Our Endless American Argument About Nicaragua
Inside the debate over whether travel to the Central American nation is "safe" or "ethical."
I still like to the read the paper version of the New York Times on Sundays. This is partly because I am an old-school newspaper person. But it’s also because I like to see how various articles (some of which I’ve already read online during the week) are presented by the Times editors. I’m always interested to see what’s put on the front page, what’s above and below the fold, and what’s stashed away on A9.
For instance, this past Sunday, it was curious to see how—in the Opinion piece about “Who Should Lead New York City?”—Zohran Mamdani’s profile was subtly tucked away on the fifth page, while Andrew Cuomo and Brad Lander shared the first candidate spread. It was also surprising to see that a disturbing feature about how ChatGPT has learned to manipulate people and distort their reality was nearly hidden below the fold of the Business section.
Of course, it’s usually international news that’s shoved out of sight. This Sunday, on A9, was this article: “U.S. Urges Its Traveler to Steer Clear of Nicaragua.” Apparently, the Trump State Department held a briefing last week, warning Americans not to travel to Nicaragua because “the country is sinking deeper into authoritarianism, making it more perilous for tourists.” One unnamed official told the Times that Nicaragua “does have the potential to be a great holiday destination, but crosscutting that are very severe human rights violations and a very strict authoritarian system of governance.” Ahem.
First of all, do I have to point out the breathtaking irony here? Setting aside whether citizens from one country sinking into authoritarianism should be traveling to another, I’d like to look deeper into what underlies the discussion over whether or not to travel to the Central American nation.
According to the Times, the travel advisory came about because officials were “alarmed by the flurry of positive press about Nicaragua in travel publications.” Recently, Travel + Leisure put Nicaragua on its list of 50 Best Places to Travel this year, Vogue called the country an “it” destination, and Nicaragua made this year’s New York Times “52 Places To Go” list.
On some warped level, this might be a sliver of good news for those of us who thought travel publishing was dead—maybe middling service travel journalism is a new form of resistance! In a hilarious meta twist, the Times felt the need to release a statement in response to the State Department’s warning, defending its “52 Places To Go” list:
Our annual ‘52 Places to Go’ list is curated by expert travel editors for readers seeking new travel experiences and cultures. When developing the list, editors take into account factors that make the destination stand out in that particular year, including a major cultural event, newfound popularity, upgraded infrastructure and attractions as well as the safety of a location. We exclude destinations that are designated a Level 4.
I mean, LOL. Setting aside the absurd, self-important notion of “expert travel editors” (again, LOL) the whole kerfuffle raises so many questions.
First, some facts. Nicaragua is among the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, and tourism is essential to the economy. The nation had already been put on a Level 3 travel advisory (out of four) in December, ie. the last days of the Biden administration. Nicaragua has been in political upheaval since at least 2018, when protestors took to the streets to protest the authoritarian rule of president Daniel Ortega, whose paramilitary forces have killed hundreds and imprisoned thousands. Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo both still rule the country with a vice grip.
Next, a slight inaccuracy. According to the Times, Nicaragua “started emerging more than a decade ago as a low-cost alternative to other nearby countries, like Costa Rica, which had become crowded with tourists.” I don’t know if this comes from their “expert travel editors,” but it would be more accurate to say that travelers have been calling Nicaragua “the New Costa Rica” for almost 30 years.
I know this because I was among the first wave of travel writers doing these types of stories. In the 1990s, during my 20s, I spent a lot of time in Nicaragua, which was emerging from more than a decade of civil war, natural disaster, and our own government’s role in trying to oust the Sandinistas from power.
I had become interested in Nicaragua at my hippyish, liberal university in Vermont, where most people thought the Sandinistas (led then by Ortega) were the “good guys,” fighting back against the Contras, backed by the conservative Reagan administration, who were trying to rid Central America of “communism.” Which is to say that Americans—from both the left and the right—have been arguing about a country they don’t really understand for a long, long time.
Back then, I was like many travelers of my post-Cold War generation who lit out for Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central America, enthralled by destinations that had been mostly off-limits to most Americans for decades. When my brother’s college roommate, who was from Managua, invited me to visit, I showed up a few months later.
I had never been anywhere like Nicaragua, and in my suburban naivete I marveled at how “chaotic” and “alive” it seemed to be: how in Managua I could exchange my dollars to córdobas on the side of the road from random men waving stacks of cash, while hawkers tried to sell live parrots, monkeys, and armadillos through the car window. People gave directions like “turn left at the big statue of the man holding the machine gun and sickle and go three door down” (because most of Managua literally had no street signs or house numbers). The reminders of the Soviet-supported Sandinista regime were everywhere: Lada taxis, Aeroflot billboards, giant murals, the former soldier camped out in the Plaza de la Revolución guarding the “eternal flame” (which by then was a plastic light) across the square from a cathedral that had been destroyed in a 1972 earthquake.
