Earthquakes, Mud Slides, & Sandinistas

Nicaragua is finally recovering from natural and man-made disasters. So why is it still so crazy?

Glenn Garvin from the March 2000 issue

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Actually, Nicaragua was one of the first Latin American countries to get a McDonald's franchise, way back in 1972. Unbeknownst to its corporate masters up north, the restaurant stayed open after the Sandinistas took over. Indeed, in late 1986, the author Denis Johnson published a novel set in Managua called The Stars at Noon. Some of the scenes took place in the McDonald's, which was described with stomach-curdling detail: "With the meat shortage, you wouldn't ever know absolutely, would you, what sort of a thing they were handing you in the guise of beef....It's the only Communist-run McDonald's ever. It's the only McDonald's where you have to give back your plastic cup so it can washed out and used again, the only McDonald's staffed by people wearing military fatigues and carrying submachine guns." When the suits at McDonald's headquarters saw that, the jig was up.

But all is forgiven now. Managua has three--count 'em, three--golden arches, to go with four Pizza Huts, two Subways, and now even that TGI Friday's with the mysterious menu. A major hotel opened late last year; two more, including a Holiday Inn, are due by the end of 2000. A glittering upscale topless bar has risen in the Managua neighborhood that once was home to so many American reporters and revolutionary camp followers that it was known as Gringolandia.

Broken to bits by the 1972 earthquake, ground to dust by nearly two decades of war and 11 years of Marxist economics, Managua is slowly, inexorably clawing its way into the 20th century, albeit just as the rest of the world is headed for the 21st. Not that there aren't some bumps along the way. The city's two new shopping malls have given Nicaraguans their first exhilarating, terrifying glimpse of an ominous new technology: the escalator. So many thrill-seeking kids crowd around the landings on the upper floors at the Mentrocentro and Plaza Inter malls, daring one another to bolt down the rising stairs, that the managers have been driven to near-homicidal distraction.

They should, perhaps, heed the advice of the son of the owner of the country's only previous escalator, which croaked during the big 1972 earthquake. His pop had the same problem, he told me, but came up with an effective low-tech solution: "He put an employee with a belt on the first floor to spank anybody who was caught coming down the wrong way."

The one thing that hasn't changed is Nicaragua's luck. Even when the place hasn't been at war (which is almost never), it's been nature's punching bag. Three times over a 150-year time span, earthquakes have leveled Managua; volcanoes, tidal waves--you name it, Nicaragua has had it. Latest manifestation: a plague of vampire bats. Driven by Hurricane Mitch from their caves in remote northern mountainsides, the bats have resettled in urban areas and have prompted deadly epidemics of rabies and cheap Dracula jokes.

The bats may seem vaguely comic, unless you awaken one night to find one fastened to your throat. But I don't begin to have the words to describe the meteorological bloodlust with which Hurricane Mitch dismembered the villages of northern Nicaragua, the way it left the countryside looking like it had been clawed by a giant cat. When I interviewed an 8-year-old boy who watched a mud slide barrel down a volcano during the hurricane and bury 44 of his relatives alive, I found I couldn't even write down his words. I just kept thinking of a character in Mark Harris' novel Bang the Drum Slowly who's found out his baseball-playing son is dying of a rare form of cancer. "My son," he says, "got one shit deal."

But where else but Nicaragua could you ever hope to find a character like the delirious Eden Pastora, the famous Commander Zero who was a hero of the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza dictatorship but then turned against his old compañeros to become a contra? Pastora, who always has time to explain to reporters that he is not only a military-political genius but also the most handsome man in Nicaragua, is still here, as lovably egomaniacal as ever. (If he is not absolutely the most handsome man in the country, he is nonetheless a very attractive one, having fathered 22 children by an indeterminate number of women.)

When the Nicaraguan electoral tribunal ruled him ineligible to run for president on a technicality, Pastora camped on the sidewalk outside its offices and staged a hunger strike. When I went over to interview him on his 30th day without food, I took along a photographer. No pictures until I put on my hat, Pastora insisted, taking several minutes to arrange his gleaming white sombrero just so. As he lovingly inspected the results in a hand mirror, he smiled and assured me, "Next to me, Errol Flynn looks like a piece of shit."

Whenever Nicaragua throws me a curveball--which it still does with disconcerting regularity after 16 years of covering it--I think of a story about Pastora from his contra days, when he fought with his putative allies at the CIA almost as much as his Sandinista enemies. The American spooks drove him half-mad. One day Pastora's aides sat silently by as he paced up and down, ranting and raving, for more than an hour. They couldn't figure out what the problem was. He kept screaming about the chairs, the damned chairs, the chairs would be the death of him. Chairs? Finally one of the men slapped his forehead in recognition. For chair, Pastora was using the Spanish word taburete. But a chair is also a silla. And silla is pronounced exactly like CIA in Spanish. Covering Nicaragua has been the only time in my life I've wondered if I shouldn't have taken more drugs in the '60s.