Nicaragua sits in the middle of Central America.

Its often-troubled history has been dominated by political intervention from the north and geological forces from within, earthquakes and volcanoes.

from within, earthquakes and volcanoes.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman , was provided by Agnese Haury.

♪ music ♪ ♪ music ♪ Nicaragua is part of the central American rim of fire, a volcanic arch.

It's produced by the Cocos plate in the Pacific that is crashing and pushing under the Caribbean plate and where they hit it creates friction and volcanism.

Nicaragua has over 50 volcanoes at least 12 of which are active and this field is fairly recent.

I see lichens growing on the lava, which means it's been here for probably a few hundred years, but this is volcano country.

This whole landscape has been burned over here, beneath the vegetation is just pure lava, the kind they call ah ah in Hawaii, but that fire would have to have been caused by ash and rock spewing, blowing out of the crater up here.

I know we're getting close cause there's the cross up on the hill and people tell me from the cross you can look straight down into the crater.

This is the Masaya volcano, right now the most active in Nicaragua.

It's so active as a matter of fact, that the park service cut off the trail going up to the top where they have the best views.

They also asked me to put on a hard hat on, in case the bombs come out of the bottom of that crater when it explodes and they gave me identification, a bracelet here in case they have to look for my body.

This crater is called Santiago it's one of the craters that throws a lot of toxic gases and normally this crater is active and always we have explosions, big explosions.

This crater made the last explosion the last year, the 30th of April.

When we have tremors and it starts to rain sometimes all the wall collects this close to the whole where the gases come out and the pressure make big explosions and the last year all this was destroyed and we have big fire on the other side.

The activity is such that they have to monitor all the time to protect the small towns that ring the volcano.

It's a fairly heavily populated area and you can see from the depth that this has pushed lava up on numerous occasions.

Each ring represents a different flow of lava and there are dozens of them.

I'm about twenty yards from the edge of the crater here and another cloud of sulfurous smoke, walking through a field of fountain grass.

This was not here three hundred years ago.

Spaniards brought it or Europeans brought it.

It's a curse because it loves to burn and when it burns it takes all of the native vegetation with it and it then comes back.

So this originally would have been burned trees that would slowly recover.

Now they will never come back, because this cursed grass has misplaced them.

Nicaraguan volcanoes lie near the Pacific.

Far to the east on the Caribbean coast, a little over an hours flight from the capital of Managua, sits the town of Puerto Cabezas.

It's the home of the Miskito culture.

The pilot has just announced, it's an hour and thirty minutes to Puerto Cabezas.

It will be nice to get up about 6, 7 thousand feet because the temperature in here is about 92 degrees.

This history of Nicaragua is pretty much dominated by the center and the western part of the countries, which is mostly Hispanic or based upon Indian descendants of people from Meso-America.

Here on the coast the ethnic makeup is almost entirely coastal Indian, who have a completely different history.

It is resulted in a country that was really split in two.

The central part, which is the Nicaragua part most people know, and than the coastal part on the Caribbean that is somehow never been really connected with the center.

It's been an ongoing battle for the forces that have tried to democratize Nicaragua to make it into one country when there are forces pulling it apart in two different ethnic directions.

Spanish Mestizos who live on the other side in or around Managua have their culture.

We here are the Miskitos.

The original name of Puerto Cabezas is Bilwi.

It was very different here before the highway was constructed.

All transportation used to be by sea, by boat.

The highway has made things better for us.The towns have grown a lot because the people that lived in the rural towns and communities have migrated.

We have our own government, but of course we are still under the control of the capital of Managua.

All the towns along the coast to the north subsist on the fishing economy.

The major activity is lobster fishing.

The Caribbean coast of Nicaragua is usually The Caribbean coast of Nicaragua is usually referred to as the Miskito coast, not the Mosquito coast.

It's name after the Miskito people.

They live north into Honduras and south almost to Costa Rica.

Well I've scored big time here in Puerto Cabezas.

I hired a taxi driver.

He doesn't speak the Miskito language but his daughter does.

This is Erika and she's going to show me around and teach me a little bit of the Miskito language and what's going on here in town.

(Spanish) 'Kaisamahka' means let's go.

So here we have a real live armadillo.

(Spanish) Kuisku.

If you want to have a good recipe for armadillo, you get plenty of onion, you get coconut milk, you get other spices and stuff and you cook it and you eat it.

I'm going to try it someday, maybe.

This is malanga.

In Miskito, 'dasin.'

Dasin?

Dasin.

I get it close.

It has both Spanish and Miskito names.

It's a starch that they put in soup.

You can actually make cakes out of it, but here we have four different varieties of root crops.