I once stood in the Plaza de la Revolución with a crowd of 20,000 to watch a huge twilight outdoor mass that had been called in the name of solidarity, holding a candle and a tiny flag I’d been given by a group of schoolchildren. President Arnoldo Aleman, who years later would be convicted of stealing over $100 million from the nation’s coffers, appeared with the cardinal of Nicaragua and gave a speech. Driving the next day, the road was blocked for a brief time by students who wore bandanas over their faces, berets, and carried zip guns. They held banners that read, “Reformación sin Corrupción!” A guy with a megaphone stood on my car’s bumper for a few minutes to shout his message to the crowd.
Everything in Nicaragua felt so dynamic and immediate to a sheltered white boy, and completely the opposite of the life I lived at home in America. I would return from my trips with hundreds of pages of callow journal entries in Moleskine notebooks.
Soon enough I began to persuade magazines to send me back on assignment. Since travel editors can never resist the allure of The Next Hot ‘It’ Place, pitching felt incredibly simple. In those days, the notion that Nicaragua was opening up to vacationing tourists after decades of strife was travel editor catnip. In buzzy publishing shorthand, Nicaragua was “The New Costa Rica.” I was assigned a number of sunny features on the country for mainstream magazines—the kind of articles that would appear between ads for luxury hotels, cruises, and expensive watches.
In 1996, I arrived to write one of those features, for Travel + Leisure, on the day before a heated presidential election, only the second election since end of the Sandinista era. All bars and restaurants were closed for three days, as votes for Ortega (yes, he was still around) and right-wing Aleman were counted. There were reports of violent flare-ups. One night, as we returned late to our hotel, everything was dark and locked. We banged on the window and were finally let inside by a shirtless man holding a machete who claimed to be the night manager. It was not exactly the type of vacation the gentle readers of Travel + Leisure were likely imagining.
On another evening, while staying at a rustic resort at a mountain coffee plantation in a cloud forest full of howler monkeys, my travel companion and I decided to drive down into the city of Matagalpa to find a restaurant we’d seen in our guidebook. When we arrived in Matagalpa, that restaurant was shuttered, along with three others we tried. Meanwhile, hundreds of people were streaming into the streets. Crowds were shouting and carrying signs. Teens spray-painted storefronts. Pickup trucks crowded with angry-looking men, some carrying baseball bats, circled the center of town. We drove the wrong way down a one-way street, causing the crowd to shout at us and chase our car. We stopped and tried to read our guidebook by the dashboard light as a police truck made a sweep of the central square. With guns drawn, they asked us to roll down the window and were flabbergasted to see just two gringo tourists looking for a restaurant. “Matagalpa is closed, jefe,” they said. The police truck escorted us directly back to the mountain road. I cringe now at how clueless I was to the larger, complex implications of my own cultural voyeurism.
When I returned home to write my assigned pieces, it was nearly impossible to convey the truth of my experience. A consumer travel magazine had to run a long sidebar titled “On Caution’s Side” advising readers: “Walking around Managua at night is a bad idea…During the day Nicaragua’s roads are terrible; at dusk and at night, they’re treacherous.” A men’s magazine insensitively teased my article on its cover as “Guerilla Vacation in Nicaragua.”
I would return many more times, particularly to Granada—which is now the epicenter of tourism—on assignment for Condé Nast Traveler in 2001. This article was about Americans buying up cheap properties for vacation and retirement homes. An American real estate agent took me by boat through an archipelago in Lake Nicaragua called simply Las Isletas, a collection of over 350 islets formed from volcanic eruptions of the purple-coned Volcano Mombacho that hovers nearby. The water was placid and the islets full of gorgeous palms, mango trees, and giant water lilies surrounded us. A whole indigenous community lived in the tiny coves and channels of Las Isletas—men throwing fishing nets off rocks, women doing laundry, children paddling to school in canoes.
But brand new homes that had already sprung up on a number of the islets, as well as the huge “For Sale” signs posted next to the indigenous families shacks on others. A growing number of wealthy Americans were snatching up Las Isletas. The real estate agent told me he’d already sold a half-dozen and there were four islands available to buy on that afternoon, some as low as $30,000. “Don’t you think it would be a shame if houses were built on all of these islands?” I asked him.
