by Orsetta Bellani
Image of the long protest that the Association of Relatives of those Affected by Chronic Kidney Failure (ANAIRC) hold in Managua since March 9, 2009. (PHOTO BY ORSETTA BELLANI)
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) has taken three brothers and the father of Carmen Rios. All of them worked as laborers at Ingenio San Antonio, a sugar company of 40,000 hectares located in the Municipality of Chichigalpa, North West of Nicaragua. The mill is owned by Nicaragua Sugar Estate Ltd, part of Nicaraguan economic giant, Pellas Group. From the sugar cane, the company gets sugar, ethanol and the prestigious Rum Flor de Caña, exported worldwide.
The Pacific coast of Central America has been affected by the epidemic of CKD: in Salvador, chronic kidney failure is the leading cause of death among men, while among the Nicaraguan male population it has caused more victims than AIDS and diabetes together. However, the causes of the disease have not been fully elucidated.
In the Municipality of Chichigalpa, which has 45,000 inhabitants, about 7,000 people became ill from CKD. The family created the association ANAIRC (Nicaraguan Association of Those Affected by Chronic Kidney Failure), complaining that the Pellas Group is responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, former workers of Ingenio San Antonio. “The Pellas Group says they have nothing to do with the deaths and that pesticides banned in the United States, Canada and the European Union do not cause the disease”, explains Carmen Rios, president of ANAIRC. “ANAIRC was born in 2004 and the following year we marched along the 135 km between Chichigalpa and Managua. Since March 9th, 2009 we sit in this area in the center of the capital. We ask the Pellas Group to stop use pesticides that harm the health of workers and pollute the water that everyone drinks, we want to reforest the area and sit at a table of dialogue, to determine a compensation for the deaths and the damage they cause to our health. And we want people to know what’s behind the azure they consume, behind the rum they drink and the ethanol they put in their engines, they need to know that many people here in Nicaragua are dying.”
The community of La Isla (The Island)- sarcastically renamed “The Island of widows,” which is located within the Ingenio San Antonio and it’s completely surrounded by sugar cane fields, represents the most serious case of CKD. On The Island, 70 percent of men and 30 percent of women have been affected by kidney disease. In this place where the only option is to work in the mill, the first to get sick of CDK are laborers, but the disease also spreads to their families. This situation also causes many social and psychological problems, and creates a vicious circle that is very hard to exit, since the children of the deceased are still working in the same company.
“In 2006 the World Bank lent money to the Pellas Group to build the ethanol plant,” says Viola Cassetti from La Isla Foundation, a controversial foundation that works in Chichigalpa. “The workers filed a complaint alleging that some pesticides and the lack of adequate protections were causing an epidemic. The World Bank commissioned an investigation to Boston University, which after four years does not have a clear answer: it just published a report that said it did not find any direct connection between pesticides and CKD, but that it cannot exclude its existence. The epidemic can have various causes: it can be linked to pollution, and genetic factors may also influence. Another hypothesis that has been considered is the dehydration caused by excessive heat: laborers lose two liters of liquid every hour, so it’s a type of work that can be compared to running a race. They would have to drink ten liters of water a day and rest 45 minutes every 15 minutes of work.”
According to Martha Flores from the Recinos Inti Pacha Mama Managua association this explanation is too simple: “The heat is a characteristic of the climate of the area, it cannot be considered the cause of the that ease of all these people. In Chichigalpa, the water is contaminated with 18 different types of pesticides.” In fact, 98.7 percent of the wells are contaminated. The first to discover the presence of pesticides in the wells of Chichigalpa and bring up its links with CKD was Dr. Enrique Jose Rios Urbina, with the support of the laboratory analyses of the Autonomous University of Nicaragua. Dr. Rios Urbina, brother of the president of ANAIRC, worked at the hospital at Ingenio San Antonio, which is owned by the same Pellas Group and represents the only health facility in the area. According to reports the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT), which in October 2008 dealt with the case, “the witnesses alleged that the hospital concealed the real causes of the disease, and thus provides inadequate medical treatment. In the words of a particularly qualified witness, employers were fully aware of the facts and verbally oriented the medical professionals for failing to report on the diseases they suffered.”
When Dr. Rios Urbina made his finding public, he was fired. He later died from CKD.
