The Sandinista movement was perceived in America as ideologically Communist, and Ronald Reagan tried to destroy it through the covert Contra invasion. Of course it failed like the Bahia de los Cochinos invasion by John Kennedy. Reading Donald Hodgins, an American academic historian, it appears that, unlike in the CIA and the American government, in the academia it was well known that Marx was not among the intellectual progenitors of the Sandinistas.
Hodgins points out that Nicaraguan worldview was impressed by hundred years of American aggression, first to guarantee that no second transoceanic canal will compete with the Panama Canal. Second, Nicaragua was "invaded" by American gold miners in transit to California, leaving a rather barbaric impression. Nicaraguans were also aware of the plans transfer the cotton/slave economy of the South, after the victory of the North, to their land. The Marine invasion in the nineteen twenties finally confirmed their fears of becoming an American colony.
Those were the ideological roots of Sandino, nothing to do with Marx or Russia. It is amazing that Reagan could be so blind, seeing Communists where there were none. In fact, the Sandinistas, when in power, held democratic elections and lost. And they moved aside and transferred the government to the Chamorro widow. They spent sixteen years in the opposition to recover the power. Today, the Sandinista leader Ortega and his family rule the country, more or less following the Somoza dynasty model. This time America lets it be.
Thursday night I lost my way in a Nature Reserve near the Maccabean Tombs. The reserve has stone building with sanitary services, but the management will not operate the local, antiquated wastewater treatment plant. Parts of the reserve are let out to marriage "halls" (pic) but the Ministry of Health will not allow them operate without a wastewater treatment solution. I am planning a small rotary drums plant and the treated wastewater will be recycled in forest irrigation. Technically it is quite simple, the challenging (and expensive) part is getting it approved by all the bureaucracies. Each tree and rat hole is catalogued and cannot be touched without permission. Some plants and animals are a little different from those five kilometers afar, and have been declared protected and in danger of extinction. A recent study classified seven different varieties of scorpions in Israel, all candidates to the "Protected" status. It gets on my nerves that the "nature" the bureaucracies are defending is nothing more than the overgrazed shrub-bush, sadly degraded by the fucking (and fucked) Arab goat. Anyway, Israel has been densely inhabited for eight or ten thousand years, by humans and by the Neanderthals, so what is natural? On the other hand (I still have two hands), the public demands "Nature" and that it be "Protected" against themselves, so the poor salary-drawing homolesbian environmentalist is forced to invent it.
J 