Managua Fills With Trash in Fight Over Best Scraps (Update1)

[struggle4progress]

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Managua is using temporary dumps to dispose of some 2 million tons of trash a day as protesters block garbage trucks bound for the main municipal landfill for the third week in a dispute over who gets the best scraps.

Demonstrators who rely on the refuse to make a living started blocking trucks from dumping waste at La Chureca on March 3, claiming that municipal garbage workers are stealing the most lucrative metals, glass and other refuse before they drop off the trash. The mayor's office said yesterday that it had reached an accord with protesters to let the trucks return ...

An estimated 1,300 people, who call themselves churequeros after the name of the dump, scavenge for bottles, aluminum cans, copper and cardboard boxes in the piles of refuse, earning up to $5 a day from reselling the scraps to recyclers. The blockade has raised concerns of possible disease outbreaks as trash piles up throughout the capital ...

Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the hemisphere after Haiti, with 43 percent living in extreme poverty, the World Bank says. Almost 20 percent of the people who pick through trash at the 34-acre La Chureca dump are younger than 17, a study by the Nicaraguan group Two Generations found ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a8YrHAp0Te_0&refer=home

[Judi Lynn]

1. Ouch. This is horrendous. Look how much good has been done for Nicaragua,

beating down political opposition the hard way, after they had the nerve to try to rid themselves of U.S. puppet dictators!

ANASTASIO SOMOZA, SR. AND JR.
Presidents of Nicaragua

The Marines invaded Nicaragua in 1912, and stayed until 1933, fighting but never defeating the revolutionary Augusto Sandino. They created the Nicaraguan National Guard and installed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. Then Sandino, who had signed a truce and put down his arms, was assassinated by Somoza. A general who led the Marines into Nicaragua, explained, " I was a high class muscle-man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. l helped purify Nicaragua for an International banking house." President Franklin Roosevelt put it another way. "Somoza may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch." Corruption, torture, and wholesale murder of dissidents continued for 45 years under two generations of Somozas, for after Somoza Garcia was gunned down in the streets in 1956, his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle took control. The Somozas plundered Nicaragua and became millionaires. The younger Somoza, made $12 million a year buying the blood of his people and selling it abroad at a 300% mark-up. In 1972 after an earthquake killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans, Somoza had his National Guard seize $30 million in international relief supplies and sold them to the highest bidder. Near the end of his reign, he aerially bombed his own capital to stay in power, but he was overthrown in 1979 by a rebel group who called themselves the Sandinistas, after the revolutionary hero his father had slain.
(snip)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html