This article unpacks the events of the April 2018 insurrection in Nicaragua through an analysis of visual representations of plant forms in urban landscapes and in social media in the country’s recent history. By revealing a contested imagery of plants, it considers the implications of historically decentering the human in visual culture, and how the speculative potential of plant and vegetal thinking may reconfigure social movements. Based on the vegetal iconography of this historical juncture, the analysis exposes a cartography of ecocidal practices of neoliberal/global capitalism at the margins. The iconography of vegetation suggests what Michael Marder calls plant thinking and being, as well as a new configuration of networks that challenge current forms of authoritarian power and capture different ontologies of practice.
Este artículo aborda los acontecimientos de la insurrección de abril de 2018 en Nicaragua a través de un análisis de las representaciones visuales de las formas vegetales en los paisajes urbanos y en los medios sociales en la historia reciente del país. Al revelar un imaginario cuestionado de las plantas, considera las implicaciones de la descentralización histórica de lo humano en la cultura visual y cómo el potencial especulativo del pensamiento vegetal puede reconfigurar los movimientos sociales. A partir de la iconografía vegetal de esta coyuntura histórica, el análisis expone una cartografía de las prácticas ecocidas del capitalismo neoliberal/global en los márgenes. La iconografía de la vegetación hace referencia a lo que Michael Marder denomina pensamiento y ser vegetal, así como una nueva configuración de redes que desafían las actuales formas de poder autoritario y captan diferentes ontologías de la práctica.
Este artigo desvenda os eventos da insurreição de abril de 2018 na Nicarágua por meio de uma análise de representações visuais de formas vegetais em paisagens urbanas e nas mídias sociais na história recente do país. Ao revelar uma imagem contestada de plantas, o texto considera as implicações de descentralizar historicamente o humano na cultura visual e como o potencial especulativo do pensamento das plantas e vegetal pode reconfigurar movimentos sociais. Com base na iconografia vegetal dessa conjuntura histórica, a análise expõe uma cartografia de práticas ecocidas do capitalismo neoliberal/global em suas margens. A iconografia da vegetação sugere o que Michael Marder chama de pensamento e ser vegetal, bem como uma nova configuração de redes que desafiam as formas atuais de poder autoritário e capturam diferentes ontologias de prática.
From the Anthropo-scape to the Vegetal-scape
In Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua, metal trees have become contested signifiers of Daniel Ortega’s and Rosario Murillo’s politics, and of the economic and the social development projects promoted by their government.1 As part of the presidential couple’s political rebranding of Sandinismo, between 2013 and 2018, 130 of these metal structures emerged in Managua to later also appear in the colonial cities of León and Granada, for a total of almost two hundred structures.2 These trees come in two dimensions: twenty-one by thirteen meters or seventeen by thirteen meters, with a weight of nine and seven tons, respectively. Each metal tree also contains cement and cables, as well as hundreds of LED light bulbs that turn on at dusk and stay on through part of the night to colorfully illuminate the city. Funded by a fossil-fuel economy, each metal tree costs around USD 25,000, without including the $1 million per year tab for electricity, plus surveillance. Beyond symbols of power, these structures anticipate a contested view of what constitutes the plant as form.
The framing of the top image of figure 1 illustrates where the multicolored massive metal trees stood, and in some places still stand, with the backdrop of Daniel Ortega’s portrait, much like extensions of each other. Visually, Ortega could be seen as a fruit or flower coming out of the tree structures. Or the trees could be seen as images coming out of his head/mind, like a dream or a thought. In a way, both of those readings could apply, as I explain in what follows. That top image of figure 1 also captures the juxtaposition between the greenery of the real vegetation of the city and the Technicolor palette of the public art project that aggressively extends throughout the city’s streets and boulevards. The contrasting color scheme helps to emphasize the contraposition between the twisted shape of the metal trees and the organic vegetative forms. This top frame visually anticipates the context of the ecological emergency Nicaragua is experiencing as part of this political phenomenon, which has seen an alarming reduction in protected areas, an accelerated rate of deforestation, and an increased rate of violence against Indigenous communities in the name of economic development.3 As such, real trees had to be cut down to erect these structures, an underlying layer of the image.
“Así luce la avenida tiscapa luego de un fuerte despale de justiciar y democracia,” PuebloÚnete, Facebook, May 27, 2018, www.facebook.com/2020684208192861/posts/2029973150597300/
“Así luce la avenida tiscapa luego de un fuerte despale de justiciar y democracia,” PuebloÚnete, Facebook, May 27, 2018, www.facebook.com/2020684208192861/posts/2029973150597300/
The bottom half of figure 1 shows the results of the popular discontent that ensued after the 2018 insurrection: none of those structures were left. The time-lapsed frames of the landscape are used to explain the centering of justice and democracy as the weapons against this metallic arboreality, as a visual representation of Ortega’s autocratic project.4 The uprising that took place in Nicaragua starting on April 18, 2018, initially over unilateral changes to Nicaraguan social security benefits, reconfigured locally how resistance is enacted, casted, and represented.5 The subsequent visual representations of these events reveal a replanted local iconography and signifiers of power, and of resistance to power, moving from the human subject to vegetal and plant iconography as agents of resistance to authoritarianism. In this example, that meant removing images of Daniel Ortega and his populist leadership from billboards and also taking down the visual extensions of that political power embodied in the metal-colored trees that prevail in the city. A spontaneous collective effort led to the removal of over thirty of those structures in less than a month, channeling the political discontent that combined specific incidents with long-term growing frustration with the reduction of political liberties as it relates to the visual landscape.
Regarding the context of the insurrection, one can argue that the current iteration of Ortega’s authoritarianism started to gel after he lost the elections to Violeta Chamorro in 1990 at the end of the Cold War.6 Although politically neutralized to facilitate the political transition, his brother Humberto Ortega remained as Minister of Defense and also as head of Nicaragua’s armed forces, making it difficult for the new government to consolidate. During that five-year period the armed forces were groomed to remain loyal to the Ortega family while making governability precarious for the new leadership. In another prelude to authoritarianism, the pact between Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Alemán (Chamorro’s successor in 1998) assured Ortega’s return to power nine years later through shady electoral reforms.7
Ortega officially returned to presidential office in 2007. As part of his twenty-first-century mandate, Rosario Murillo, Ortega’s lifelong partner who eventually married him to officialize their joint reign, became the spokesperson as well as the assessor for press and communication through her leadership of the Consejo de Comunicación y Ciudadanía del Poder Ciudadano (National Council of Communication and Citizenship for Development and Social Benefit).8 This maneuver put her in charge of all public arts decisions and public appearances, as well as of all the propaganda associated with the new-age version of Sandinismo, which includes the metallic trees.
Anticipating those structures, the regime began to install cone-like trees in rotundas and boulevards in 2007 after their first reelection. In terms of the context, those first proto-forms emerged at the end of Plan Puebla Panama (2001–8), a development program approved by Interamerican Development Bank that included Mexico and Central America. In its place, the ALBA treaty (The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) became the development path for the country with the Sandinista government.9 Nicaragua signed on as an official member of ALBA in 2007, getting generous petroleum credits and loans that for over nine years gave the Ortega-Murillos the economic benefits that allowed them to perpetuate their political agenda, including the budget to construct the metal trees at hand.
Sealing the autocratic path of the regime, the power couple changed the constitution in 2013 to guarantee their reelection in 2014. In addition to advancing direct threats and actions against the natural reserves, as will be discussed later, this time marked the official dismantling of the recent democratic structures that were set in place during the Sandinista government of the 1980s. A controversial vote by parliament, led by Ortega’s party, approved an amendment to article 147 of the constitution, allowing the president to be indefinitely reelected. That article had prohibited consecutive terms to avoid scenarios of dictatorship turned dynasty, but this move rolled back that constitutional protection against a historical pattern. At that juncture, Murillo masterminded a reshaping of the landscape of the city, introducing what she early on called the “trees of life.” The visual imposition of those structures came along with the demolition of past symbolic urban markers that captured other historical eras. For example, at the beginning of their second consecutive term, with an amended constitution in their favor, in 2014 the public monument called Lighthouse of Peace was taken down, as was La concha acústica.10 Along with the erasure of prior symbols, the third consecutive presidential reelection in 2017 (for a total of five presidential terms), along with Rosario Murillo as vice president since that time, produced the authoritarian totalitarianism still in place today and with no end in sight.
