This is one of a series of four reports called “Those who stay”: surviving under economic crisis and dictatorship in Nicaragua, which was recently published by DIVERGENTES focusing on the impact of the massive migration which has happened. After four years of the worsening of the repression and the dictatorship of Ortega-Murillo, Nicaragua has lost 7.6% of its population who had to leave. More than 500,000 people who leave behind stories of desolation. At the same time, those who stay try to continue their lives without daring to make many plans for the future. In rural zones, the fields were emptied of men, and women are taking on the hardest farming tasks. In universities a good part of the students have returned to the classrooms, knowing that many fellow students have left going into exile. Youth who are living with the absence of relatives and friends, but who have learned to dance keeping silent and maintaining appearances. The norms of living under a dictatorship.
The hands that are left in the countryside
By DIVERGENTES y Otras Miradas
Feb 4, 2023
Homes without men. In the rural area of Nicaragua, the exodus to the United States is reflected in the partial de-population of communities and the increase of women working the farms. In this report we were able to confirm the scarcity of labor for the hardest work, which previously and almost exclusively men used to do who have migrated. Family remittances represent an economic relief for those who stay, but they resent the absence of their relatives.
It is raining in El Almendro. A downfall that little by little dissipates over this community of Nueva Guinea, in the interior of the Southern Caribbean region of Nicaragua. Because here it rains, and in a few minutes clears up, with such a harsh sun that it burns the skin, above all of the peons that spend the entire morning picking and carrying sacks of coffee. Some rest and others wait in the shadows for the rains to end to eat lunch, while other hands, dozens of hands, pick the red fruit from the branches of the trees.
“Working in the fields grows on you, “ says Yessenia, 35 years of age and a coffee picker in this farm of El Almendro. She is stout, with white skin, with some freckles on her face. She says that she has been working these lands for five years, between 8am to 3pm Monday to Friday, in order to not “abuse my body too much.” She gets up very early and cooks, gets the children ready for school, gives them breakfast and leaves lunch already prepared. “Right now, the children are not in class, I bring them with me to the farm, because they help me: to bring in water, towels to dry my sweat, do little tasks,” says Yessenia. “In addition, the kids have fun here.”
Along with Yessenia are two girls. They are young, under 30 years of age, some have children. Going farther into the fields we see more women, but also a few men who are dressed in a similar way: sweaters with hoods, blue jeans, rubber boots, cloths on the back to cover any part of the body. They tend to be distinguished by the hair that extends outside the hats in pig tails or braids. There are women picking coffee, but also carrying full sacks, walking in the mud, to take them some 100 meters away where they store them under a zinc hut.
It is more and more common to see these images of women working in the fields of Nueva Guinea. Single women or accompanied by their children. It is not new in the countryside, the difference now is that they are the majority. The testimony of the inhabitants of this zone coincides on this. Due to the massive migration of these last years the producers of tubers (cassava, taro, potatos) and coffee are hiring more women in the face of the absence of labor to do the harsh work that previously tended to be assigned to men: planting, watering, picking and carrying enormous sacks.
The owner of the coffee fields where Yessenia works, nearly 51 acres of land in Nueva Guinea, says that in order to run his farm he needs some 10 permanent workers, but the scarcity of labor has forced him to run it with five workers in recent months. “We make do with relatives to begin with, because it is difficult to find farmhands,” says the coffee grower, a tall and swarthy man, who on this day at noon is also carrying sacks on his back. “At the time for picking coffee, it is the women who are pushing more to work,” he adds. On this farm now 80% of the coffee pickers are women, when previously they only represented 30% the owners said.
There are no statistics about how many Nicaraguans have migrated by provinces, nor the gender of each one. But on traveling through the rural area of Nueva Guinea, what we observed are nearly abandoned towns, with just a few women walking around and some children playing on the roads. A guide from this place points out the closed houses, with chains and padlocks, of the people who have left. “There, the son of the woman there left, and two cousins,” he says, and points again, “in that home the husband left”; “In that one the mother left”, and so on during the tour. We noted down up to 50 people who, as they told us, have migrated from these communities to the United States in recent months.
