For Divergentes and CONNECTAS
Text by: Wilfredo Miranda Aburto
Photos by: Carlos Herrera

Jose Francisco Urbina Hernandez gets to the top of the hill and puts down the sack of abaca hanging on his right shoulder. He shakes away the sweat on his forehead and discreetly gazes to the horizon. “The lake is right there. Twenty kilometers away from the border with Nicaragua,” he says. He conceals the nostalgia of people in exile, but it still comes across on his rugged smiley face. “We are close to our country… but we have no chance of going back as long as Daniel Ortega is in power,” he says as he looks north, although the view is foggy due to the heat and humidity in this edge of Costa Rica that people call Upala.

“The abaca plant is similar to plantain, they harvest its fiber which is used to make bags, they pay well for it,” Urbina Hernandez says, changing the subject. Talking about his country and the government that has been after him for decades does not annoy him but it is not his favorite topic either. He says only what is necessary, especially regarding something that still stirs him up: the farmers’ struggle against the failed Interoceanic Channel project of Daniel Ortega and Chinese businessman Wang Jing. Law 840, the law that created it, is still valid and it puts at risk lands and lake Cocibolca, the same lake that this man was just pointing at and which, every now and then, refreshes Upala with its breeze.

Farmers in exile have discovered new crops in Costa Rica, such as abaca, which pays well in the market. Carlos Herrera | Divergentes.

The project of the Channel was presented by the Sandinista regime as a way to solve the country’s historical poverty: it sold an illusion of progress –compared with Panama and its Channel– that drove a lot of enthusiasm. However, when Law 840 was passed, the promise was broken due to burdensome conditions for Wang Jing, and the land in the concession became a settlement of thirteen affected municipalities with more than 370,000 inhabitants. Out of those, 120,000 would be displaced. In other words, their lands would be bought at cadastre value instead of at market price. This was the drop that filled the cup of farmers against the plans for the Channel.

Urbina Hernandez arrived in Costa Rica on January 12, 2019, after fifteen months in a jail of the Ortega-Murillo regime, he was incarcerated for having taken part in the social protests. After he was released on probation, he went back to his home in Nueva Guinea, an agricultural municipality in the southern Caribbean, in Nicaragua. Harassment by the police and paramilitary against him remained constant, and, like thousands of Nicaraguans, he crossed the southern border seeking protection and exile. He arrived in one of the main centers for exiled farmers run by Doña Francisca ‘Chica’ Ramirez, a fierce and persisting anti-Channel advocate.

In late 2018, Costa Rica made room for the first wave of over 90,000 exiled people running away from Ortega-Murillo’s revenge for being part in the social protests that shook Nicaragua that year. Farmers that got to Costa Rica through townships settled in Cartago, a mountainous province east of San Jose. But they despaired after a few months: the lands in Cartago are suitable to grow coffee, vegetables and delicate orchids, not for the tubers and red beans that they were used to plant and abundantly harvest in Nueva Guinea’s clay-like and well-drained soil. The worst part is that many farmers worked in the city’s Horticola Nacional market as handymen or assistants to the local producers. They did not really feel autonomous. Additionally, Cartago’s cold rain made them freeze.

Due to her hard-earned leadership in over 100 protests against the Channel (the most significant precedent of the popular uprising of 2018, in which farmers participated, in particular in the barricades that helped fend off the paramilitary repression), ‘Chica’ Ramirez managed to lease 65 hectares of land in Upala. In this border area, weather resembles the one that these farmers are used to.

Farmer leader Francisca ‘Chica’ Ramirez runs the farmer camp in Upala, red beans are one of its main crops. Carlos Herrera | Divergentes.

Upala has been a fertile ground since the 19th century and its rubber trees attracted the Nicaraguans who first populated this administrative division. Currently, with its binational population, these farmers have exiled themselves in these lands, where beans, cassava, malanga and abaca grow and are used for their own consumption, the small amounts that are left are sold. The farmers camp known as “campamento de Doña Chica” is located in San Jose de Upala. Truth be told, the camp is a series of wooden houses with zinc sheet roofs surrounding a common area (with the same characteristics) intended to function as computer laboratory, group kitchen and location for the exiled farmers’ assemblies.

