Tale of Two Nations

10 November 2003


Nicaragua is a Two-Class Country

Secretary of State Colin Powell was the first man with that title to visit Nicaragua in more than a decade, and to help American journalists (who are pretty weak when it comes to knowing about places outside the US), the State Department put together a briefing paper. Then, State disavowed the paper because, well, because it told the truth.

Written by a diplomat currently serving a term in Managua, the report said that the country is divided into the haves and the have-nots. There is a pro-US elite who wear Ralph Lauren, drive Ford SUVs and go out to TGI Friday's. Meanwhile, "most Nicaraguans are subsumed by the struggle to find the next plate of rice and beans and, therefore, have little time to think about the United States or world affairs in general." Also, "Nicaragua crawls along as the second poorest country in the hemisphere after Haiti, battered by storms of nature and of their own making, with little hope of things changing in the future."

Embarrassed by the document, an unnamed senior official at State said to Reuters, "It's a set of gross oversimplifications. I'm dismayed to see anything like that even written much less passed out." More regrettably, it's true.

State's own cheat sheet on the country lists it as worse off now than in 1979 when the Sandinistas took over. Blaming the Sandinista Communists would be easy, but they've been out of power for 13 years. Nicaragua is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere save Haiti, with a per capita GDP of US$470 -- little enough to make rice and beans a worry. They had help in screwing up their own country in the 1980s from the US and USSR, but the cold war is over, the Sandinistas are out of power, and they still have not reached where they were a quarter of a century ago.

There is little evidence of a middle class in Nicaragua. There is less of a history of one. The nation has merely returned to its type, pre-Sandinista lords and peasants. State may be dismayed that the briefing paper was written, much less passed out, but true friends of the Nicaraguan people are even more dismayed by the inaction by all parties in dealing with the truth contained in the document.

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