During this assertion of power, the metal trees began to spread through the urban landscape, partly reconfiguring and claiming public spaces according to a distorted aesthetic/ethical project. This effort marks a shift away from the memories of the revolution, from the end of the civil war, and from the land. W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us that “[o]nly the monuments and empty spaces are left on the sites of revolution, and they are generally images of the failure or betrayal of revolution, its replacement by tyrannical regimes.”11 The site of that 1979 Sandinista Revolution in the twenty-first century turned into a tyrannical metallic arboreal landscape that demolished past markers of historicity to assert a neoliberal take.12 A look at visual representations of vegetal life in Nicaragua takes us to 2013, the year that initiated the dismantling of democracy and of protected areas. That year, metal tree monuments began to emerge in rotundas and avenues of the city of Managua. More precisely, the arboreal imagery began in a sort of psychedelic-carnivalesque homage to the anniversary of the “Revolution” in July 2013 at the Plaza of Faith.13 Here carnivalesque is understood in Édouard Glissant’s sense of a creative disorder and excess, as a space to which to escape. In the case of the metal trees, these serve to detract or escape from the historical, the social, and the ecological ramifications of the political trajectory.14 The metallic forest forges a carnivalesque ambiance that is very much part of the “Capitolocene,” expressed here by the authoritarian practices of the Ortega-Murillo regime.15
Because the urban metal forest represents the contradictions of a twisted, postrevolutionary, neoliberal aesthetic/ethical political project, in the 2018 insurrection live plants become agents and signifiers of resistance and possible alternatives of an imagined future (fig. 2). Along with real barricades and blockades made of concrete blocks or sandbags that were placed throughout the country for several weeks,16 live plants served as symbolic barriers of protection against state violence in urban neighborhoods during the widespread insurrection. Figure 2 shows domesticated plants in pots and planters that belonged to the surrounding community and were brought out to block a city street. The inside gardens went outside to stand with the people or to keep some people out, if only figuratively. Likewise, uprooted plants like agave were also used to simulate roadblocks (not shown here). Plants like agave can serve as live fences in urban and rural areas, but they had to be uprooted to be placed on the streets, unlike the domesticated potted plants. At the same time, individuals planted live trees and live plants in place of the metal trees. Those symbolic actions were recorded in viral videos that served to indicate a shift in reclaiming not just the space but also the significance of organic plants in opposition to the metallic renderings.
Ecological barricade in the neighborhood of Guadalupe, León, Facebook, May 2018
Ecological barricade in the neighborhood of Guadalupe, León, Facebook, May 2018
Does this new visual centering of vegetal life in the context of insurrection challenge the anthropocentric approaches of will to power and of resistance to that power? What alternatives does “plant thinking” offer human networks to effectively challenge political authoritarianism, global capitalist development, and violence, as illustrated in the case of Nicaragua?17 To understand the centering of plants in the political imagery of the country, what follows is first a contextualization of what happened in 2018; second, an account of the political, environmental, and visual context that lead to that social explosion; and finally, some implications of plant studies as it interfaces with Mesoamerican conceptions of plant life and practice. But first, what led to the taking down of the steel forest? In asking the question, I am reminded of the Bob Marley song “Small Axe” (1973), “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe, sharpened to cut you down (well sharp), ready to cut you down.” In this case, human actions worked together as small axes to cut down invasive metallic trees.
The Insurrection of April 2018
As we’ve seen, what happened in April of 2018 is the culmination of years of political discontent, but what set it off was two significant events that took place in that heated month. The preamble was at the beginning of April, in response to a fire at the Biological Reserve of Indio Maíz.18 For ten days, starting April 3rd, five thousand hectares of the biosphere reserve burned as a result of the incessant informal and illegal expansion of the agricultural frontier. While the reserve burned, the Ortega government dragged its feet and refused the assistance of Costa Rican firefighters who were within reach of the fire. The culprit was later found to be a colono (settler) who was clearing land illegally. He was later released without penalty nor explanation. A week after the fire began, around April 10th, a protest by auto-convocados (self-summoned people) began, composed of students, young people, and peasants who demanded information about the forest fire and the status of the ecosystem, as well as accountability and better safeguarding of protected areas both north and south. These initial protests for Indio Maíz were quenched harshly by Ortega’s officials, including the national and riot police, as well as the extra-official Juventud Sandinista. People were left rattled and upset by the government’s actions against the citizens. Social consequences aside, according to local scientists the fire was the most devastating environmental catastrophe in the region to date.19
Just a few days after the fire, through a presidential decree on April 17th, the government changed the rules governing social security benefits. These unilateral changes increased the contributions that individuals and employers make to social security, and decreased by 5 percent the already scant benefits of retirees and of people with disabilities. The decree was published the following day in the official government venue La Gaceta-Diario Oficial. That same day the elders went out to protest the reforms. The initial rally was met with violent repression of mobs attacking the retirees. Those powerful images were captured by cell phones and went viral through social media. Still upset by the violence against them a week prior, students immediately mobilized and joined in the demonstrations, extending the unrest throughout the rest of the country. The killing of fifteen-year-old Álvaro Conrado that April 20 also caught and spread on social media drove massive crowds of citizens to the streets to express their indignation for weeks. The crescendo of both protests on the same month, first for the forest fire and second for the social security reforms, resulted in a violent aftermath that drastically transformed local politics and demographics. Since then we saw the migration of over one hundred thousand people by the year 2020, all fleeing the increasingly repressive state violence. The repercussions of this human rights crisis continue to reverberate today.
As a result of the repressive state violence that followed the social explosion, the flow of migrants from Nicaragua since the 2018 crisis has exceed the numbers migrating during the Cold War in the 1980s.20 In addition to the displaced, according to the International Human Rights Commission’s report, between April 18, 2018, and July 2019, 355 people were killed, more than 1400 wounded, and more than 690 people detained.21 Those numbers increased exponentially in the months to follow. To continue with their violent actions, the government kicked out the special commission of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (part of the Organization of American States), and it continues to terrorize and arrest the citizenry and the political opposition, normalizing a state of exception.22 As part of this entrenchment, Nicaragua exited the OAS in July 2021 to avoid accountability. Operation Nica Welcome, on February 9, 2023, involved exiling 222 political prisoners to the United States, including most of the political opposition, journalists, students, campesino leaders, and former leaders of the FSLN. After removing them from the country, Ortega stripped the desterrados (which translates to exiles but in Spanish means un-earthing, as in uprooting plants) of their Nicaraguan citizenship. Many of them have now also lost their private property, much like what happened in the 1980s, that time under the pretense of economic reform. The Catholic clergy has also been a target of repression, and at least ninety-seven priests have been forced to leave Nicaragua since 2018, not to mention all those who have been imprisoned. Government forces have also shut down and permanently dismantled dozens of universities and institutions of higher education since the protests, also sanctioning educators.23 This tightening of control was set off by actions like the cutting of the trees, the barricades, the roadblocks, the marches, and waving the Nicaraguan flag, as well as the murals, songs, and memes in social media critical of the regime.
Note that many of those actions, such as the roadblocks, the music, and the murals, were key instruments of the 1979 revolution that continued to influence the postwar generations. The advancement of technology, and of new political markers such as those structures, add a layer to an already rich collective memory of how resistance to power manifested collectively. The toppling of the metal trees was the initial spontaneous reaction to the political discontent that had been accumulating for years. Those acts of public disobedience only lasted for the first month of mobilization, serving as a sensationalist way to document the different forms of protest. A meme that circulated on Facebook at that time shows how social media constructed a visual narrative of the challenge and of the desired outcome of those actions (fig. 3). Starting our visual reading, the frames on the left side initiate the narrative of heroism, with both human and animal (a lion from the city of León) standing over the toppled metal tree structures. In contrast, the right side of the meme captures the governmental power asserted visually through the preponderance of the trees in the urban landscape. In the lower right quadrant is the Hugo Chávez monument, considered to be the “graduation” or the main objective.
“Esto solo es la práctica, viene la graduacion… todos arderán baby…” Meme, Facebook, May 2018
“Esto solo es la práctica, viene la graduacion… todos arderán baby…” Meme, Facebook, May 2018
Complementing the visual story, the caption included over the pictures reads: “This is just the rehearsal,” “Graduation is coming…they will all burn, baby.” The end of the caption alludes at least to two different moments of visual narratives: “Burn Baby Burn,” which has been used in reference to the Los Angeles Race Riots of 1965 and to the Vietnam War.24 The caption also nods to part of the notorious line of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film Terminator 2: Final Judgement (1991), “hasta la vista, baby.” The references to political unrest, war, and dystopian futuristic possibilities align visually and textually. Tragically, while documenting this massive undertaking, Guatemalan journalist and filmmaker Eduardo Spiegler was accidently killed on May 16, 2018, by one of the falling structures while recording the act of civil disobedience. After that tragic death was aired live, the cutting down of these structures stopped being recorded and celebrated. Images of the tragedy were promptly removed from social media. The testimonial potential inherent in these audiovisual technologies mobilized, diffused, and documented (via various degrees of expression and creativity) the state terror that was experienced. So much so that the interdisciplinary group of independent researchers from the OAS reviewed more than ten thousand visual documents and more than three million messages in social media to prepare its report, which accuses the regime of crimes against humanity. In the meantime, government officials denied the visual evidence and rather claimed it was a “soft” or “failed” coup d’état directed by United States interests.25
As part of the insurrection, figure 3 sensationalizes the act of taking trees down while threatening to take them all down, including the Hugo Chávez monument in the historical center of the city. In this postrevolutionary iteration of Sandinismo, Chávez and his Bolivarian populism become founding symbols of the metal forest. Serving as an epicenter of the Ortega-Murillo’s hegemony, this centerpiece of the “trees of life” was erected in 2013. It sits adjacent to the lake of Managua, Xolotlán, on Avenida Bolívar. Chávez’s monument has served as a sort of epicenter for the propagation of the trees of life and as a transition from the human to the plant form of visual representation. Not by happenstance, the financing behind the controversial metal tree project came from ENATREL (the National Industry of Electric Transmission), supported by Albanisa, an offshoot of ALBA, through an irregular national debt to Venezuela.26 Through the metal trees, their indirect financier, Hugo Chávez, is introduced into the select pantheon of Latin American resistance in Nicaragua. The head of Chávez at the end of the Bolivar Avenue takes the nineteenth-century Bolivarian project north, into the isthmus, to the center of Managua. A close-up of that monument insists that the human form takes prominence over the arboreal form. Much as the visual dimensions anticipate, real trees continue to succumb to the human amid the pressures of agriculture, cattle, mining, and the timber mafias.
