“Mi Barrio Latino América” consists on a short series of biographical articles on people Ramon Hernandez and Karol Carranza are interviewing throughout their travels in Central America and Mexico. The articles highlight personal stories, concerns, opinions and issues in the words of the people interviewed.
Mariana Zeledón Navarro & Claudia C. Sevilla Navarro, Granada, Nicaragua, March of 2011.
Mariana and her sister Claudia have been food vendors in Granada’s ‘Parque Central’ for 19 years. Food vending is a vital source of income for many Nicaraguans. The Navarros speak of how vendors faced a violent attempt to remove them from Granada’s central plaza in the late 1990s and continue to struggle with debt, numerous fees and corruption that has made it difficult for them to meet their basic needs. Nicaragua is also heading for its presidential elections in November of this year. They share their opinions:
“Every day we pay to be here, so we depend a lot on daily loans to cover our daily expenses. Having this stand also requires the payment of a monthly quota to the municipal government for the use of the floor, the garbage … well, it’s a tax here. Apart from paying the ‘alcaldia,’ we also pay the person who helps us store our carts, the person who sets them up and the person who lends us the money for our daily expenses. Everyday we pay, except to the municipality, which is due monthly.”
“These payments keep on growing. Before, we did not have to pay anything. The payments began about 10 years ago. Tatiana Chamorro was the mayor of Granada, who started the monthly payments and later suspended them. She did this because she wanted to rid the ‘Parque Central’ of vendors, but when she saw that she could not achieve this by charging high fees, she suspended them in order to remove us on the grounds that we are not paying. We organized and protested and that is when they began to mistreat us. In [Claudia’s] case, I had a miscarriage because the police hit me, causing me to lose the baby. However, the final struggle succeeded because the vendors stayed. [Chamorro] lost because the people of Granada backed our struggle. That is when the payments began again; suspending them as we explained gave them an excuse to evict the vendors, because if we pay we have a right to stay. This happened in 1996; since then the payments have been getting larger – you are never able to pay them off completely.”
“Reducing these taxes would benefit us. For Nicaragua to progress they must stop charging the poor and charge those who can really afford to pay, but they excuse the large companies that belong to the wealthiest families from paying taxes. In the 1970s and 1980s, Nicaragua had a lot of war and mothers lost many sons. People voted in Violeta Chamorro because eliminating the draft was one of the principle promises of her campaign. We did not want more war and it’s a good thing that since then we now live in peace. Five years ago when people voted in the current president [Daniel Ortega], critics said he would reinstate the draft and continue the war, but this was only commentary from the right. The neo-liberal politicians argued this, but if you know a little bit of Nicaraguan history, you would know how much money they stole from our country. Nicaragua is not the way it seems and the real history is never taught, but we have lived this history. People will vote for those who work for the people and from what we see the liberals only work for themselves.”