Opinions are spoken in hushed voices in southern Nicaragua, but the region is still bursting in stories. Anna, who owns a small hotel overlooking the San Juan River, hears some of them.
She pays heed to the rattling sound of motorboats coming into town, carrying rumors from Managua. Behind her room, she overhears the muffled footsteps of foreign migrants going north and Nicaraguan refugees going south. Since April 2018, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans crossed the San Juan River to find safety in Costa Rica.
With almond eyes that seem to permanently hold a mischievous look, Anna, in her fifties, has short, dark, curly hair that frames her plump, glowing face. Her joyful countenance suddenly darkens when she remembers how youth are incarcerated by state forces. “How can they do that to our young people?” she asks, fighting back tears.
But she has to be careful of whom she shares her feelings with – some of her friends and relatives work for the Sandinista party and would not bear to hear criticism of El Comandante Ortega.
In November 2019, I reported from the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, where the winding San Juan River separates an internationally sanctioned country with its internationally lauded neighbor.
In 2019, it wasn’t hard to follow news from some parts of Central America online: presidential tweets from El Salvador, tragic deaths of Guatemalan migrant children, headlines of Honduran politicians on trial for drug-trafficking. But reporting—at least outside the region—on what happened further afield from the headlines was scarce.
The placid San Juan River—with wilderness on one side, and the colors of the Nicaraguan Army on the other—stretches over 125 miles and runs through Central America’s largest natural reserve, Nicaragua’s El Indio Maíz. Traveling along the border means hopping on botes, crowded boats that motor for hours on end between two villages. The lush surroundings of the river are home to sloths, armadillos, kingfishers and 200-feet tall ceiba trees, as well as a silent stream of people moving along the waters.
Seasonal farmers plow Costa Rican soil, Cuban migrants trek through the continent, and Nicaraguan activists escape government repression. All cross paths on the banks of the San Juan.
Migrants may be far from Managua, but they are never too hidden from the outreach of the Nicaraguan regime. While Nicaraguan workers and bi-national children who study in Costa Rica know their Nicaraguan ID number by heart and write it on lists given to military checkpoints along the San Juan River, others ask the boatman to drop them off between two stops and disappear into the jungle.
Migration is not the only silent phenomenon of the region—deforestation goes on out of view as well. Between 2011 and 2018, Nicaragua lost 1,400,000 hectares of forest, according to the environmental NGO Centro Humboldt.
While eyes were on Masaya’s besieged churches—where the police had fenced in a group of mothers on hunger strike to release their children held in jail for political activism—the 1,227 square mile forest of the Indio Maíz reserve is shrinking. Illegal loggers, miners and impoverished farmers go deeper and deeper into the forest. Farmers often sell their land to large extracting companies and buy cheaper land in the reserve.
José Velásquez, a forest ranger appointed by the autonomous indigenous and afro-descendant government, claims that trees are logged at an accelerating rate, and that land is cleared for new farms on an almost daily basis. The Ortega regime, according to Velásquez, is either turning a blind eye on deforestation or worse, encouraging illegal logging in exchange for political favors. Nicaragua has fallen into nepotism and authoritarianism, even in the jungle. “The settlers tell us that the government gave them permission to come,” Velásquez told me. Clashes between illegal settlers and the Rama, Miskito, and Kreol—local indigenous groups opposed to the canal—are not uncommon and sometimes lead to murder.
Leddys Vallecillo, an student activist turned refugee, believes the Nicaraguan government is seeking to regain control of indigenous autonomous lands to build an interoceanic canal, a controversial project which was put on pause in 2018. “It is clear that the dictator's government wants to take possession of these lands to build his canal. That project was never really cancelled,” Vallecillo says.
Although violence and environmental disputes are not foreign to Costa Rica—where Bribri land defender Sergio Rivas was murdered this past year—Nicaragua’s neighbor became famous for its efforts to stop climate change. The country revealed ambitious plans to fully decarbonize its economy by 2050. If successful, Costa Rica could become the first zero-emission country in the world. That ambition earned the country the U.N. Champions of the Earth Award and a spot for its president, Carlos Alvarado Quesada, in TIME’s 100 Next most influential people.
In a country where already 95% of energy comes from renewable resources, Costa Rica plans on reaching 100%, and turning 70% of all buses and taxis electric, by 2030. To start working on that goal, Costa Rica closed 2019 by placing 44 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations around the country. And when climate talks at the COP25 UN conference fell flat, Costa Rica led a group of 23 countries that tried to push for stricter rules in the international carbon market, called the San Jose Principles.
Although Costa Rica only produces 0.4% of the world’s global emissions, Carlos Alvarado’s goal is to set a template for others to follow, as he explained in an interview with WIRED. And Alvarado’s push is not only environmental. In 2020, therapeutic abortion and same-sex marriage will be legalized in Costa Rica. Also, next year, the growing number of Nicaraguan asylum seekers, now reaching 70,000 people, will receive medical insurance in Costa Rica through collaboration with the UN Refugee Agency.
Belize, in its own way, too, can be considered an overlooked regional—if not a world—leader. Before the end of the decade, Belize managed to have its large coral reef barrier taken off UNESCO’s endangered list and it regulated the use of fishing gillnets, which deplete fish stocks and kill endangered species. The Belize government also tripled the number of protected marine areas from fishing, allowing 11.6% of territorial waters to replenish fish populations. Illegal fishing has dropped about 60%. According to The Guardian, “other countries, including Australia and the Philippines, have been taking note and looking to emulate tiny Belize.”
These regions—from Nicaragua’s jungle to Costa Rica’s roads and Belize’s shores, just to name a few—are less discussed in the English-speaking world. They don’t dominate foreign coverage of Central America news the same way that El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras do.
Yet, coverage, and ultimately, what Carlos Alvarado calls “narrative,” will help shine a light on Central America’s silent struggles and overshadowed successes.
In 2020, let’s follow more stories like those of Anna, who, from her hotel facing the San Juan River, hears the deafening Sandinista music played by the neighbors every other day.
Since the anti-government protests and the subsequent State repression flared in 2018, tourism dropped and Anna had to fire nearly all her staff. She knows that some of her former employees have had to go back to farming and are under pressure to sell their land to the type of guest that her hotel, like others in the region, now receive instead of backpackers: wealthy business people managing the palm oil industry. From time to time, a lone undercover journalist will drop by the hotel, too.
While government workers party in boisterous caminatas organized under pink tents, Anna runs through her list of guests. She never knows when the Nicaraguan police may come to her hotel, looking for migrants, journalists or political activists, and ask for it.
Melissa Vida is an LA-born, Belgian and Salvadoran freelance journalist and editor with bylines in The New York Times, Foreign Policy and more. For weekly news and suggestions on what to read about Central America, subscribe to her team’s newsletter “Central American News.”