Unlike other protests in Latin America at the time, figures 1 and 3 show that the political discontent did not take place in the historical center but was instead directed at the tree structures scattered throughout the city. Despite particular differences among protests in the urban landscape, the social explosion of 2018 in Nicaragua echoes other massive popular uprisings that emerged around that time in places like Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti, and Venezuela. In the case of Nicaragua, at the heart of this new visual imagery plants acquired a symbolic currency that implicitly acknowledges and anticipates a shift from human to nonhuman agents of (social) change. We can observe this centering of plants through the raising and toppling of huge metal tree monuments, in the use of vegetation in public spaces, and in their insistent representation through social media platforms. In relation to the toppling of the metal trees and other monuments, Ileana Selejan suggests that “vandalism as symbolically reparative” became a means of “reclaiming Nicaragua’s revolutionary past and its symbols, while deploying them towards the making of a yet to be imagined political future.”27 In the context of postcapitalist, postdemocratic, antiauthoritarian and anti-anthropocenic protests, the idea of vandalism seems misplaced, but the idea of “symbolically reparative” in the making of yet-to-be-imagined (political) futures points to some of the potential applications of how we interpret this new visual social-scape.
Plant and vegetal life studies allow us to ponder how the visual life of plants provides other possible ontologies that permeate into social configurations of resistance, as displayed by images in their various forms.28 We can thus speculate about how and why new social formations of resistance are embodied in plant forms, as well as how the visual representations of plant lives and being allow us to imagine, and perhaps articulate, new forms of social resistance or militancy for the future. Figure 4 shows another example that emerged from the 2018 insurrection, illustrating that despite the integration of plants in the warrior’s arm and leg armor, the Anthropos continues to be the dominant form of agency. The living plant shield and armor, along with the aviary helmet, are auxiliary elements of human struggle. The warrior as individual subject is an interspecies conglomerate of resistance. Although the human remains prevalent, it seems inseparable from the nonhuman that is also at the center. This nationalist warrior, whose helmet represents a guardabarranco, the national bird, bears a Nicaraguan flag as a weapon while stepping triumphantly on one of the metallic trees that we have been discussing, making it seem small in comparison to this bigger-than-life character. The warrior with the animal headgear is reminiscent of Mesoamerican depictions of Indigenous combatants and deities. In this digital rendition, wrapped around the right foot that stomps on the remains of that metal tree grow sacuanjoches, the national flower of Nicaragua, implying the flowering of a different, vegetal possibility of plant form and of human nationalism. Why and how have plants decentered the human and entered the visual landscape of resistance in Nicaragua? To understand this shift, we must appreciate the when; that is, the broader context of the peasant-led struggles to resist and to question the development paradigm and the ecological challenges facing Nicaragua.
Nicaragua Art: “Nicaragua su despertar después del 19 de abril” [Nicaragua, its awakening after April 19], 2018. Uploaded by María Alejandra, Pinterest, www.pinterest.com/pin/84864774214309291/
Nicaragua Art: “Nicaragua su despertar después del 19 de abril” [Nicaragua, its awakening after April 19], 2018. Uploaded by María Alejandra, Pinterest, www.pinterest.com/pin/84864774214309291/
The Slash-and-Burn Context
In 2012, a year before the metal trees started sprouting, the government declared Nicaragua a mining destination, emphasizing an extractive economy that depends on dispossession in its various senses.29 It is interesting to note the return to the extractive practices and objectives of the colonial enterprise. To illustrate the point, let us consider that as of 2022 the number one most exported product in Nicaragua was and continues to be gold. Not all that material is being extracted legally. For instance, 66 percent of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve has been approved for concessions to mining, violating the human rights of the Mayangna and Creole communities in that protected autonomous area.30 Declared a patrimony of humanity by UNESCO in 1997, that protected area is second in size and biodiversity only to the Amazon in the Western Hemisphere. The metal trees can be understood as a visual arsenal of what Macarena Gómez-Barris refers to as the extractive zone.31 Such zones demarcate the “temporalities and the spatial catastrophe of the planetary through a universalizing idiom and viewpoint that hides the political geographies embedded within the conversion of complex life.” These metal trees are part of what she calls “colonial visual regimes [that] normalize an extractive planetary view that continues to facilitate capitalist expansion, especially upon resource-rich Indigenous territories.”32 They are also colonial in the sense that the metal trees import a manufactured arboreal product at the expense of the local organic arboreality. If we consider that in Mesoamerican cosmology ceiba trees were a centerpiece of community and of their sacred relationship to the land and to the cosmos, in the context of the Ortega-Murillo regime we can observe a colonized version and vision of trees as inorganic. But it seems that that esteem and recognition for the tree form remain close to the people of that land, as the second epigraph of this text asserts.
The metal trees began to appear in the landscape at the time that the state opened the door to assaulting protected ecosystems through mining. This was also the same time as the controversial treaty to build an interoceanic canal through Nicaragua, signed between the Chinese entrepreneur Wang Ying and the Ortega government. With Decree 840, as part of this nineteenth-century project in 2013, the regime sought to hand over to the Chinese magnate vast amounts of land for a hundred-year term, through an undetermined canal route that would cut across autonomous regions of the Atlantic coast. This decree was made without considering the rights nor the opinions of Black Indigenous and other Indigenous people who are sovereigns of that land, nor taking into account the ecological impact of the venture.33
The pipe dream of the canal corresponds to a nineteenth-century trope of development that has been sustained by the post–World War II reconfiguration of the development discourse, as explained by Arturo Escobar.34 Those enacted discourses as practice have had real material and historical consequences in the region, and in the current environmental juncture they mark a shortsighted continuity to those modes of development. Although the United States is no longer the “empire” behind this enterprise, now it is the capitalist world system, or the propaganda thereof, that has surpassed and replaced, even in appearance, the logic of nation-states. In the same vein, the environmental-ecological question spans planetary issues that are rooted in local, territorial, and environmental rights that surpass the interests of national parameters as well. Capitalism, like ecology, is not bound by national parameters, although these borders serve to advance the growth of the former to the detriment of the latter. The canal project, like the mining industry, points to what David Harvey has referred to as the deterritorialization that is part of the intricacies of “uneven spatio-temporal development.”35 That unevenness affects directly the rural and Indigenous sectors, not to mention all ecosystems that go along with those forms of living and knowing.
The peasantry raised resistance to the looming threat and to the overt unilateral intention to expropriate land through Decree 840. These actions aligned with the mobilization of Indigenous communities in Nicaragua who work to protect their ancestral lands. The impending actions proposed by the decree would affect many natural reserves and archaeological zones, including the Ometepe Island Biosphere Reserve, the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve, the Wetlands of Bluefields, and more. Because of this, prior to the insurrection of April 2018, the rural sector organized over eighty marches in the five-year period between 2013 and 2018. Those mobilizations were met with fierce repression from the authorities and from paramilitary groups. For example, a march that took place in 2016 resulted in five injured, one by gunfire, and eighteen disappeared.36 The rural mobilizations in Nicaragua received support from some of the intellectual allies of the city, such as Mónica López Baltodano, also now in exile. Despite these alliances, there was scant overt support for the campesinado’s struggle in the urban areas. Folks from the capital and big cities did not seem too concerned with the possible repercussions of Decree 840, as it did not seem to directly affect their livelihood. That is, not until Indio Maíz started to burn.
At the helm of the peasant struggle is Francisca Ramírez, also known as doña Chica, recipient of the prize from the Mare Terra Mediterrània foundation for her activism in the anti-canal peasant movement (fig. 5). As part of her activist response to Decree 840, doña Chica also founded the Consejo Nacional en Defensa de Nuestra Tierra, Lago y Soberanía (National Council for the Defense of Our Land, Lake, and Sovereignty), where Medardo Mairena served in the council. Mairena was sentenced to 216 years in prison for his leadership and for being the representative of the peasantry during the failed attempt at national dialogue after the 2018 insurrection. After serving fourteen months of his sentence, Mairena was one of the 222 prisoners who were brought to the United States as part of Operation Nica Welcome. Doña Chica is currently living in exile in a neighboring country because of the repression that ensued after the 2018 protests.
