Owning Property in Nicaragua
Property in Nicaragua
The mire in the middle of Land is best put in the form of a question. If I buy land from someone who bought it legally from someone who bought it illegally from someone who stole it after it was taken from them under the rules of a regime that the current government says is illegal — do I legally own it?
This was the problem facing American developers in Nicaragua several years ago after they bought cheap property on which to build condos and resorts. Whether the trees they felled made any sound was the least of their philosophical worries.
Filmmaker Julian T. Pinder was well-placed to document this mess, having some years earlier purchased his own piece of beachfront property on the south coast of the Central American nation. His film, well as the indignant indigenous population.
It’s a little hard to know where our sympathies should lie, although on balance the invading Americans seem the most wilfully blind, following the nation’s colonial and revolution-wracked history only far enough back to justify shot in 2006 but only now being released, contains interviews with U.S. developers as their claims on the land. With character assassinations left and right, however, few of the players seem truly innocent.
The film runs a brief 76 minutes and could have used a little more time to explain the convoluted history of the region.
In the meanwhile, accusations fly back and forth. One developer is accused of stealing a town’s baseball field for use as a parking lot. Then it’s revealed he’s building a school for the locals. But the school’s main purpose is to train cheap labor for the resort he’s planning to construct. And so on.
Perhaps the Nicaraguan situation is too complex for easy explanations, or maybe it’s still too much in flux. Land feels like a snapshot taken from a moving car, clearly fascinating and beautiful but badly blurred by the pace of change.
