06.12.07 Hang Ronald Reagan
I remember my first ride on a chicken bus through Nicaragua because of something I saw.
I was on my way to Granada, having boarded a bus from Masaya in the thick dust that blew from the dirt road, encrusting the sidewalks and the streets. I liked to have my hair wrapped up in a bandanna when when it got too dusty; the particles lodge into your hair like glue.
While I was bumbling along on the bus, I looked out the window and saw a stuffed man dangling from a tree, hanging by his neck. He was wearing what looked like a grey suit.
Then I thought it was a scarecrow, and didn’t think much else of it. But recently I picked up Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, a slim volume of reportage he wrote while he visited Nicaragua in the mid-1980’s when the current President Daniel Ortega had first come into power.
In his novel, he’d described stuffed men exactly like the one I saw hung by the neck from trees, and he’d explained that they were the campesinos’ way of decrying Ronald Reagan, who had led the effort back in his presidency to crush ‘the communists’ of Nicaragua, defying international law.
Years later, I guess still nobody sees the need to take the Reagan doll off the tree. Or maybe somebody’s holding a very strong grudge.
This blog is edited by Emily Ding, a 23-year-old Malaysian who has just returned from spending a year in Central America & Cuba traveling, learning español, teaching English, dancing salsa, and working when she wanted extra money, so some of the information offered here will sometimes - inevitably - be informed by a Malaysian perspective, and perhaps also a bit of an international outlook since she spent three years in London studying and three years in Melbourne before that. Feel free to dispute anything.
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Dona James
13 Nov 08 at 10:02 am