Nagarote background

Near the center of the town of Nagarote lies the symbol of the town’s resilience and sustainability. This town, as a Nagaroteño of any age will tell you, is home to the Millennium tree; the majestic 1,000+ year old Genízaro, accompanied most days by its caretaker in the park that shares its name. To the outsider, Nagarote may appear nothing more than a slumbering, though well-preserved, dust lined small town. If they’ve spent any time in Nicaragua, they might take note of its handsome urban design and orderly infrastructure. Nagarote is known as a Municipio Azul (Blue Municipality), the government’s environmental designation, ranking it first place as an exemplar model of cleanliness, thanks in large part to the innovative street clearing program implemented some time ago by the town’s mayor.
Perhaps less obvious to the passing visitor however is the extraordinary character of the people who call this their home. This town has watched generations of its best and brightest succumb to the promise of job opportunities in Costa Rica or the lures of ‘El Norte’ or simply move to other parts of the country in search of stable employment. Tourists perhaps take a moment to enjoy a quick snack of Quesillo, the local cheese filled tortilla dish that the town is famed for, but rarely venture away from the roadside restaurants that line the busy highway. They prefer to continue north to the historic diamond in the rough Leon, with its rebellious past and inviting beaches, or simply back to Managua to catch their plane.
There is a steady succession of missionaries sent to Nagarote. Every denomination is represented and it is not uncommon to see foreign Jehovah Witnesses, Evangelicals and Mormons enter the poorest neighborhoods in search of new converts. The town has also received Peace Corp Volunteers for years who provide support to the small cluster of local NGOs as well as develop their own work plans. With these exceptions, Nagarote remains a place that few foreigners have heard about and fewer still have visited.
In recent decades, the town center’s boundaries have expanded and stretched as people move out of the countryside in hopes of supporting themselves and their families with the money earned in the nearby Maquiladora zone (la Zona Franca as they are euphemistically called). There they will do the repetitive and exhausting assembly work of cutting, dieing, stitching and sewing clothes destined for shiny malls in distant countries. The neo-liberal economic model imposed by free trade agreements such as CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) have plunged Nicaragua into the impossible global competition of enticing cheap labor with little on no restrictions on business. Nations provide incredible tax breaks and ensure that the free movement of capital will not be hindered by the threat of environmental regulations or labor laws. Typically, a worker can expect to earn anywhere from $64-100 USD a month, working 7 days a week, 10 hours a day. Increased privatization has led to higher prices for basic necessities. An average Nicaraguan family has seen their salary devalue and the prices of goods and services skyrocket. Such hardship has created a people proud of their local customs and traditions and committed to the preservation and improvement of their town.
Such strengths are not revealed all at once and learning how to understand them is one of the many rewards for anyone who spends considerable time here.
The Genizaro Park, where our proud tree continues to thrive, is as much a symbol of resilience as it is of hope. Nagarote is located in Nicaragua’s Pacific basin. This region was devastated by decades of contamination and poisonous pesticide use as a result of the cotton industry that dominated the municipality of Leon from the 1950s into the 1970s. Sustainable agriculture teaches that in order for land to be responsibly cultivated, a diversity of crops should be present. The practice of monoculture farming, in this case with cotton, exhausts the land of natural resources, exposes the soil and water table to toxic agrochemicals and introduces new vulnerabilities such as crop destroying plagues. The very chemicals that brought on such plagues are administered once more in new, harmful combinations and quantities. This practice leads to dependency on such chemicals by agro-businesses and local subsistence farmers alike. The results are stronger plagues and sicker people. Nicaraguans still register some of the world’s highest levels of DDT in their blood because of this practice.
In the 1990s, organizations began to focus on smaller scale production in order to stimulate the agriculture industry and the economic contributions of small, rural farmers. Such organizations proposed a new form of development that focused on sustainable agriculture, diversification of crops, conservation of land and water, and organic compost. It is within this tradition as well as the aspirations of the growth of the new green economy that we have positioned our environmental program at the Sister City Project.