PBI-Nicaragua shares Galeano passage from ‘The emigrants, now’ as the new year begins

The Peace Brigades International-Nicaragua Project, which is based in Costa Rica, has shared a new year’s message for 2021 featuring an excerpt from ‘The emigrants, now’ by the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano.

The passage reads:

“Since always, butterflies and swallows and flamingos fly away from the cold, year after year, and whales swim in search of another sea and salmon and trout in search of their river. They travel thousands of leagues, on the free paths of air and water.

On the other hand, the paths of human exodus are not free.

In immense caravans, the fugitives from the impossible life march.”

The full text by Galeano can be read in Spanish here.

In 1990, when the Sandinistas lost a national election after 10 years of the US-financed Contra insurgency, Galeano wrote: “The authors of war and hunger are now celebrating the result of the elections, which punish the victims. The next day, the US government announced the end of the economic embargo against Nicaragua.”

Galeano had been a supporter of the Sandinista revolution, but parted ways in 2008 in solidarity with the former Sandinista minister of culture Ernesto Cardenal.

More than 100,000 people have left Nicaragua in recent years, a large majority of them to Costa Rica where PBI-Nicaragua is based.

This year will be a crucial one in Nicaragua as a presidential election is now scheduled for November 7. PBI-Canada will be following updates from PBI-Nicaragua and the defenders it accompanies as the year unfolds.