities (among many others) in the United States.

My first thought, however, is that the photograph might just as easily have been taken in Nicaragua. Outside of Managua is a "zona franca" in which various incentives encourage investment in light manufacturing such as textiles or basic assembly operations. These facilities -- such as Las Mercedes and Las Palmeras provide business services and utilities that would be in short supply elsewhere in the country, so that the rent per square meter might actually be higher than comparable facilities in the United States.


What the zones offer really offer, of course, is very low-cost labor, adding a additional, very wide layers of profit between those who make clothes and those who purchase them. 


In the case of Managua, the facilities are accessible to ports, but for high-value, low-weight items for which tight timing is part of the business model, proximity to the airport is even more important. The current geography of lingerie is apparently such that the outskirts of Managua is a good location for a 200,000-square-foot Victoria's Secret shop. That is a lot of bras and panties! And the real secret is what portion of the price of a $50 bra is paid to the women who made it, and whether more than a few top managers benefit from the operation at all.

Back to the opening photo -- one of the few "benefits" of having such a facility in one's neighborhood is that flawed items go to real factory outlets (like we used to have in the United States), and from there to various local markets. In Central America -- as in textile-producing areas throughout the periphery of the world space-economy -- slightly imperfect designer fashions are easy to come by.

All of which raises the question: how much is this stuff really worth anyway?

Guy Lombardo: Managua, Nicaragua ... a wonderful town

For four of the past five years, I have enjoyed a nice New Year's Day tradition -- attending an open house with many friends here in snowy Bridgewater in the midst of final preparations to lead a study tour to Nicaragua. As of January 1, I have usually gotten most of the gifts I will take to my host family and the other coffee farmers we will meet, and I have gotten all of the information I can to my students. So I spend the day savoring the good company of my friends and my family, while also thinking about the upcoming adventure far to the south ... and the last-minute preparations of packing and travel documents.

January 1 (or more likely, late the night before) is the only day most people think of Guy Lombardo. And for years, Auld Lang Syne was his one-hit wonder, to my knowledge. That is, until a friend shared this gem from 1946. The song is kitchy, to say the least, and the lyrics both celebrate and stereotype Managua as a tropical place. The video below puts the song in sharp relief, as it shows imagery from the days of the elder Somoza, a dictator installed by the United States Marines. Managua never developed the cachet of Havana, but it was a bit of a playground.

The video is brilliant in its juxtaposition of the song's flippant remark about siestas and laziness with the languid lounging of the lily-white elites of a bygone era.

The elaborate statuary shown in the middle of the video are in contrast to the ironic statuary currently found at the site where Samoza's treachery resulted in the death of Sandino.

See my entire 2006 Nicaragua photo set on Flickr.

Sierra Coffee

Thanks to my friend Rob (who lives full-time in the real world, rather than the Internet, so he'll never see this) for pointing me in the direction of some great little coffee articles in Sierra magazine. I send my students browsing in the online version of the magazine every semester to bring me back the best articles, so I might have found this eventually, but Rob found it for me first in the current print edition.

Searching the magazine -- which is the official publication of North America's original environmental organization -- I actually found three interesting little articles related to coffee and the environment.

Many of us know that coffee grounds are great for garden composting -- come see my hydrangeas some time -- but this Green Tip article provides some details about this, and links to many additional suggestions. The College Buzz article describes nationwide efforts to bring socially and environmentally sustainable coffee to campuses. I'm proud to say that our own Social Justice League students at BSC have been working very effectively in this direction -- with some changes already taking place and more to come.

The article that Rob mentioned originally is called Sustained Buzz, in which five coffee experts are asked to recommend coffees -- other than their own -- that provide good quality and good results for the environment. I was very pleased that Green Mountain Coffee's Lindsey Bolger recommends the coffee of Selva Negra where -- ironically -- I first met Bolger's colleague Rick Peyser and others from Green Mountain. In January 2010, I will be taking students to Selva Negra for the fourth time, and I agree that this is truly one of the world's most enjoyable coffees. During our annual coffee tasting in April 2009, Selva Negra was by far the most popular offering.

Later in the spring of 2009, we had the great privilege of Selva Negra proprietor Mausi Kuhl visiting our campus to describe some of the extraordinary ecological projects that make Selva Negra a place that grows both organic coffee and organic farmers!