Gabriela Alemán, Francisca “Chica” Ramírez, from the series Central American Heroes, Smug Morenita, www.smugmorenita.com/new-page-1
Gabriela Alemán, Francisca “Chica” Ramírez, from the series Central American Heroes, Smug Morenita, www.smugmorenita.com/new-page-1
Peasants joined the urban struggle of 2018 almost immediately. Since the height of the crisis, violence against those communities has remained constant. One year after the insurrection, twenty-nine peasants had been killed, all of them participants in the protests and activism of the anti-canal movement. According to experts, these were executions, produced by gunfire from the police and from the paramilitaries.37 In addition to these murders, hundreds if not thousands have been chased out to Honduras and Costa Rica, where they have been hiding since the crisis. In the context of Nicaragua, it is important to consider that indigeneity has been systematically erased as a category related to the peasantry, in order to forge nationalist hegemony of a Nicaragua mestiza.38
As a case in point, in figure 5 doña Francisca Ramírez, hailing from the Autonomous Region of the Southern Caribbean in Nicaragua, is portrayed as a protagonist of plants against a green backdrop and among two large leaves that seem carefully placed to suggest wings. In contrast with the warrior in figure 4, taken more from pages of graphic novels, anime, and superhero characters, figure 5 remains in a more realist vein. Historically rooted, the (olive) green of the fatigues of the guerrilleros is now exteriorized as armor of resistance, with the leaf forms. In the image, leaves as embodiments of receptivity and supplementarity are at once building blocks of plant life, as source, product, and reproduction of vegetal being, and they enact a “veritable anarchy.”39 Indeed, as the illustration suggests, Francisca Ramírez’s leadership style follows that configuration. Continuing with the leaves as backdrop of the image, and seeing them perhaps as possible configuration of such social movements, Emanuele Coccia reminds us that plants are leaves before anything else, that leaves are what produces the plant, and that the origin of our world is the leaves, as a paradigmatic portal that weaves cosmic connectivity.40 Peasantry is part of the interconnectivity between the human species and plants today, much as leaves make sustenance in the world possible.
In the context of popular lore in Nicaragua and of the region she comes from, the leaves behind doña Chica in figure 5 bring to mind the nonhuman main character of the Miskitu legend The Invisible Hunters.41 In that story, a vine called Dar (from the verb “to give”) gives three brothers the power of invisibility to hunt wild boar (wari) for their village. In exchange for this plant power, the brothers must agree never to sell the meat and to never use guns to hunt. In this folktale, the plant becomes the moral compass of Indigenous communities as they face the demands of impending contact with capitalism. Pressured by their interactions with the British merchants, who provide arms to the brothers, they disregard the promises made to the Dar and enter the logic of capitalism by using guns to kill and sell wari meat. As a cautionary tale, the Dar punishes the brothers by making them invisible. In figure 5, doña Chica seems like a representative of the Dar, as we can read a continuity between the Miskitu legend and the current landscape, where people like her stand on the front lines of the ethics struggle and for the ontologic model represented by local Indigenous and peasant communities. Her stance, and Mairena’s collaborative organizing, sought to oppose Decree 840 and stand in solidarity with the first nations that continue to struggle for their livelihoods in their relationship to the land.
As part of the canal dreams, of the rise of mining and of the imposition of metal trees in the country’s capital, the year 2013 also marks the direct assault upon the Indigenous people of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, with the murder of Mayangna Indigenous leader Charles Taylor.42 The protected area is in ancestral Indigenous and African-descendent territories that include Creole, Mayangna, and Miskitu. In the year 2000, only three years after UNESCO recognized Bosawas as patrimony for humanity, approximately 15 percent of the reserve had already been cleared for agricultural purposes. According to 2019 reports from MARENA, the Nicaraguan environmental agency, that number went up to 31 percent, including deforestation at the reserve’s core. That has been possible because forty-two thousand acres per year were illegally cut, as of 2016.43
While the metallic trees grew, adding mounting costs by state-sponsored surveillance to protect them, the Bosawas reserve continued to be slashed and burned: only six forest rangers worked per 1668 square kilometers.44 Plenty of images circulated on social media to visually denounce or comment on the contradictions (fig. 6). That meme from 2016 is composed of two images: the main one focuses on a row of trucks carrying lumber, and the second is a small picture in the upper right of one of the metal trees. The caption reads “working hard…Forestry ALBA, the government and the FSLN $ Farewell Bosawas.” The assault on the biosphere reserve and on real trees is directly linked to the relationship between Venezuela and the FSLN government, with the metal trees as an icon of that alliance. Memes and other such visual multimedia material composed of both montage and digital art served to comment on the ecocidal practices of the government by insisting on the prevalence of the metal trees in light of such destruction. Through memes and GIFS, the commentaries about the metal trees abound. Here we consider visual culture as “deterritorialized procedures” that remain a source of nationalist imageries, as explained by García Canclini, further amplified and “detemporalized” by the immediacy of the web.45 Photographs, captions, montages—all formed a collage of visualities and signifiers that transposed time and space to point out the newly acquired significance of plants.
“Trabajando duro…alba forestal el gobierno y el fsln $…adios bosawas” [Working hard…Alba Forestry, the government, and the FSLN $…good-bye, Bosawas]. Meme, Facebook, 2016
“Trabajando duro…alba forestal el gobierno y el fsln $…adios bosawas” [Working hard…Alba Forestry, the government, and the FSLN $…good-bye, Bosawas]. Meme, Facebook, 2016
In this complex context, the metal forest of Managua serves as a visual rhetoric that seeks to neutralize or conceal corrupt politics, including the canal project and the extractivist practices of the government, while normalizing the anthropocentric logic of late capitalism or of the Capitalocene. The visual assault of the Technicolor metal trees go hand in hand with the authoritarian scheme that has allowed the Ortega-Murillo regime to perpetuate itself in power. In addition to the canal project, which in hindsight may have served as a smokescreen to obscure the real vital destruction of various ecosystems, this period marks an accelerated depredation of the northern and southern reserves of Bosawas and Indio Maíz. As part of that extractive mode of economic scheming, Marder comments that “[p]ractices of deforestation are the ontic mistranslations of the ontological principle of infinite vegetal giving, in that such practices conflate the trees themselves, living beings that are not stockpiled in the planetary ‘factory,’ with infinitely renewable resources. That which is the most widely shared becomes the most deeply violated and subject to a desire for unlimited appropriation.”46 As such, the sustainable slash-and-burn practices of Indigenous communities become deformed when practiced by those seeking to strip the land. That appropriation and “ontic mistranslation” is embodied in the metal forest of Managua and in its burning. The imposition of this carnivalesque wonderland of public art through the transformation of plants materializes visually the excess of authoritarian maneuvers and the tropical take of anthropocentric capitalism in effect.
That maneuver, in addition to asserting an aesthetics of this form of power, denaturalizes real trees with the pretense of beautifying the city. Citizens recognized the contradictory relationship between the metal forest and the ecocidal reality of the region, so as part of the insurrection of April 2018, they set out to slash and burn that public art project. A meme that circulated on Facebook at the end of April 2018 comments on the contrast of severity between the slashing and burning of Indio Maíz versus the assault against Rosario Murillo’s mechanical forest (fig. 7). Figure 6 anticipates the actions of figure 7. Unlike the first meme, which centers on the cut-down tree trunks, figure 7 focuses on one of the metal trees on fire and black toxic smoke emanating from its burning. Located on top of the retaining wall of the Tiscapa Lagoon, on the other side of Sandino’s silhouette seen on figure 8, the burning structure is one of at least two more metal trees that can be seen in the background along the body of water. We can see that real trees seem reduced in size and density in relation to the metal ones. In plain daylight, the image also shows the quotidian character of this type of burning, as a vehicle drives by and street vendors continue their hustle uninterrupted. To take down the metal structures, protesters usually turned first to fire to debilitate the metal and then took turns sawing it down.
“Vándalos incendian la recerva Chayo Maíz”/Vandals Burn the Recerve [sic] Chayo Maíz. Facebook, April 2018
“Vándalos incendian la recerva Chayo Maíz”/Vandals Burn the Recerve [sic] Chayo Maíz. Facebook, April 2018
Carlos Herrera, photo in Carlos Salinas Maldonado, “Si Sandino levantara la cabeza,” Confidencial, August 2, 2016, www.confidencial.digital/opinion/sandino-levantara-cabeza/
Carlos Herrera, photo in Carlos Salinas Maldonado, “Si Sandino levantara la cabeza,” Confidencial, August 2, 2016, www.confidencial.digital/opinion/sandino-levantara-cabeza/
The caption on Facebook adds commentary on the connection between this type of burning and what happened in the Indio Maíz reserve: it reads “The Recerve Chayo Maíz” [sic]. “Chayo” refers to Rosario Murillo’s informal nickname, familiarizing her while undermining her authority. The word indio is replaced by Chayo in this rendering, thus capturing an ontic difference on the meaning and practice of what constitutes a natural reserve and the erasure of the first nations. Inverting the nineteenth-century Latin American civilización y barbarie paradigm, the industrial artificiality of the stylized metal trees imposed by the Ortega-Murillo regime became the “barbarism” obstructing the reimagined and reclaimed “civilized” natural landscapes proposed by the protesters. This new imagery did not center human actors or actions but rather plant and vegetal agency. The challenge to the human-centered visual discourse of resistance and of progress imposed by the representatives of the Sandinista Revolution has been questioned by the centering of plants as subjects and objects of liberation. In sum, it is that form of emancipation that leads to reimagining a revolution that connects human to nonhuman rights.
