William Walker and Water

William Walker was an eccentric American who--bored with life in the temperate zone--conquered Nicaragua in the 1850s and attempted to have it admitted to the Union as a slave state.

Since then, a whole mess of crazy shit has gone down. The United States has in various substantive ways interfered in Nicaraguan affairs about a dozen times, most famously in the contra-Sandinista affair, which you may recall as the biggest blot on Reagan's administration. (Nicas generally recall it as a decade of terror in which the Sandinistas, a leftist pro-literacy and pro-development group which toppled 50 years of dictatorship, were slowly and bloodily brought down by rightist rebels funded by the United States.* Again, I don't know how they forgive us.)

Nowadays, U.S. influence is more politically subtle. I'm writing a paper on the IMF's advocacy of privatizing the Nicaraguan water supply (i.e. selling the public water system to foreign--American--companies), which may make drinking water unaffordably expensive. Stay tuned.

*Reagan's argument was that the Sandinistas were sympathetic to communism and therefore bad.