Boy do you ever know you're in the wet tropics, when you see all these different root crops, we never see any of them, where I live.

So this is a little red snapper here, 'inskapauni', something like that in Miskito and I know mackerel when I see it.

Mackerele (Spanish) The Miskito at times has the same name as English.

(Spanish) Oh it's conch, so the Miskito often has the same word as in English.

There's a huge English influence.

Here in the coast everything is measured in the English system.

Pounds, ounces, inches and feet and miles per hour.

In the center part of the countries, it's meters, it's centimeters, it's kilos.

So the two never seem to want to meet.

(Spanish) Chicharrones, it's deep fat fried pork skin, pork rind.

They slaughter the pigs.

They take the lard, heat it, and then they put the skin, that has been very much cleaned, into that and cook it and the result is chicharrones and it's very good if you don't care about your cholesterol.

and it's very good if you don't care about your cholesterol.

Nicaragua has hundreds of miles of coastline on the Caribbean but very few places where the water is deep enough for a port.

So there are very few towns that can get supplies from the ocean.

Because the coast goes out very gently, they have to build a wharf far enough out that the boats can make it.

This one is a kilometer long.

Everything that this town uses has to come in either by water or by air.

Most of it comes in by water along this kilometer long wharf.

Unless we think that things are really modern here on the Caribbean coast, this is a dugout boat.

It is one solid trunk, that has been hollowed out and you can see the size of the tree it had to have come from.

It's very, very heavy.

This would take 10 or 15 men to move but it will last and it will not sink.

This is a mangrove swamp that extends for miles to the east, to the north and to the south.

The mangroves are really the nursery, the place of refuge, the creation of vast amounts of ocean life and any town around here owes its economic existence to fishing, which again depends on the mangroves.

The mangroves keep the surf and the waves from coming in.

The water is completely calm.

It gives a place where the fellows can bring their boats in and clean them and repair them.

Nicaraguans are crazy about baseball, but I think they are even crazier about here around Puerto Cabezas.

This is a women's softball league.

The pitchers are not as fast as they might be in other parts, but let me tell you this is a heavy community event.

There are crowds here rooting for both sides.

I don't want to get caught in any argument if there's a disagreement.

The take off in this highly sophisticated brand new jet, leaves the ocean behind and as far as I can tell, we will be in Managua in an hour and a half.

Eastern Nicaragua seems like one vast marsh with tropical forests interspersed.

It's only after more than a hundred miles of flatlands that we spy the volcanoes and mountains that constitute the spine of the country.

The mountains have also built lakes.

Managua the capital, sits on the banks of one of them.

Granada, Nicaragua's oldest city, sits on the shores of another to the south.

Construction was begun on the cathedral of the city of Granada in 1524, which makes Granada the oldest city in North America.

Nicaraguans and foreigners generally agree that Granada is the prettiest city by far in the entire country.

The sign says this is the oldest house in Granada.

It also has the dubious distinction of being the house where William Walker lived.

His is a sad history for the entire world.

In 1853, two groups in Nicaragua were fighting each other, the wealthy Aristocracy and the merchant class.

The merchants to get an upper hand decided to bring in mercenaries.

One of the people they recruited was a Tennessean, white supremacist named William Walker.

They invited him to bring an army and he brought 300 bloodthirsty thugs with him and managed with those to take over the entire country.

Walker declared himself president of Nicaragua and reinstituted slavery, but his actions united the two competing forces in the civil war and together they fought against him and defeated him on September 14th, 1856, drove him out of the country where he was ultimately executed.

UNESCO has recognized Granada as a world heritage site, which is great for tourism.

And local officials recognize that and limit what you can do in terms of construction quite strictly.

You normally can't build more than two stories high, which is a good idea anyway cause the place is subject to earthquakes.

It's late Sunday afternoon here in the central plaza of Granada.

Families are bidding goodbye to the weekend wistfully, I assume, but nothing here could be more important, more significant and more Nicaraguan then to say goodbye with a little Cumbia.

We're on the Pan-American highway here that connects between El Salvador on the west and Costa Rica on the east.

If you need a ride you don't have to wait for long, cause here come the busses.

In the hills outside of Granada, not far from the Pan- American highway, are a series of towns known as Pueblos Blancos, the white villages.

They are known for their arts and crafts.

ElwynLópez, the potter here is the 10th generation of potters here in the town of San Juan De Oriente.

The story is quite remarkable that they began the pottery ten generations ago before the conquest, because they wanted a way of recording their culture, knowing that the invaders, the Spaniards, would destroy or burn anything that they had so their record stayed on in their ceramics and this is a way that contemporarily that they have of teaching young people now what their history is, what their indigenous history is.