This common area is built on short wooden pillars, there are posters that urge the release of their friends, political prisoners of the Ortega-Murillo regime, such as presidential pre-candidate Medardo Mairena, Freddy Navas, Pedro Mena and other seventeen farmers, who participated in the protests of 2018 in the citizen barricades that helped fend off the police and paramilitary attack. Other posters include the mantra of this camp, made up of 32 families: “Producing in exile to resist and fight for freedom. Only the people can save the people!”.

This is the common area of the farmers’ camp in Upala, where families meet to eat and discuss politics and logistics. Photo: Carlos Herrera | Divergentes.

The initial lease was for three years. It was set to expire in November 2021 –the due date established by the farmers to return to Nicaragua. The possibility of returning was attached to that year’s general election, but this hope was crushed by a new wave of repression by the Ortega-Murillo regime aimed at annulling the election by silencing critical voices. Consequently, the lease along with the size of the camp (which now covers 237 blocks) were extended to produce more and have more capacity for new exiled people. Newcomers have to adapt to the camp’s rationale: planting for their own sustenance, exchanging grains with other families and selling what is left in the local market.

“They are going to remain in power. Everything has been done to depose them but they are only growing stronger. I don’t think it’s going to happen soon, neither will our return,” Urbina Hernandez insists. This feeling of unease is shared by the other farmers, and gets mixed up with the difficulties of being in exile: concern for their relatives being harassed in Nicaragua, the lack of knowledge of the institutional regulations to sell crops in Costa Rica, scarce funding to plant and the helplessness of not being able to generate a political change in their country.

“I believe the terms have been exhausted,” warns a restless and skeptical farmer Elias Ruiz Hernandez, 43. What else can be done? Many thought that the adversary deserved a chance, and that the dictator would allow free elections to be held. But farmers have always known that Daniel Ortega will not carry on with the elections. Dialogues took place and nothing happened; he quit the OAS and nothing happened; his government is isolated and nothing happens; he gets sanctioned and nothing happens; people protested and nothing happened. He must be forcefully ousted! Many do not say it because it sounds bad, him being ousted by force could result in bloodshed, many will die… but dictatorships lead countries to these situations. Look at Europe, there is a war going on in developed countries and it was provoked by a dictatorship (Russia). That is the only thing that dictatorships do.”

Almost immediately, Ruiz Hernandez acknowledges that an armed resolution is not feasible and will not be widely supported (as Ronald Reagan did in the past with the U.S.-backed Contra). “The world has changed,” he adds uneasily and with his faith in a democratic change lost, as the regime has stubbornly closed off civic spaces and imposed a sole-party model in Nicaragua. This is exemplified in repeated claims of electoral fraud by international organizations, destruction of the institutionality and totalitarian repression, all of which materialized in 2013 with the categorical rejection of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ, in Spanish) of 31 appeals filed by farmers, whose persecution has resulted in murder and exile.

Farmer Elias Ruiz Hernandez. His father was part of the Contra and he is a fierce opponent of Daniel Ortega. Photo: Carlos Herrera | Divergentes. 

***

Elias Ruiz Hernandez’ father was part of the Contra, the rebel guerrilla that was funded by Ronald Reagan, the former President of the United States in the 80’s, which fought the Sandinista Revolution. It was a fratricidal war in Nicaragua, bloody and full of atrocities from both sides, with an estimated fatality count of 150,000 –which could be even higher. Ruiz Hernandez, a boy back then, experienced the fury of combat and anti-Sandinismo became intrinsic in him. A feeling in common for thousands of farmers in the so-called “Strip of the Contra”, a group of municipalities that are traditionally against Sandinismo in the north part of the country, in the mountainous department of Jinotega. Nonetheless, the area of influence of these groups spread to rural areas in the south, such as Nueva Guinea and Rio San Juan, extensive agricultural and cattle areas directly impacted by the project of the Interoceanic Channel.

