by Danilo Lopez

Created on: May 11, 2008

Tasba Pri

by Danilo Lopez

"Yapti Tasba Masraka nani Aslatakanka"

"Toward the end of 1984, peace talks opened between the MISURASATA [Miskito] Organization and the government of Nicaragua. These were the first peace talks between Managua and any organization engaged in armed struggle in the country. The process included four rounds of negotiations over a period of eight months in Bogota and Mexico City.

The agenda of the negotiations was based on the causes of the conflict: systematic repression and the denial of the historical rights to land and autonomy. () the majority of the Indians displaced to the Tasba Pri camps were allowed to return to their traditional communities along the Wangi (Coco River)."

YATAMA
Republic of Nicaragua
February 1989" [1]

1

Those were the days when risen martyrs
Scrutinized us from banners and street names
Tasba Pri lay silent like a phoenix still in ashes

In those days, fooled by slogans and grand promises
Young patriots befell to flesh on which cannons fed

In thin lines we marched through misty mountains
And dense confusing rivers

Hoarse machines hover above us
They drop the fruits of deadly entrails

We, peaceful Miskitos, torched the land the aliens seized.

2

Dark soldiers took me away one night
They pulled me like a beast turned prey

Wild birds and protean monkeys witnessed
The iron that crumpled my skin

My lips were cold like an empty glass
My eyes sought your face in a broken mirror
Remember!

You would be scolded at the National Palace
Along with ranks of ousted widows

3

A sudden sun beams through the forest
Archaic canopies pulled apart

Away from the edge where crocodiles
Splash and kill

We wait in silence for a fitting instant
When the waters clear and the fish snooze

4

() the Nicaraguan government, in February 1982, forcibly relocated about 8,500 Miskito Indians from communities along the Rio Coco to four resettlement camps about 60 km to the south, an area now known as Tasba Pri. [2]

They wait like panthers, eyes on a mirage
Of gentle bullets decimating our stock

You see them in dreams, a lonely woman
Writing from afar to my shadow, to my child

From a country with nameless streets and
Empty nouns your letters reach me in strange ways

I digest your pictures along empty hotel corridors,
Precarious shady parks where drunken prostitutes meander

And dense crowded manifestations where we all banter
Angry slurs against the government

5

If you could listen to the rains I've seen
Boys with broken kites, their siblings and dogs sacrificed

Entire families slaughtered in the name

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