Update: The online version now includes subtitles in English!

Finally, after the premier on Saturday in the Cinemateca Nacional of Nicaragua the final version is available online. This version has a length of 90 minutes.

There is also DVD image and various downloadable versions available from here.

A shorter version will be used on September 28th in front of all the embassies of Honduras in Latin America when the radio network Puente Sur arranges convocations against the military coup.

Update:

Posters for the 28th of September including advertisement for the documentary:

<%image(20090926-sep28-republica_dominica.jpg|794|1123|28th of September 2009, Dominican Republic)%>

While working hard on my thesis and another project for the Nicaraguan ministry of agriculture, I’ve also found a little time to go visit some of the productive countryside here in Nicaragua.

As part of that, I’ve made these two tiny videos together with Jason Glaser from the La Isla Foundation.

Sugarcane burning in Chichigalpa

The smoke from the annual sugar cane burning contains gases that are everything but healthy for those living around.
We interview the local headmaster of a school. And interestingly, he tells us that the burning of the cane is not the worst thing of living around the sugar cane fields.

English

Spanish

See also the discussion here.

9 year old girl working in Estelí

We picked up a group of workers at a tobacco farm in Estelí, Nicaragua and gave them a ride. One of the three was a nine year old girl. And the owners of the farm are, to our knowledge, Cuban-Americans residing in Miami, Florida.

The three explained to us that the father of the family was making 7.50 USD/week, and therefore had no choice but to send his daughters to work. The nine year old is working eight hours a day, six days a week, earning 50 US cents an hour. She does not have time to go to school.

English

See also the discussion here.

Both of these have been taken with a regular handy cam, so the sound quality is marginal. But both have been subtitled. You may have to enable that manually in the lower right hand corner of the video.

This is a campaign I started a little over a month ago. And yes, I happened to take the initiative, but the fact that the name wasn’t very well chosen was something many people had been thinking about before. Basically, it’s this Danish company that’s taking over a piece of property that had belonged to the army previously and builds a Danish school on it for 70 million Euros, and everybody gets all excited about how great they are. The problem is just that the company doing it is the shipping giant MAERSK and it’s named after their founder Arnold Peter Møller, who died in the 1960s. Now this guy and this company happen to have a history on earning their money on wars (selling arms to the Nazis and earning high profits on services to the Pentagon in connection with the Iraq war) and using union busting tactics against their workers.

Just in terms of numbers If they were to pay the same tax percentages for their oil exploration in Denmark to the Danish government as private companies have to pay to the Norwegian government, that would amount to 6 Billion Euros more in tax income from today until 2045. But the queen, and the Danish minister of education thank them so much for giving 70 million!

When I first wrote this, I wasn’t aware of several points that appear in the final version. That is because the first ten people signing it had a say in the contents of it, and several of them added things I didn’t have a clue of.

The reaction in the borderland has been like it would be anywhere in Soviet Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall: the newspaper Flensborg Avis refused to print it with the argument that the fond paying for the school had been “giving a lot of money to Southern Schleswig in the last couple of years”. Other people employed by the Danish institutions either were told that they could not sign such a thing or they were afraid of signing it due to past reaction from the system. The text was allegedly also spread in the intranet of the teachers down there. One guy went as far as calling me six times on my Nicaraguan cell phone and some 20-30 people sent me hate mails of various kinds. A reporter from Flensborg Avis went on and on in Facebook forums, trying to find some or other problem with the text. Unfortunately for him, he just revealed thereby that his investigative skills weren’t all that developed.

Still, despite some (unfortunately very uninformed) criticism I and we received so far, I am sure that in a few decades the call will come to fruition in some form or another. Here you can read it in four languages:
Continue reading Change the name of A.P. Møller-skolen →

When former minister of education of East Germany, Margot Honecker, received a medal for her help here in Nicaragua in the literacy campaign in the 1980s as part of the celebrations of the revolution on July 19th, I tried everything I could to get an interview with her. I also got through to all the officials and the spokespeople of president and ministry. Unfortunately though, in the end she declined.

Nevertheless, my search for possible questions cause enough stir around my friends in Germany that I was contacted in connection with this group trying to find their old class mates from a cadre school in East Germany. The Nicaraguans who had participated had for security reasons not used their real names and had never talked about where they where from.

Continue reading Searching for DDR-Nicaragua connection →