From Human to Nonhuman Visual-scape
In registering the current urban visual arsenal of the Ortega-Murillo regime, as well as the shift from the iconography of the Sandinista Revolution to the metal trees, it helps to consider the interdependence of ethical and aesthetic codes in forging an ecocidal, neoliberal-populist visual discourse atop the residues of a colonizing revolution.47 Materially this contradiction can be seen in the alarming rate of deforestation of reserved areas and its effects on Indigenous communities (fig. 6).48 Historically the FLSN showed signs of this contradiction when they officially imposed Spanish upon the multilingual autochthonous communities of the Atlantic Coast during this first phase of the Sandinista government, and also when they forced displacement of Indigenous people, as seen in the “Red Christmas” episode.49 Those actions took place in 1981, when forty-two Miskitu Indigenous communities were removed from their ancestral land and taken elsewhere; eight thousand people were moved, and seventy-five perished in the process. Many academics have commented on the contradictions of the Sandinista Revolution, including Charles Hale, who has addressed how the Sandinista leadership practiced settler colonialism; and Ramón Grosfoguel, who has pointed to the coloniality of their approach to the Miskitu.50
Adding to that mix, let us consider the term residue, as explained by Raymond Williams, in relationship to how culture can be oppositional to dominant tendencies but can also be incorporated to sustain those dominant tendencies.51 One can observe the residue of a colonialist or colonizing revolution in the preponderant weight iconography takes in visual culture, be it through crosses, religious icons, or symbols of anti-imperialist struggle like Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Hugo Chávez, or Augusto C. Sandino. In the latter’s case, such visual markers seem to capture a process in which the residual produces a wasteland of ideological content. In contemporary Latin America, images of resistance have focused on human subjects and form as main agents of change and disruption. Representations of Che Guevara, albeit emptied of historical content, have extended beyond the region and the specifics of rebellion. Emptied of historical content, for example, in that for a whole demographic sector Guevara’s image relates to the rock band Rage Against the Machine, rather than to the Cuban Revolution.52 Images of La Virgen de Guadalupe, Emiliano Zapata, Frida Kahlo, and the Zapatista movement are some of the other examples from this human-centered iconography with shifting meanings. In the realm of earth defenders, the image of María Sabina and more recently of Berta Cáceres have gained traction as other forms of warriors. These last two examples also center vegetal ecologies and collectives as constituent parts of that human struggle.
In terms of imagery of resistance specific to Nicaragua and to residual processing, until the beginning of this century depictions and representations of Sandino were everywhere. With the first reelection of the Ortega-Murillos, the iconography of Sandino began to give way to other human actors and signifiers of nationalism, such as Rubén Darío. Because the couple is now on a fifth presidential term, some consider that Sandino’s legacy has been emptied of its historical and ideological content to serve only as a rhetoric of resistance, both visually and discursively.53 This historical and visual legacy was questioned formally in January 2021, when the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS; Sandinista Renovation Movement) called for the removal of Sandino’s name and reference from its political party name, to distance itself and challenge the official political practices of the FSLN as led by Ortega and Murillo.54 That political party changed names to UNAMOS (Union Democrática Renovadora), and changed its flag from bearing a symbol of Sandino’s hat to just solid orange.
Critics have commented on the ideological transformation of Sandino’s images in the twenty-first century, a transformation that runs through the visual landscape that circulated during the FSLN’s neoliberal iteration. For example, elsewhere I have offered a reading of one of Sandino’s official portraits, showing how it (and its circulation) captures the iconographic and creates an ideological collage that has facilitated the carnivalization of Sandino as an icon of resistance.55 Carnivalization is used in the Bakhtinian sense, where mocking through parody is used to question and invert power structures and hierarchies.56 In reference to that, I also analyze a 2005 caricature-montage by Pedro X. Molina that combines Sandino’s body in the aforementioned portrait with Anastasio Somoza’s face, along with other digital alterations.57 In that paper I explain how, through the use of historical portrait and digital montage, the cartoonist early on suggested there was a return to an authoritarian and dictatorial pattern, now under the guise of a new Left. Other images of revolution that center human in Nicaragua include the photographs produced by Susan Meiselas, who internationalized the national iconography of resistance, if we think, for example, of the Molotov man.58 The point of considering these depictions is to emphasize the prevalence of the human form in traditional renderings of resistance in Nicaragua. Other than photography, murals and other monuments also have been a significant part of the political project and contentions of that country, as Baab, O’Shea, and Vannini have explained.59
In addition to diminishing the prevalence of Sandino’s iconography, during the Ortega-Murillo mandates the most immediate visual recasting of guerrilla/post–Cold War aesthetics has been to reduce and nearly eliminate the significance of the traditional militant signifiers of the red and black colors in favor of a Technicolor palette of turquoise, fuchsia, yellow, mauve, white and such. These colors have been used to alter, not without controversy, the national emblem of Nicaragua in all official communications from the government. The same colors would eventually be applied to the metal trees (see fig. 1). In terms of the visual cues of male fashion, military fatigues have been replaced by white formal shirts with rolled-up sleeves, more in line with a neoliberal sensibility. The shift here is to visually move from the militant stance to the entrepreneurial benevolence centered on a cult of personalities. Some of these populist strategies can be seen plastered in an aggressive billboard campaign across the country depicting large bust portraits of the presidential couple, along with the mottos of “Nicaragua: Christian, Socialist, in Solidarity!” and of “The people president” (el pueblo presidente). While the first motto captures the essence of the theology of liberation, note that this majority has ceased to be Catholic, for which the Christian appellative is key. In the second motto, substituting the president for people seals the populist approach to authoritarianism. Much like the reconfigured visual cues, the new slogans are warped in contradictions that evoke Christian socialism and the solidarity that once characterized the armed struggle. Words and images seek to appeal to a popular sense of empowerment. Despite the textual and visual rhetoric, the centering of human agency as subject of resistance changed after 2018, when plant imagery gained significance to challenge the repackaging of revolution.
Whereas specific human subjects have visually dominated local iconography, the opposite has happened in the use of plants because it started with abstract allusions in the shape of cones mimicking those of Christmas trees. Figure 9 shows how it was that figurative cone-like shapes, back in 2007, began to anticipate the centrality of vegetal agency in the realm of a contested visual-landscape. Like the more stylized trees of the present, those shapes included strands of light running vertically to emphasize the festive appeal. Unlike Christmas trees, instead of the star at the tip, campaign propaganda was placed atop them in rectangular three-dimensional shapes. What would be a gift box at the bottom of a traditional Christmas tree, is here a package at the summit of that tree or as the apex of a beam that seems to extend from the ground. These structures were placed in rotundas that often included other types of statues; in this case, one can see the shape of a Virgin Mary statue to the side. Regardless of what or who sat beside them, the focus at night was always on the cone structures, as the lights and spotlights emphasized them.
Arelly Castillo Molina, “Qué papel juega la alcaldía de Managua”, El pequeño espacio de Arelly. WordPress, April 18, 2011, https://arellycastillamolina.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/que-papel-juega-la-alcaldia-de-managua/
Arelly Castillo Molina, “Qué papel juega la alcaldía de Managua”, El pequeño espacio de Arelly. WordPress, April 18, 2011, https://arellycastillamolina.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/que-papel-juega-la-alcaldia-de-managua/
Those first abstract and industrial iterations of plant life were part of a political discourse that sought to assert its power through alienating the biotic. Plants were not meant to be depicted as organic entities but rather as a futuristic replacement of living ones. As part of the neoliberal version of Sandinismo that Baab called Sandalismo, the cone-shaped structures mimicking Christmas trees were left in rotundas year-round in what seemed like a permanent tropical carnivalization of the season.60 In the context of an occluded neoliberalism, this aligns with a global consumerist pattern reinforced by the Christmas tree symbol. Through the permanence of the cone-shaped trees, the regime began to implement a visual assault normalizing an absurd or seemingly eccentric arboreal distortion in public spaces.61 These illuminated cones stayed in place year after year, prompting people’s speculation about the esoteric symbolism behind the strategically placed structures.62 In addition to the local popular lore that emphasizes Murillo’s tendencies, due to her eccentric style and affiliations, two former Sandinista militant intellectuals, former Vice President Sergio Ramírez and the comandante Dora María Téllez, have both referred to this posturing with the occult.63 Despite those questions, the metal shapes were deemed harmless enough to become the site of a neoliberal landscape with residues of the Left in the Central American tropics.
The cone-shaped figures gave way to the metal trees when they were first included in the Hugo Chávez monument discussed earlier (see fig. 3). Yet the coupling of human with arboreal iconography extends beyond Chávez. The tallest of these metal trees in Managua, also raised in 2013, can be seen on the Hill of Tiscapa, next to an imposing silhouette of Sandino, placed there in 1991 (see fig. 8). Designed by Ernesto Cardenal, that eighteen-meter-high monument, dedicated to the “general of free men,” was positioned shortly after the war during Chamorro’s government to commemorate Sandino’s legacy and to facilitate the political transition. In addition to being located on the edge of the Tiscapa Lagoon, overlooking Lake Xolotlán (Lake Managua), the site of that structure is symbolic because it housed Somoza’s mansion, where he had torture chambers and dungeons for political prisoners and opposition members.64 The insertion of Sandino’s giant metal silhouette monument during the early 1990s marks the triumph of his endeavors over the Somocista legacy. It distances the national hero from the FSLN, while also signaling a peaceful transition of power. From a distance, and because of the angle of the placement, the tallest of the yellow metal trees next to the contested national hero overshadows and trivializes his stature, while symbolically disavowing his legacy. At best, the side-by-side placement visually puts Sandino’s iconography on par with the steel tree(s) against the backdrop of the contaminated lake.65 This is very much in contrast to the Chávez monument, where the Venezuelan leader’s head is just as large as the structures, making him bigger than the tree structures and their signifiers (see fig. 3).