Nicaragua is a country with open wounds where both extremes bear grudges. The Sandinista Revolution lost power in the 90’s when former President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro defeated Daniel Ortega in an election process. At that moment, the exhaustion of the armed conflict and the large number of families crying over their dead children led to a peace that was besieged by Sandinismo. Nicaragua split into two predominant political factions: Sandinistas and Liberals. The majority of the latter elected two presidents that beat Ortega. In 1998, a political agreement of the Sandinista leader with Arnoldo Aleman enabled his return to power with a cut of the electoral ceiling in 2006.

Ortega’s presidency caused resentment among farmers, especially due to the national and municipal electoral fraud perpetrated by the Sandinista apparatus and the Supreme Electoral Council. Ortega’s regime conducted an institutional and political persecution in rural areas which were openly against Sandinismo with the goal of taking local power back from them. Alleged armed groups rose against Ortega’s government, for instance in 2013 in Cerro Kilambe.

Those small cells were wiped out by the Army of Nicaragua or the Police, in clashes that the armed forces labeled a war against common crime. However, it was the Interoceanic Channel project which fueled farmers’ discontent; they organized more than 100 mass marches that put the controversial project in check. Moreover, expropriation of land was established in Law 840, causing turmoil among farmers’ most fundamental aspect: their intimate relationship with their lands. Farmers’ world-view is based on cultivating their land and being nurtured by it, a relationship that is grounded on self-sufficiency.

The “struggle”, as farmers call their opposition to the Channel, was self-funded. Most anti-Channel leaders were thriving producers who owned hundreds of hectares of land and trucks to transport the production, as well as with product diversity to fill Nicaraguan supermarkets with tubers, beans and cheese. Now, in exile, they miss this self-sufficiency the most.

I met many of the farmers based in Upala when I traversed the Channel’s route in 2015. They were kind, good-natured and proud. One of them, Lury Sequeira has businesses of pig farming, a car wash and clothes sales in El Tule, Rio San Juan. Upon our reunion, she is thinner and there are bags under her eyes; she shuts the door of the room in which she is crammed into the ‘Doña Chica’ camp. Totally the opposite of when she used to open to reporters inquiring about the farmers’ opposition to the Channel. I can say, at least for what I felt in Upala, that their pride is battered. “When you see the house from the outside, you immediately imagine the conditions inside,” Lury says as she invites me to the camp’s common area to talk.

Farmer leader Lury Sequeira lives with her family in a small room in the camp in Upala. Photo: Carlos Herrera | Divergentes.

However, the farmers have not lost their capacity to share their plates of beans, fresh cheese and tortillas. The profit they lack nowadays in Costa Rica was lost when they protested against the Channel in the streets of Nicaragua. Repression against the farmers back then was conducted with excessive force and jail time, but to a lesser extent than expected after the 2018 protests.

The Channel project is now defunct, especially after it was made public that the fortune of Wang Jing, the mysterious Chinese investor, collapsed in the crash of the Asian stock exchange. Although Law 840 is still effective, farmers were relieved because the government set the megaproject aside. In 2018, farmers joined the students’ protests fueled by overall national dissatisfaction due to the social security reform and the repression. They built barricades in their cities, and were attacked by paramilitaries and their arsenal of weapons of war.

Jairo Lopez is a fifty-year-old farmer who fought in the Contra. In 2018, he decided to defend the barricades and the paramilitary malice left him in shock. “The command of ‘Let’s go in with everything we’ve got’ brought in the paramilitaries, ‘Operacion Limpieza’, and let me tell you… I know about weapons, and it was orchestrated between the Police, the Army and former members of the Ejercito Popular Sandinista, they colluded and snipers fired at kids’ necks, at the innocence of those kids; they shot at unarmed people. It was an indiscriminate attack,” describes Lopez, a man who still wields his machete and lifts 100-lb sacks of grains, despite his age. “Admittedly, in the 80’s it was us Nicaraguans fighting against each other, but that was different… We were two armed military groups, but we were equals. In 2018 it was the civic society that was attacked, and the ones with the heavy guns were on the other side,” the farmer goes on.