“Well, it’s gonna happen,” he told me. “We’re running out of places to go. “There are very few undiscovered places left in the world.” To the younger me, this statement felt like a moment of deep truth, and I included the real estate agent’s quote in the article that I eventually wrote, which the magazine teased as “Nicaragua’s New Wave,” touting the country as “the next new thing under the sun” and explaining, “Americans, it seems, are buying up the place.”
That night, I visited an oceanfront development called Rancho Santana, that had been acquired from local ranchers. I stayed in the model home, perched above an untouched pink beach. From the terrace, you could see so many ghost crabs scurrying that the sand actually looked alive.
At dusk, the electricity went out. The developer and I ate dinner by candlelight, amid tropical evening rains. As the lights flickered on and off and as the thatched roof leaked, he shrugged. These were simply kinks to work out, he said. “You know how it always happens,” he told me. “The average American, he goes somewhere on vacation, he likes it, and by the third day, he says, ‘I wonder if there’s any property for sale down here?’ He says to his wife, ‘You want to go look at some property, honey?’ That’s how it happens.”
That night, I fell asleep in the hammock watching lightning strikes illuminate the horizon over the Pacific, thinking about the inevitability of what a New Nicaragua would look like.
All of which is to say that the latest debate over whether or not to travel to Nicaragua feels a little ho-hum, or at least deja vu. I do not believe that Nicaragua is any more inherently dangerous for most American travelers than it was in the 1990s. Granada is already full of tourists and retirees. A friend recently rented an Airbnb there for a month, and posted images of overpriced sandwich shops and cafes offering matcha lattes. San Juan del Sur is full of people enrolled in surfing lessons. Another friend recently went to a yoga retreat near there. American Airlines flies regular flights from Miami to Managua. These days, a million tourists a year visit Nicaragua. Most of these vacationers don’t represent a threat to the Ortega government. But what do I know.
There is, of course, always the ethical dilemma of whether or not to travel to Nicaragua. Though even that discourse falls along the same lines as it did in the late 20th century: Ortega was a terrible leader for the Nicaragua when he led a left-wing junta and he is a terrible leader now as an authoritarian strongman. The only difference I can see right now is that writers like me are no longer welcome. In its article, the New York Times reports that journalists are routinely barred from entry by the Ortega government. Influencers, it appears, have avoided this scrutiny.
I have not been to Nicaragua in more than 15 years, and given its current state, I don’t know when I will ever get to return. I can’t help but wonder about my own small role in the tourism rush of the past decade. And about how little that tourism has added to the lives of everyday Nicaraguans.
But I think about the time I spent there quite often, particularly one small encounter. One afternoon, I drove from Managua to Masaya, to visit the craft market as well as to hike the nearby volcano. On the way, I was suddenly stopped and waved over by two police officers standing on the side of the road with automatic rifles. The officers wore buttons with Nicaragua’s then-official slogan brazos abiertos (“open arms”) and were smiling but still demanded to see my passport. I handed it over, and they studied it silently. They said they’d have to keep it. I would have to go to the police station the next day and pay a fine to get my passport back. “What can we do here and now?” I said, flashing my wallet. “Can I pay the ticket in cash right now?” They asked for 60 American dollars, which I handed to them and then drove on to Masaya.
I spent a couple of hours at the volcano and then the market. For a few dollars, I bought a hand-sewn guayabera, gray with four pockets and two ribbons of intricately stitched designs, from a woman named Mirna. I was so happy with my new guayabera purchase that I took off my T-shirt and put it on right in the market.
Then I drove back to Managua, the capital, the same way I came. Near where I’d been pulled over, there stood an open-air bar with a thatched roof. In the shade, I could see both of the policemen I’d paid, hats off and guns leaning against the bar, lounging and drinking beers. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. I honked my horn and they waved, raising their beer in toast, still smiling.
I tell that story quite often, though I don’t really know why. Nor do I know what, if any, conclusions there are to draw. But when I wear that guayabera now (which is much harder to button) I can barely recognize the insufferable thrill-seeker I had been in my 20s. I guess part of the education of travel lies in seeing things with fresh and ignorant eyes—and in being wrong. Which is why it’s important to check in with that younger traveler from time to time, to retrace our journeys, and to ask new questions of where we’ve gone before.
As far as the question of whether one should promote travel to Nicaragua, I’ll leave that to the so-called “expert travel editors.”
Beautifully written. Thanks for sharing.
What a wonderful piece. Read it, O ye purists, & repent. Or at least recognize thine selves. And yes, I have a mirror.