Turning to a visual interpretation of the twisted metal trees, the structures are stylistically reminiscent of Gustav Klimt’s Tree of Life series beyond just the name.66 Perhaps to insist on that golden allusion, at their debut all these structures were painted yellow (see figs. 6 and 8). The displaced Art Nouveau aesthetic in the context of Managua contrasts with the natural greenery and with the precarity that otherwise characterizes the Central American city. Modernist aesthetics and modernity, understood as the development implied in the physical and material undertaking, collide to trans- or de-form a tropical and impoverished landscape. Wonderland or nightmare?67 Visual carnivalization as a form of mocking, questioning and subverting environmental politics or of revolutionary aesthetics and ethics? Estrangement of plant life in the face of rampant deforestation? Kitsch, Technicolor version of plant life in the twenty-first century? All sorts of suggestive possibilities and readings come to mind with this public art campaign. Metal trees became the oblique markers of what Mirzoeff calls the “anthropocene landscape.”68
According to official discourse, these structures were made to beautify and create a sense of pride in Managua, to cheer up the needy, and to make the city stand out from other Central American capitals. For the opposition, on the other hand, the trees began to represent the irresponsible fiscal practices that characterize the regime, while neglecting education, public health, and the housing situation. Téllez, former militant of the FSLN and also founding member of the opposition MRS, has argued that the tree structures represent a fascist authoritarian model, and that they are also a reflection of the regime’s power as a projection of its desired permanence, combined with the esoteric and mystical tendencies of Rosario Murillo. Téllez further considers them to be pathologies of a disease she coined “syndrome of the trees of life.”69 Indeed, these forms are used by official discourse and rhetoric, as part of the tourist packaging and iconography available to characterize the city as synecdoche of the country. Replicas of the metal monuments can also be found in souvenir shops in tourist areas as mementos of the Central American capital.
In addition to Téllez, Gioconda Belli, one of the most prominent contemporary literary figures of Nicaragua, has also written about this mechanical forest and has commented on some of its contradictions in a poem entitled “Al verde futuro de los árboles desterrados” (To the Green Future of Uprooted Trees).70 Here the poetic voice takes issue with the uprooting of real trees in order to make place for the metal structures. The title of that poem plays with the word desterrado, here applied in both the literal sense of uprooted and the figurative meaning of exile, centering plants as subjects of human displacement. Adding to what has been said about the “arbo-latas”(tin trees), I have argued that the arboreal iconography reveals a juncture of neoliberalism where aesthetics, ethics, and politics are deployed to normalize ecocidal practices of Anthropocene capitalism in the Capitalocene.71 These structures mineralize and fetishize real trees by hyperaestheticizing and mechanizing them, turning the organic to metal as a visual hyperbole of a projected, frustrated hypermodernity.
As part of the visual reading of the tree structures, one must consider their materiality; that is, the use of metal in the vegetal form as part of the estrangement effect produced. Walter Benjamin brought it up in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” where he quoted Marinetti’s manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war to illustrate the use of metal in the aesthetics of futurism: “[w]ar is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns.”72 One hundred years later, on this side of the Atlantic and in the context of a “developing” and “postcolonial” world, that aesthetics, aligned with a fascist political turn, materializes a “dreamt-of metallization” of trees, not of the human body. In the twenty-first century, the “flowering meadow” of machine guns cedes the way to a metal forest. The “beautiful war” implied in this form of metallization is not aimed at the human, as with the context of the Ethiopian colonial wars and futurism a hundred years earlier, but rather at the forests and the ecosystems that sustain the other-than-humans in the context of the Anthropocene as Capitalocene. Although metal was conceived and used as a utilitarian material of modernity, as explained also by Benjamin in his Arcades Project, in this Central American context it is used as a surplus of symbolic value for ecocidal public arts. Futurism and speculative practices meet a hundred years apart. The optocentric turns to a metallization or mineralization of the arboreal, and later the insistence on plant form as the subject and object of historical agency decenters the centrality of human historical subjects as agents of social change.73
Toward a Plant Being
The sparks for the April 2018 insurrection, first over the mishandling of a manmade fire in the Biological Reserve of Indio Maíz that gained momentum with spontaneous protests against reforms to the social security benefits and following the violent governmental response to the political discontent, combine human and nonhuman concerns. As the number of injured and killed protestors escalated, more metal trees started going down, each requiring a collective coordinated effort of ingenuity. The documentation of the arduous undertaking was recorded and shared live on social media, as memes and images of this public uproar multiplied. Beyond documenting the tumbling and the tumbled structures, some images focused on the aesthetic effect of the representation of social and ecological justice. The taking down of these metal trees stands in visual contrast to the slash-and-burn practices in the reserves, both of Bosawas and Indio Maíz.74 Although the instigators of such fires and destruction enjoy impunity, unfortunately some of the recordings of bringing down the metal trees have served to later criminalize people who participated in this part of the civil unrest. At least three individuals were charged with vandalism, and hundreds were prosecuted and harassed for their actions against the public monuments, but nobody has been charged for any of the more than three hundred deaths. These facts imply that in this postrevolutionary context, metal trees (or what they represent in this context) are more valuable than human life, not to mention plant or any other form of nonhuman life.
Plant forms have always been a centerpiece of life in the isthmus, but in the twenty-first century the contested images involve the cutting of real trees and the taking down of metal ones. The introduction and spread of metal trees as part of a public arts campaign and of political power make them targets of discontent. That discontent has become a deflector and generator of activism that situates plants as a concentric point of extractivism in its different forms. A practical question remains, based on the prevalence of these actions and imagery. What would have happened if instead of diverting the popular discontent toward taking down the metal structures, the political mobilization focused its energy on the immediate objective? Did these metal trees serve another purpose in distracting political action and attention? These examples illustrate the anesthetization of action, through the symbolic uprooting of an imposed metal forest.
Considering the significance of plant forms in Nicaragua from the vantage point of visual culture and of social unrest suggests that the human form has ceased to be an actor of resistance. Let’s consider, for example, that one of the most iconic images of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 is of people taking down a statue of Anastasio Somoza Debayle mounted on his horse. That monument was at the entrance of the national stadium. As part of the contested memories of “revolution,” in Margarita Vannini’s sense, a broken piece of that statue with its plaque was placed at the edge of Laguna Tiscapa, alongside the Sandino silhouette and the massive metal tree (see fig. 9). The insurrection of 2018 in Nicaragua situated plant forms at the center of the action. A contested vision of plant form, instead of a human representation, was the object to be taken down and replaced by real plants. The advances of technology and social media have allowed for the creation of different renderings and representations of these actions and of plant-human relations. This has revealed that there has never been another politics other than that of nature, nor another nature other than that of politics, as Bruno Latour suggests.75 A visual reading of what has transpired in Nicaragua in recent years indicates that the livelihood of plants, as part of a dignified human existence, is the objective of social mobilization and of emancipation.
Here plants are not just a “threshold of philosophy” but a synecdoche of nature,76 and also a threshold of action and ontology as seen in this context. The limit of philosophy means that plants do not allow us to think in totalizing terms. The social activism that has allowed for a replanting of resistance, aligning with plant forms, has reached and extended beyond the context of individual actors and of Nicaragua to protests against global capital in other countries. Evidence from visual culture in the case of this Central American country confirms that specific heroes are not at the center of an imagery of resistance. Beyond rhizomatic actions and the multiplicity of immanence,77 the spontaneity of the insurrection may be part of a “web of reciprocity” seen in trees, whereby they communicate to each other without speaking, underground, through fungal bridges that connect them.78 Is it possible for humans to enact plant thinking and being? This is what we would like to see and imagine.
What is the center or the heart of the plant, the roots, the fruits, the flowers? It does not matter because it does not have one: the plant resists human analogy. We can move beyond the arboreal or the tree as the personification of plant, as a humanist projection of the vegetative. Left to itself, a plant can emerge from a seed, a fruit, a root, a branch, in some cases from a leaf. All first nations of the Americas have always known that plants resist anthropocentric perspective and limits. Human and plants coexist in one form in countless examples of deities, stories, and visual examples from Mesoamerican antiquity. The plant is not an independent being; it coexists with others, both animal and not, while providing life directly and indirectly. May humans work to also coexist with other beings. A political cartoon by Manuel Guillén illustrates a plant form as agent of change in taking down orthodox ideology, represented by the red and black of the official Sandinista discourse (fig. 10). Plant form is what prevails here, not human struggle. The struggle captured by this plant is not only aimed at the colors of ideology but also at temporalities, as the text in the pot of the plant and the flag indicate. The plant from the nationalist pot (in white and blue) labeled April 19th ruptures the July 19th of the red-and-black movement. Although the limits of plants may be precisely as the image captures, nationalism is the form that restricts plant and human life. The contested plant imagery and plant representation that we have seen through this essay point to the possibility and pitfalls of how plant thinking may be conceived and practiced.