In contrast to the rural area, the center of the municipality of Nueva Guinea shows a different picture: a noisy and colorful town that goes to bed late and wakes up late. Having an extension of 2,774 square kilometers and being the most populated town of the Autonomous Region of the Southern Caribbean Coast (150,000 people), the impact of the migration is not so obvious. But there are signs that show it: while the market buzzes with people, at noon the line in the Ministry of the Interior office where passports are processed gets longer and longer. The neighbors says that in recent months is has stayed that way, and the influx has not diminished, not even with the closure of the borders that Joe Biden, the president of the United States ordered at the beginning of January. This is a town, like others in Nicaragua, comforted by the money of family remittances, but that cries during video calls, and in silence over the departure of their neighbors and relatives.
The decision after the United States
Rebeca, 33 years of age, does not know what she will do when her husband returns from the United States. She thinks that it is not a bad idea for both of them to be able to buy a farm or start a vegetable business, selling groceries, meat…”Who knows what we will do, but that will be once he returns,” she responds after being asked about her plans. What she is sure about is that she will have “a big party” when her partner returns to Nicaragua. “It will be in gratitude for him returning healthy and safe,” Rebeca says. “It would be to be grateful in addition for him returning, because many people leave and do not come back, they made a life there.”
Rebeca´s house which is half-finished – with concrete walls, zinc roof and tile floor – is located in Talolinga, a community one hour away from the center of Nueva Guinea. She lives there with her four children, between the ages of 4 and 13, who run around behind the chickens and dogs in the yard of bare soil which surrounds the construction. Her husband used to work as a farmhand on the hacienda, but the money “was not enough to live on,” comments Rebeca. “My husband left to give us a better life, because here in Nicaragua we were being strangled economically.”
The departure was June 21, 2021 a year and seven months ago. She does not want to talk about the tears of that day, but she does want to talk about the uncertainty that she experienced since then. “When you make that decision, as a couple or family, you are aware that this dream could cost the life of the one who leaves,” Rebeca notes adding that her husband´s trip “was hard.” Along the way the Mexican police stopped him, but he was able to cross the Rio Bravo 15 days after leaving Nicaragua. Nevertheless, he was held for two months and three days (something that Rebeca will never forget because of how nervous she was during that entire time) in detention centers in the United States, before they released him. “It is hard for him, who is there, and for us, who stayed,” she said.
To travel to the United States her husband borrowed five thousand dollars, which he continues to pay at an interest rate of 20% a month. There he has been working in construction and just got a job in a factory. “The distance continues to be hard : he has suffered accidents at work. Once he hurt his fingers with a drill and on another occasion, he fell off a ladder. But thanks be to God he has not had anything serious happen to him,” Rebeca points out. “We cannot complain because he has always had work.”
Now the economic situation of Rebeca´s family, compared to what they had before her husband migrated, “is a lot better,” Rebeca herself confirmed. Monthly remittances are improving the economy of entire families of Nueva Guinea and the entire country. According to data from the Central Bank of Nicaragua (BCN), between January and December of 2022 the family remittances that entered the country rose to $3.225 billion dollars, 50.2% more than the same period from the previous year, which represents more than 20% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Nicaragua. 76.6% of remittances were sent from the United States.
A shopkeeper, whose business also functions as an agency for remittances in Talolinga, says that he has noted a larger amount of people who come to his establishment to withdraw remittances in the last six months of the year. “People continue leaving the country in order to send remittances,” says the merchant. “Remittances are meeting basic needs, because there are many people who do not have anywhere to get a peso to eat in their home,” he added
The merchant is experiencing this personally. More than 20 people in his family have migrated in the last three months. For the end of the year holidays his relatives in the United States sent them money for Christmas and New Year´s expenses. “It is true that they miss it, but this is a way for them to feel close to us and us to them”, the shopkeeper said. “Obviously it is never going to be the same as having the complete family together,” he added.