The months of June and July 2018 were the most violent of the April uprising. 152 people were murdered by the paramilitaries in that period of time –out of the 354 who were executed that year. The regime’s repressive force alerted the farmers in the north and southeast of Nicaragua, which caused thousands of still-injured farmers to rush to Costa Rica through the townships. While those who remained in Nicaragua suffered the onslaught of a follow-up persecution which, according to an investigation of Confidencial in alliance with CONNECTAS, resulted in the death of thirty farmers for political reasons between October 2018 and December 2019.

It was then when Elias Ruiz Hernandez fled. “On December 27th, 2019”, the farmer solemnly specifies, not being able to let go of his invaluable loss. “My homeland…”, he says.

One of the things that exiled farmers in Costa Rica are grateful for is the free quality education that their children are entitled to. Photo: Carlos Herrera | Divergentes.

“Daniel Ortega has been harassing farmers for years. He did it with my father, who fought Sandinismo in the 80’s, and now me,” Hernandez claims. I wonder: Do you cling to death in exile? Do you leave your possessions in Nicaragua, your history, your thoughts, ideas, your people, your town? Or do you make an effort to return to your country? The most pressing issue is that these people are clear in terms of what we are up against, informed on the risks we need to take… If there is something to fight for, then we must do it. If you look back in history, this has happened almost everywhere in the world, not just in Nicaragua.”

Jairo Lopez is fed up because all civic expressions against Daniel Ortega are met with repression. What else can slaughtered people do? What else can the international community do beyond imposing sanctions? What else can farmers do? These questions hunt him as he cuts off the weed in the outskirts of the camp. The farmer thinks that the Sandinista leader is planning on leaving them with no other choice than to “resort to taking up arms”. “It sounds easy,” he says, “but the world is different now. No one will give us weapons and we do not want them either.” Jairo Lopez lived through a war, he does not want to do that again. For him, it’s a resounding ‘no’.

“We cannot go back to the 80’s… It was too rough, too long; the resistance left many victims. We have done everything in our power to fight peacefully, non-violently. That is why we are willing to take up a civic fight and rearrange in exile, putting pressure on the OAS. In other words, exercising pressure as civilians, which is valid at all times. We are not thinking about military pressure. Nicaragua does not want that anymore.”

Even though farmers that left the Contra carry the stigma that they intend to resume military conflict in Nicaragua,
conversations with them indicate that it is a very remote option. In fact, seniors such as Jairo Lopez –those who experienced the war– outright rule it out. Ironically, the younger generation –who did not fight in the 80’s– are the ones suggesting that
option… yet it is not their main one. “ It is the last resort,” Elias Ruiz Hernandez.

Initially, farmers arrived in the city of Cartago but they could not adapt there. They needed land to survive. Photo: Carlos Herrera | Divergentes.

These exiled farmers, as well as others who are scattered in San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica, attend workshops to reflect about the role of their movement in the struggle for democracy and the culture of peace in Nicaragua. Elvira Cuadra, sociologist and expert in security, is in charge of these workshops, which are cathartic for these farmers.

“There is a real peace vocation in most leaders and members of the farmers’ movement”, Cuadra explains. “This became clear in different moments, in in-depth discussions pertaining to the country’s situation and to the alternatives to solve the crisis in Nicaragua. Very few suggested the violent option, but these were specific and isolated people… Most agreed that they had to follow a civic strategy, that conditions were different now and that people really longed for a peaceful change. They do not want another war, least of all in rural areas, since they are familiar with the effects or consequences of violence on their families or the lives of farming populations.”

The frustration of being exiled and harassed in Nicaragua, even after so many years, is what makes some farmers dream about taking up arms. They have lost it all, their farms and tractors have been seized, they are in exile, and they have been stripped of social and political rights as important as voting and freedom of association. Sociologist Cuadra found out that in the workshops held in Costa Rica.

“Since they have left so much behind, farmers who are exiled here carry all this heaviness. Not all of them were poor farmers, they were small producers who had farms, animals and economic activities that were somewhat important in their communities,” she adds. “They have started from scratch here, that may cause exhaustion, so to speak. But, in general terms, most of them intend to uphold the civic action strategy aimed at political change in Nicaragua”.