Manuel Guillén, 19 julio/19 abril. La Prensa digital: el diario de los Nicaragüenses, July 19, 2020
Manuel Guillén, 19 julio/19 abril. La Prensa digital: el diario de los Nicaragüenses, July 19, 2020
This reading of plant imagery invites us to imagine new social formations of resistance that could follow the possibilities of plant life. The Nicaraguan insurrection has no single individual leader; it is a decentralized movement, composed now of a huge diaspora that resides in many countries beyond Costa Rica, Mexico, the United States, and parts of Europe. The word diaspora is rooted in the Greek spora, meaning seed, dispersion of seed.79 There are social, economic, cultural, and political entanglements implied by the literal and symbolic ramifications of what is happening. Can we think of this decentralization as a source of strength, of a possible becoming beyond the localized? Thinking in Marder’s terms, could social forms of resistance convey a plant/vegetal vitality? The self-unfolding, the fugitive mode of being, or cryptic form of plant life, one that moves at a different temporality that includes imperceptible movements?80 May the different forms of recent unrest worldwide speak to the possibility of becoming beyond human through plant beings, as a possible way to eschew and perhaps alter the present path in Nicaragua and otherwise.
Acknowledgments
Earlier iterations of this paper were delivered at the Latin American Studies Association meeting in Boston in 2019, at the Congreso Centroamericano de Estudios Culturales that same year in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and at the Memory and Imaginaries of the Future symposium in the Central American Studies Program at California State Northridge, also in 2019. I am grateful to the enriching feedback received from colleagues at those events, in particular to Beatriz Cortéz, Valeria Gringberg-Pla, and Carolyn Fornoff. In addition to Marisol de la Cadena and Tatiana Argüello, mentioned in the footnotes, I especially appreciate Kevin Guerrieri for his keen eye and mind, and Azfar Najmi for his technical support.
Notes
Ortega joined the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in the mid 1960s. He spent seven years in jail for bank robbery in 1967. As a result of a hostage exchange negotiation directed by the FSLN, along with other militants he was set free and sought refuge in Costa Rica during the last years of armed struggle. In Costa Rica he met Rosario Murillo in 1978, and he has been with her since then. Prior to her public political life, Murillo was a journalist and poet. In 1977 she went into exile in Costa Rica. Both returned to Nicaragua after the triumph of the Revolución Popular Sandinista in 1979.
The FSLN was founded by Carlos Fonseca Amador in 1961 following the Cuban model of national liberation fronts. For more details, see Matilde Zimmermann, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Sandinista Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
For example, the Humboldt Center recently reported that from 2011 to 2018, 1.4 million hectares of forest were cut in Nicaragua, totaling 11 percent of the country. This essay considers these statistics as well as the alarming escalating violence against Indigenous lives that are part of those ecosystems.
The Facebook caption reads “This is how Tiscapa Avenue looks after a tough cutting of trees done by justice and democracy.” Translations by the author.
From April to August 2018 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded over three hundred people murdered, including dozens of underage children, over two thousand injured, and sixteen hundred kidnapped, disappeared, or illegally detained. Not a single person has been charged or investigated for any of the murders. Today, over a hundred political prisoners remain in jail, over one hundred thousand people have fled the country, and much of the populations lives in what is considered a state of siege. OHCHR, Situación de los derechos humanos en Nicaragua, February 11, 2021, https://www.ohchr.org/es/documents/reports/ahrc4621-situation-human-rights-nicaragua-report-united-nations-high-commissioner.
As part of the FSLN’s first political phase, Daniel Ortega was coordinator of the Junta of National Reconstruction (1979–85) and then president of Nicaragua during 1984–90.
The purpose of the pact was to allow more political space to the FSLN, with the understanding that they would let Alemán and his party, the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC), keep some sort of political power. This was an important feat for the Sandinistas, as it was being questioned and threatened by the creation of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (known by its initials in Spanish as MRS) in 1995.
Between presidencies, the partnership of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo was severely tested in 1998, when her daughter Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo accused her stepfather of abusing and raping her for over a decade. Although Ortega is considered guilty, he never faced consequences, and his wife stood by him, to the estrangement of her daughter who is now in exile in Costa Rica. Among the documentaries dedicated to this story, one short film blends the question of the metal trees with the interfamilial drama. See El árbol de la vida (la reina, la hija y las mujeres), directed by Bernardita Llanos, Brooklyn College of CUNY, 2019.
ALBA was founded in 2004 by Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro as an alternative to the US programs. Evo Morales joined in 2006 and Daniel Ortega became integrated in 2008. Other countries that joined were Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Granada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, St. Cristobal y Nieves, Suriname, and Haiti. Honduras was part of it only during the short-lived government of Manuel Zelaya. In nine years Nicaragua received over $3.5 million dollars in petroleum credits that benefited individual government officials.
In the historic center of the city of Managua, the Lighthouse of Peace, built in 1990 under the presidency of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, was the marker of the end of civil war. At its base, fifteen thousand rifles used in the armed conflict were buried. La concha acústica (The Acoustic Shell) was built in 2004 under Herty Lewites, mayor of Managua at the time and a major political rival for Ortega, since he was the preferred candidate for the FSLN. Lewites died in 2006.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 156–57.
Much has been written about Nicaragua and its contested urban landscape as it relates to monuments, murals, and more. For example, see Oscar M. Caballero, “Nicaraguan Ghost Monuments: Posthumous Memories of ‘La Concha Acústica,’” Monument Lab, March 9, 2022, https://monumentlab.com/bulletin/nicaraguan-ghost-monuments-posthumous-memories-of-la-concha-acustica; Margarita Vannini, “Políticas públicas de la memoria en Nicaragua,” A Contracorriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America 12, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 73–88.
The plaza, created for the pope’s second visit, had an acoustic shell that was placed in 2004 but removed in 2014, along with the monument of peace, which commemorated the postwar era in the early 1990s, and other such public art objects that marked the (neo)liberal government. The redrawing of public monuments under both neoliberal and Sandinista governments, as part of the political struggle, has also been remarked by Florence E. Babb, “Recycled Sandalistas: From Revolution to Resorts in the New Nicaragua,” American Anthropologist 106, no. 3 (2004): 541–55; Florence E. Babb, “‘Managua Is Nicaragua’: The Making of a Neoliberal City,” City and Society 11, no. 1–2 (1999): 27–48. See also Skyla O’Shea, “Welcome to Managua’s International Airport: Three Decades of Memory Wars in Nicaragua,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 14, no. 1 (2008): 107–24.
Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (1981; repr., Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
This concept, in contrast to the Anthropocene, attributes the global changes to the capitalist mode of production, not to humanity. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making King in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).
Between April 18th and the middle of May 2018, over 130 protest barricades and roadblocks were placed by citizens throughout the country. Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes, Nicaragua: informe sobre los hechos de violencia ocurridos entre el 19 de abril y el 30 de mayo de 2018, Organization of American States, 2018, 140–54, www.oas.org/es/cidh/actividades/giei-nicaragua/GIEI_INFORME.pdf.
“‘Plant thinking’ is in the first place the promise and the name of an encounter, and therefore it may be read as an invitation to abandon the familiar terrain of human and humanist thought to and to meet vegetal life, if not in the place where it is, then at least halfway.” Michael Marder, Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 10.
Located in the southwestern quadrant of the country, the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve is nestled between the Indio River in the north and the San Juan River in the south, spanning 3,180 km2. It was declared a protected biological reserve in the 1990s.
The epicenter of the fire took place nineteen kilometers from Costa Rica, and the Nicaraguan government refused assistance offered by the equipped and ready Costa Rican fire fighters. The extent of the ecological devastation is explained in part in Keyling T. Romero, “Doctor Jaime Incer: El incendio en Indio Maíz es la mayor catástrofe ecológica,” La Prensa: el diario de los nicaragüences, April 2, 2010, www.laprensani.com/2018/04/08/nacionales/2400979-doctor-jaime-incer-el-incendio-de-indio-maiz-es-la-mayor-catastrofe-ecologica.
Charles G. Ripley III, “Crisis provoca emigración record desde Nicaragua, superando los niveles de la Guerra Fría,” Migration Information Sources: Online Journal of the Migration Policy Institute, April 19, 2023, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/crisis-provoca-emigracion-record-desde-nicaragua.
Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes, Nicaragua.
In June 2021, most of the primary candidates for the presidential elections scheduled for November of that year were arrested, as well as twelve important opposition members and journalists; this included protagonists of the “revolution” such as Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres, both of whom participated in the most important operations and in freeing Daniel Ortega from prison. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, “Five Years into Nicaragua’s Human Rights Crisis, the IACHR Calls for the Restoration of Democracy and Stresses Its Solidarity with Victims,” press release, April 18, 2023, www.oas.org/en/iachr/jsForm/?File=/en/iachr/media_center/preleases/2023/067.asp.
Over twenty institutions of higher education have been closed in Nicaragua since 2021, including the oldest university in the country, Universidad Centroamericana.
The phrase gained currency when a radio DJ described what the rioters shouted. In 1965–66, the Chilean-born artist Roberto Mata made a poignant painting, Burn, Baby, Burn, to refer to both the Vietnam War and the Watts race riots in Los Angeles.
The report was released on December 21, 2018, a few days after the government had expelled the committee from the country. The document focuses on the worst of the violence, between April 18 and May 31.
Albanisa is the ALBA of Nicaragua SA, which emerged out of a Venezuela-Nicaragua Oil Agreement. Some consider it a criminal network that has allowed for money laundering, and to create a front business for corruption. See “Treasury Sanctions Nicaraguan Financial Institution and Officials Supporting Ortega Regime,” US Treasury Department, press release, October 9, 2020, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1149.
