Article by PBI-Canada

The Peace Brigades International-Nicaragua Project, which is based in Costa Rica, has shared an excerpt of a passage from ‘The emigrants, now’ by the late Uruguayan writer, journalist and novelist Eduardo Galeano.

The passage reads:

“Since always, butterflies and swallows and flamingos fly away from the cold, year after year, and whales swim in search of another sea and salmon and trout in search of their river. They travel thousands of leagues, on the free paths of air and water.

On the other hand, the paths of human exodus are not free.

In immense caravans, the fugitives from the impossible life march.”

The full text by Galeano can be read in Spanish here.

Galeano was an early supporter of the Sandinista revolution, but by 2008 he stated that the Ortega government’s harassment of Nicaraguan poet (and former Sandinista minister of culture from 1979 to 1987) Ernesto Cardenal was the act of a “deplorable regime.”

Cardenal had left the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1994 calling it a “dictatorship not a revolutionary movement.”

Many other heroes of the Sandinista revolution have become critics of Ortega including Dora María Téllez, Mónica Baltodano and Daisy Zamora.

This past December, former Sandinista supporters Vilma Núez (now the president of the Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights/CENIDH) and journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro (the editor-in-chief of the Sandinista newspaper Barricada from 1979 to 1994) were also targets of police repression.

This situation has led to more than 100,000 people fleeing Nicaragua, a large majority of them to Costa Rica where PBI-Nicaragua is based.

In 1990, when the Sandinistas lost a national election after 10 years of the US-financed Contra insurgency, Galeano wrote: “The authors of war and hunger are now celebrating the result of the elections, which punish the victims. The next day, the US government announced the end of the economic embargo against Nicaragua.”

In ‘The emigrants, now’, Galeano writes: “The castaways of globalization go on pilgrimage inventing roads, wanting a home, knocking on doors: the doors that magically open to the passage of money, close in their faces.”

This year will be a crucial one in Nicaragua as a presidential election is now scheduled for November 7. PBI-USA will be following updates from PBI-Nicaragua and the defenders it accompanies as the year unfolds.