Managua, failed city

Don't be fooled by the ratio in this photo; there are a lot more horsecarts than Land Rovers in Nicaragua.

There is a political-science concept of the "failed state," that is, a place like the Congo or Iraq, where the institutions of government have either collapsed or never properly existed. A failed state lacks infrastructure, and cannot build any because there is no tax collection (and who would want to pay, knowing that the government is impotent at best and completely corrupt at worst?) It's a vicious circle of anti-development. If there is any organization, it's at the hands of warlords and thugs. Otherwise, the country will have simply unraveled into a series of small, isolated villages.

Analogously, Managua is a failed city. There was never any central organizing principle as in Granada and Leon, which benefitted from a logical Spanish grid. What infrastructure there was was destroyed in the 1972 earthquake, and Somoza embezzled virtually all of the aid that the world gave to Nicaragua for rebuilding. The anger at this act triggered years of war, as the US and USSR fought by proxy and further shredded what civilization remained. Nicaragua is now at peace, but in the midst of a harsh recession. The city has dis-integrated* into a loosely affiliated sprawl of small neighborhoods, each with its corner shop and pharmacy, and the city government has minimal power or money to do anything.



No city maps. Land is dirt cheap; a frontier mentality as people gradually trickle back into the city to rebuild houses on abandoned land, some 35 years late. Sporadic collection of taxes and utilities. No central square, no city-sponsored events, no architecture, few statues. The water seems to work well, but the electricity, privatized a few years ago to the Spanish firm Union Fenosa, goes out in most parts of the city for most of the day. Even the people who live here have trouble finding their way around; I spent an hour this morning while my credit officer asked the people in the new-ish neighborhood she was visiting how to find the place she had "directions" to (from the bus stop, two blocks south, a block and a half west - she was interpreting "block" to mean only intersections with streets, her direction-giver was meaning also intersections with alleyways.) The magic of big cities, their ability to bring people together and catalyze gatherings, depends greatly on people being able to find each other in a downtown, a known place for strangers to meet. When that is subtracted you have a place with all the drawbacks of a big city, and few of the advantages.

So, is there hope for improvement? Hard to say. On the one hand, there is always hope - on the other, investment isn't exactly flooding into the country. Ortega is still (as always) a question mark...

*Yeah, I know this whole using-a-hyphen-to-draw-attention-to-the-original-individual-significance-of-both-parts-of-a-compound-word thing was played in the late 90s. What can I say, I'm kicking it old school.