por el personal de El Reportero
GRANADA, Nicaragua – Nicaragua has a rich history of poetry, and a common passion for the spoken word which unites class and cultural divides.
This past week has seen the Fifth International Poetry Festival take place in the beautiful, old city of Granada, bringing together more than 130 poets from 54 different countries.
Poets from Uganda and Iraq have made the journey to this Central American nation – testament to the festival’s credibility and commitment to the poetic cause.
Award-winning Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli was on hand to give the opening reading.
As vice-chair of the festival and author of 15 literary works, including seven poetry collections, she is one of Nicaragua’s big literary stars.
She thinks the festival is important because it opens up Nicaraguan poetry to an international audience.
“It also provides a big showcase for the different poetic tendencies in the world today,” she says.
Poetry in Nicaragua has often been, and still is, an outlet for political and social commentary.
In the years prior to the Sandinista revolution of 1979, it expressed many of the hopes and fears of the people.
And then, we’ll go wake our dead with the life they bequeathed us and we’ll all sing together while concerts of birds repeat our message through the length and breadth of America.
This extract, from Belli’s poem Until We’re Free, contains both a political message and a paean to the joy of poetry.
Modern poetry could be said to get a bad press – or not much press at all – so it is interesting to see a small country in Latin America putting so much emphasis on this literary form.
“Poetry is still as relevant today as it has been in the past,” insists Ms Belli.
“It can be used as both a celebration and a weapon in our society.”
DAS scandal could jeopardise U.S. assistance to Colombia
Colombia’s defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, explicitly stated that the intelligence service, the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), should be wound up. His comments were heavily infl uenced by time and place.
Santos was speaking to an audience in Washington; fresh revelations about the DAS carrying out illegal wiretapping of government offi cials, the opposition, the judiciary, and the media, had just emerged. It is this sort of scandal which has deterred Democrats from approving an FTA with Colombia.
The US House of Representatives did approve a bill this week preserving 2009 financial assistance for the counter-narcotics initiative Plan Colombia at last year’s levels, but President Barack Obama is starting to send out signals that he might change direction on drug policy.
Where’s the crisis heading?
The insouciance about the world economic crisis in Latin America’s bigger economies has proved shortlived. In Brazil and Mexico companies are slashing costs and downgrading forecasts.
Among the middle sized economies, only Peru seems to believe that it will escape the crisis unscathed. Venezuela and Colombia have expressed worries about the crisis but barely touched the policy tiller. Chile, typically, has taken action. It has decided to raid its sovereign wealth fund to pay for a welter of new infrastructure projects. Ecuador has gone back and opted for blunt protectionism.
(Latin Briefs and BBC contributed to this report).
