Nicaragua, the ruined utopia

(Versión en español)

There are twenty of them, mostly girls. There are some boys in the group, but they are fewer in number and younger. All of them are painting on some big cardboards while their instructor, a young lad, cuts small pieces of tape he will use to stick children’s paintings on the school walls. When we ask why it is a man, so not a woman, who lead crafts workshops, the obvious answer comes naturally:

-They need to get used to male presence.

We are on the Caribbean coast, in the city of Bilwi, but almost all Nicaraguans know it by its Spanish name, Puerto Cabezas. As we can read in three languages, – Spanish, Miskito and Creole- , we are entering a shelter for women who are victims of violence, owned by the Nidia White Women’s Movement. That includes all kinds of violence, as the people in charge of it specify, but above all sexual violence and rapes. They tell us that among the 186 victims they have helped in 2013, only two dozen are adult women and 40 are teenagers. The other 122 are girls under 14. For those who haven’t yet connected the syllogism, we witness a revealing scene just in the same room where the girls are painting. One of them stands up, and goes into the main building to come back carrying a baby. Then, she breast-feeds him. Roughly estimating, she is no older than 13.

Nobody would say it, but she is a lucky girl. Nicaragua is one of the world’s five countries with a total ban on abortion, so many women die from non viable pregnancies, particularly if they are very young. Although we have no access to official data, we can reconstruct the information by our own means. Regarding to the number violations registered between 1998 and 2008, when the prohibition came into force, more than two-thirds of the victims were under 17 and half of them under 14. Until 2008, when the latest official information about this subject was provided, near 820 women per year asked Nicaraguan sanitary system for help suffering from dangerous embryonic and fetal malformations incompatible with life, and almost 630 suffered from ectopic and molar pregnancy, the two of them potentially fatal for the mother. Since them, all of them must continue the pregnancy and hope an spontaneous abortion save their lives. Any different conduct is penalized with prison.