The leader Francisca ‘Chica’ Ramirez is like the Reverend Mother of the camp –she scolds everyone who speaks about violence. “That is not how it’s done,” she reminds them. “It is pretty confusing because we have been focusing on conflict resolution, human rights, civil and peaceful revolution. But when a farmer asks you the following question: Where in the world has a dictatorship as bad as Daniel Ortega’s been ousted with just a flag? You do not know how to answer, you want to make a better world, you want to fight with things other than weapons”, ‘Doña Chica’ asserts.

Francisca Ramirez became a leader in the protests against the Interoceanic Channel that was promised by Daniel Ortega. Photo: Carlos Herrera | Divergentes.

For these farmers, Nicaragua’s unresolved crisis merges with the boredom of four years in exile. Costa Rica has many rules in place to sell the farmers’ production whereas this activity was not so bureaucratic in Nicaragua. These producers’ status as asylum seekers makes it more difficult for them to process formalities in institutions, despite the good will that Costa Ricans have shown the exiled population.

“We arrived in a country which demands to register each 100-lb sack of beans that is harvested. We have had to learn about these rules with the help of the UCR (Universidad de Costa Rica), but the process of asylum status does not help. You show your card and everything is more expensive,” ‘Doña Chica’ complains. She has managed to get a loan for a truck that allows those in the camp to sell in a farmers’ fair in Upala.

Still, profit is limited. Many young farmers prefer to go to work in the pineapple plantations (Costa Rica is the main exporter of fresh pineapple in the world) but they are underpaid due to their migratory status. Lury Sequeira tells me that the latter, plus the expensive cost of living in Costa Rica, has driven farmers to migrate to the United States. The north is the new destination of choice for Nicaraguans, who are well aware of the post-pandemic unemployment rate affecting the Costa Rican economy, which is also saturated by the amount of refugees it has welcomed since 2018.

“There is not much to be done at the moment. I feel that the opposition has become weak with everyone who has left. As long as our path is not clear, people will continue to seek exile in Costa Rica and the United States,” Lury claims. “Over one hundred leaders have left in the last year. There is more financial stability and opportunities to work in the United States… But there is also despair, especially because there are lands and resources in our countries.”

Some farmers do not work in the camp in Upala, they choose to work in pineapple plantations to get more income. Photo: Carlos Herrera | Divergentes.

Temptation to return even with Ortega still in power has been hounding these farmers. Not just due to exile nostalgia that shone through Jose Francisco Urbina Hernandez on top of that hill, but because they think they could sort out their financial hardships working their abandoned fields at the other side of the border with Upala. Nonetheless, this decision is not an easy one. Their pursuit seems pointless.

“We have even thought about a paramilitary system. Why? For example, if people want to protest in Nicaragua, Ortega’s response will be violent. So, in our despair, we need to find ways to defend ourselves, because defense is valid,” Lury justifies. “People are up to the necks with this situation, our families who work in cattle back in Nicaragua are being victims of cattle theft. We lack many resources and things here (in Costa Rica) are different than in Nicaragua; there I have my family and my farm to produce.”

The idea of “paramilitary cells” is shared in murmurs, yet it’s blurry, ambiguous and shapeless. “In the workshops, some brought up the topic of assembling “paramilitary cells”… but the interpretations or the meaning of those cells varied”, Elvira Cuadra recalls. “Some saw these as organized groups to respond to the government repression by means of peaceful and civic ways. Others interpreted it as a way to get back at the government violence with a degree of violence as well. But, as I said, it was focused on a few of them.”

Lunch time approaches. In the camp, women season a massive pork stew with achiote. Elias Ruiz Hernandez rushes and finishes up our conversation to go and bring some plantains. He also thinks about the “paramilitary cells”, but he is unclear as to how to proceed. “We don’t know anything, and making mistakes is not bad. It is normal, human,” he insists and pauses to say hi to some kids in the camp who are returning from school in Upala. “Look!”, he points out, “this is what Daniel Ortega fears the most, even more than weapons: education… That is why our long struggle does not end with overthrowing Ortega from power, we are just getting started. A corrupt model has made its way, silencing thinkers by appointing them in certain positions or by putting them in jail. That is what we need to fight against, a long-term fight to transform Nicaragua: providing education for people not to dance to any tune,” he concludes, thrusting his machete on the stool.