Why have you not left?, we asked the shopkeeper.
Each person makes their own decision. If all of us leave the country, who is going to bring about change? I cannot be filled with hopelessness.
Talolinga is a community with unpaved streets and concrete block houses, with big and open yards between them. This morning at the beginning of January there is hardly any perceivable movement, except for a bus that gathers a few passengers to take them to the center of Nueva Guinea. A bar has a table occupied by three men drinking beer. A pair of children running. And throughout the block one can clearly hear the mooing of some cows, closed in a pen.
The last kiss of those who stay
You never felt that that kiss that you are giving your fiancée could be the last. So you do the first thing that occurs to you, like anyone who has experienced it for the first time: you hug her hard against your chest and you do not want to let her go. Because you do not know whether something might happen to her along the way. Or whether the distance and time will end up separating your lives completely. No one assures you whether it will be a “until I see you soon” or a definitive goodbye.
That is what Álvaro experienced, 25 years old, on November 20, 2022 , when he said goodbye to his girlfriend, before undertaking the trip from Nueva Guinea to the United States. They had thought about going together, but she got money first to make the trip. Álvaro would do it later, on January 15, 2023. Nevertheless, the new migratory reform (which allows for the immediate expulsion of Nicaraguans at the border), announced on January 5th by the president of the United States, Joe Biden, stopped Álvaro´s trip. “My idea was to go to the United States, ask for asylum, work and help my family,” the young man said.
In Nicaragua, Álvaro had passed the fourth year of Civil Engineering in the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast (URACCAN). He had interrupted his studies in the last years, because he spent two years exiled in Costa Rica, for participating in the protests against the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in 2018. When he returned to the country, he began to work in a bottling plant, where they paid him $335 a month, but the high cost of living, says Álvaro, forced him to look for solutions. “I resigned because with the salary they were paying me I did not have enough to even eat.” Álvaro says that, with what he earned, he would not be able to build or improve his home, buy a motorcycle, “get ahead in life.”
He resigned from his job and began a business (whose name we omit for his security), while he tried to get the $5,500 dollars which the coyote was charging him (human trafficker) to cross into the United States. “The coyote tells me that he can get me across still, but I am afraid,” says Álvaro, who now wants to try his luck with the new humanitarian visa program that the United States opened in the same migratory reforms. “What I am looking for is a sponsor to be able to apply. That is what I am doing now,” he adds.
Why not stay in Nicaragua? We asked him.
“I was one of those most positive about staying. Even more, I would be sad when a fellow student from the university abandoned their studies to migrate to another country or move to live or work in Managua, because I knew that they were not going to do anything for their people…But I have seen that the situation in the country is not improving, I have resigned myself to that. “
Álvaro days that he spent December without his girlfriend and without 80% of his friends, who have migrated. It was difficult. But not as bad as the uncertainty that he felt during the 15 days it took for his girlfriend to get to the United States. At times, they were not able to communicate with one another, he had no information about her, he did not know whether she was OK. It is something that all relatives who stay behind experience, Álvaro says. That is why he is calm: now he can talk, laugh or cry with her every day through a video call.
This information has been produced with the collaboration of Otras Miradas as support to independent journalism in Central America. We have omitted the name of the author of this journalistic story for reasons of security in Nicaragua, and the names of the people interviewed were changed into pseudonyms for their security and privacy. The information that we publish in DIVERGENTES comes from contrasting sources. Due to the situation in the region, many times we see ourselves forced to protect them using pseudonyms or anonymity. Unfortunately, some governments of the region, with the regime of Nicaragua at the head, do not provide information or censure independent media. That is why despite requesting it, we cannot count on authorized official versions. We resort to data analysis, anonymous internal sources, or the limited information from official media. These are the conditions in which we perform a profession which in many cases costs us our safety and lives. We will continue reporting.