Ileana L. Selejan, “Vandalism as Symbolic Reparation: Imageries of Protest in Nicaragua,” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 39, no. 2 (2021): 19–38.
In explaining the “life of images,” Mitchell states, “if images are like species, or more generally, like coevolutionary life-forms on the order of viruses, then the artist or image maker is merely a host carrying around a crowd of parasites that are merely reproducing themselves.…” W. T. J. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 89.
Verónica Rueda-Estrada, “Movilizaciones campesinas en Nicaragua (1990–2018): De los rearmados a los auto-convocados,” Cuadernos Inter.c.a.mbio sobre Centroamérica y el Caribe, 16, no. 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.15517/c.a.v16i2.37499.
The Bosawas reserve consists of 20,000 square kilometers situated between Jinotega and the Autonomous Region of the North Caribbean Coast (RAAN). It was declared a National Resource Reserve in 1991 and was recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1998. Composed of six types of forest and twenty-one ecosystems, it is under serious siege by cattle and logging interests.
Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Gómez-Barris, Extractive Zone, 4, 6.
For more details on the irregularities of this reform, refer to Melvin Wallace, Ruta de tránsito y canal por Nicaragua o parte de la historia de un país en venta (Managua: Amerrisque, 2016).
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 82.
Samantha Lugo, “Protestas contra el Canal Interoceánico en Nicaragua dejan varios heridos,” CNN Español, December 1, 2016, https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2016/12/01/protestas-contra-el-canal-interoceanico-en-nicaragua-dejan-varios-heridos/.
Geovanny Shiffman, “29 Asesinatos selectivos de campesinos opositores a Ortega en los últimos meses,” Artículo 66: Noticias de Nicaragua, August 21, 2019, https://www.articulo66.com/2019/08/20/29-asesinatos-selectivos-de-campesinos-opositores-a-ortega-en-los-ultimos-meses/.
Jeffrey L. Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje: 1880–1965 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 13.
Marder, Plant Thinking, 69, 81, 85.
Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2019), 36, 37.
Harriet Rohmer, Octavio Chow, Morris Vidaure, The Invisible Hunters: A Legend from the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua/Los cazadores invisibles: Una leyenda de los indios miskitos de Nicaragua, illust. Joe Sam (San Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 1987).
The Nicaraguan daily newspaper La Prensa reported that Bosawas lost 6 percent of its territory due to deforestation during 2011–16, for a total of 92,257 hectares, while the cattle industry has seen accelerated growth, with an increase of 997,916 hectares in pasture lands during the same time frame. Cinthya Tórrez García, “Bosawás pierde bosque y nadie hace nada por evitarlo,” La Prensa: el diario de los Nicaragüenses, February 2, 2017.
To get a sense of the rate of deforestation in Bosawas, refer to “Deforestación en la Reserva de la Biósfera Bosawás, Nicaragua,” Environmental Justice Atlas, July 30, 2023, https://ejatlas.org/conflict/deforestacion-en-la-reserva-bosawas/.
“Deforestación en la Reserva.”
Nestor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 91.
Marder, Plant Thinking, 46.
For commentary on this paradox, see Carlos Vilas, La Costa Atlántica en Nicaragua (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992); Charles Hale, Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
For example, just in terms of the Reserva de Bosawás located in the Northern Autonomous Region of Nicaragua, it experienced a loss of 20 percent (4.9 million acres) of its tree cover between 2011 and 2021. Maxwell Radwin, “Indigenous Communities Threatened as Deforestation Rises in Nicaraguan Reserves,” Mongabay: News and Inspiration form Nature’s Frontline, January 30, 2023, https://news.mongabay.com/2023/01/indigenous-communities-threatened-as-deforestation-rises-in-nicaraguan-reserves/.
The Sundance-nominated documentary, Nicaragua Was Our Home (dir. Lee Shapiro, United States, 1985) registered the plight of the Miskitu pesople amid state and paramilitary violence.
Ramón Grosfoguel, “Colonial Difference, Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Global Coloniality in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist World System,” Review 25, no. 3 (2002): 203–24; Hale, Resistance and Contradiction.
Raymond Williams, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent,” Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–27.
See for example, Michael Casey, Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (New York: Vintage Books, 2019).
For further examples, see Florence Baab, “Recycled Sandalistas: From Revolution to Resorts in the New Nicaragua,” American Anthropologist 106, no 3 (2004): 541–55; Julia Medina, “Una caricatura del Sandinismo: la resistencia en mutación,” Istmo: revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, no. 20 (2010), http://istmo.denison.edu/n20/articulos/3-medina_julia_form.pdf; Julia Medina, “Retrato de resistencias en una fotografía de Augusto C. Sandino,” Revista iberoamericana 29, no. 242 (2013): 57–74; Julia Medina, “La selva mecánica en el país de las maravillas,” Istmo, no. 32 (2016), http://istmo.denison.edu/n32/foro/02_medina_julia_form.pdf.
The MRS was founded in 1995 by dissidents from the FSLN to distance itself from Daniel Ortega.
Medina, “Retrato de resistencias.”
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Carnival Ambivalence,” part 4 of The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Volshinov, ed. Pam Morris, trans. H. Iwolski (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994): 194–244.
Molina’s political cartoon was published on March 6, 2005, on the cover of the Sunday comics section El Alacrán. That publication and all other forms of journalism have been suspended in Nicaragua since the 2018 protests. Molina was recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2019 and is living in asylum to flee the political repression of his country. Medina, “Una caricatura del Sandinismo.”
Most of those images appear in the book by Susan Meiselas, Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979, ed. Claire Rosenberg (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). Those images were later recycled in the documentary Pictures from a Revolution (dir. Susan Meiselas, Richard P. Rogers, and Alfred Guzzetti, distributed by Kino International, 1991). Also consider the public art performance Meiselas did in 2004 titled Reframing History, where she installed nineteen of her original images at life size in the places where the images were captured. This resulted in a twelve-minute documentary with the same title.
Baab, “‘Managua Is Nicaragua,’” 27–48; Baab, “Recycled Sandalistas”; O’Shea, “Welcome to Managua’s International Airport”; Vannini, “Políticas públicas.”
Travel logs commenting on the prevalence of these Christmas trees can still be found. Maya Mylavarapu, “Christmas in July,” Kiva: Fellows Blog: Stories from the Field, March 3, 2009, http:/pages.kiva.org/taxonomy/term/4749?page=10.
Medina, “La selva mecánica.”
Much has been written and discussed about Rosario Murillo’s relationship to the occult. For example, Sergio Ramírez published a column titled “Cuando los brujos mandan,” CIPER, December 12, 2019, www.ciperchile.cl/2019/12/12/cuando-los-brujos-mandan/.
Ramírez and Téllez were also important figures of the MRS.
Orontes Mejía has studied this geopolitical site of the city in “Laguna de Tiscapa: Memorializing to Envision Alternative Futures” (master’s thesis, University of Manitoba, 2019), https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/items/effa4a72-d80f-481b-a970-e272d510be42.
The lake of Managua, measuring 1,042 km2, is notorious for being the most contaminated lake in Central America. The body of water began to receive Managua’s sewage in 1927, during US military occupation. Today, less than 40 percent of the wastewater received is treated. Despite its calamitous state, people live and fish around the lake. It also serves as a recreational area for Managua, with the popular malecón and the Salvador Allende Port.
The only landscape painting created during the artist’s gold period, a tree of life, was based on a series of mosaics Klimt created during 1905–11, commissioned for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. That panel version is a mural. Later it was transmuted and it is sometimes confused as a painting, when it is actually in the genre of symbolic painting. The difference matters; it incorporates multimedia (marble, ceramic, title, enamel, pearls, semiprecious stones).
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 151–70. The epigraph on this essay’s first page comes from Benjamin, Arcades Project, 476.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 240.
Dora María Téllez, “Ortega parasitó al Frente Sandinista,” interview by Carlos Salinas Maldonado, Confidencial, February 4, 2016, https://confidencial.digital/politica/ortega-parasito-al-frente-sandinista/.
Gioconda Belli, “Los árboles de mi ciudad: un canto de Gioconda Belli ‘al verde futuro de los árboles desterrados,’” Confidencial, May 3, 2016, https://confidencial.digital/opinion/los-arboles-de-mi-ciudad/.
Medina, “La selva mecánica.”
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 241.
I am grateful for a conversation with Marisol de la Cadena, who thoughtfully suggested this take.
Expository documentaries have tried to capture the magnitude and the effect of the destruction of these biospheres on Indigenous livelihoods and on the local ecosystem. For example, El canto de Bosawás (2014) focuses on the reserve that bears its name, and Patrullaje (2023) centers on the Indio Maíz reserve. Both films were directed by Brad Allgood and Camilo de Castro.
Bruno Latour, Políticas de la naturaleza: por una democracia de las ciencias, trans. Enric Puig Punyet (1999; Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2013), 55.
See Marder, Plant Thinking, 31.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 20. This essay’s second epigraph can be found on page 36.
I am grateful to Tatiana Argüello for making this observation regarding etymology and its implications during the conference of the Latin American Studies Association held in Boston in 2019.
Marder, Plant Thinking, 28.