So I am speaking with the vice president of the local community and they are descendants of Mayas and they bring a lot of the designs, their Maya designs into their pottery.

(Spanish) So they have both a pictorial representation, and what they call codeses and the mathematical points in writing that they Mayas used.

(Spanish) So this is a representation of Quetzoquatl, the feathered serpent who came through the Mayas to this place, whose energy goes down to the Earth and fertilizes the ground.

(Spanish) So because of the way that they make their pottery, this design will stay fixed in the ceramic for a thousand years.

(Spanish) They're using the same technique as their ancestors thousands of years ago used.

So this is not new, but it's new.

Excellente.

The town of Catarina is a beautiful place to live, but it has a darker history.

These are actually bullet holes from the revolution over thirty years ago.

This was a government garrison attacked by the forces of the revolution who decided to take on the dictatorship of Somoza.

It's a time that has forgotten by young people today in Nicaragua, but it's a time most older people would prefer to forget.

The Pueblos Blancos are nestled among a series of volcanic lakes.

Granada is on the shore of the largest lake in Central America.

It has beaches large enough to host popular sports and the rooting sections.

A nearby estuary is also a convenient dock for boats.

In Nicaragua, they have two seasons the wet season and the dry season.

The dry season is hot but it's a time when it's not going to rain a lot and people get out and come to the beach here near Granada.

It's probably not going to rain here for a while so it's a perfect time to come out and play baseball, swim.

When the wet season comes, very few people will be here, because it's raining most of the time.

I'm lucky enough to have Cristova here as a boat man on Lake Cocibolca.

It's the largest lake, outside of Lake Titicaca in all of Latin America.

It's huge and we're just going to see a tiny part of it.

It's fresh water.

There are actually fresh water sharks living in the lake.

They tell me if we're lucky we'll see monkeys.

This whole landscape is thanks to the action of the volcano Mombacho.

It created everything here.

It created the little islands.

It created the bay.

It gave it fertile landscape but it's also an ongoing threat to the city of Granada and to the, almost everyone who lives around here.

You could get a blow out of there and a pyroclastic flow coming out that would devastate thousands of acres and probably kill many, many people.

All of these three hundred some islands are owned.

They're privately owned.

Some of them are in public hands, but in recent years the wealthy people are coming in and buying them up and make summer places or escape places.

The advantages here on the lake, you don't get hurricanes, you don't get really high tides.

The level is very predictable, rises a little bit in the rainy season and then falls in the dry season.

This is a private beach for the black-headed vultures.

I've never seen so many vultures in one place.

Somebody's actually come here and deposited some, perhaps innards.

It looks like they slaughtered some kind of animal and brought it here but there must be, there must be 250 of them at least.

Their beaks are hooked and are perfect for tearing and although their heads are dark, it's actually skin.

And when they stick their head down in to that carcass, they don't have feathers that would get contaminated.

They can very easily keep their heads clean and don't get infections that way, but this is, this is vulture heaven.

These monkeys on this island are actually in rehabilitation.

A veterinarian has rescued them.

This poor guy has no tail and a spider monkey with no tail is like a person in a jungle without one leg, but here they have a very good existence.

They've got a mango tree that in its season has all the food they could ever eat.

Tourists come here and give them, they've requested that they just give them fruit.

So they're fairly safe, they get along well.

So it's a little open-aired zoo under very close management by the veterinarian that established it.

From the lake it's clear that most of the forests are gone, but forty miles away, a nature preserve reveals how it once was.

Over ninety percent of Nicaragua's Pacific forest have been cut down.

Of that ten percent that's left, it's hard to find any section that's intact, but one such place is called El Chocoyero.

It's named after parrots and it has some of the finest big trees you'll ever see.

It also has guides that grew up here that are part of an indigenous community.

(Spanish) So this is, they call this the Chilamata tree.

It's a fig and this is the biggest tree in the whole reserve.

I can see why.

It's enorme.

(Spanish) So it's about 250 years old.

They call them gambas here, but we call them outriggers.

And the figs, because they grow very fast, t hey send them way out and they stabilize them in the wind and the rain.

Boy the howlers always make themselves known by that deep roar, it sounds like a freight train.

Fortunately for me, it's noon and they are sort of inactive, otherwise they have a tendency to throw nasty stuff at you.

There's a female with a baby.

Now I see what those fingers were.

Okay, it's coming over to the mom and it's quite interested in me, which might be a bad sign.

No it's staying quite close to mom.

It's always got its tail, it's always got some connection to mom.

So when she bounces through the trees, she's got to be carrying that baby with her.

This waterfall appears just out of like a spring at the very top and the local people value it greatly.

The water is pure.

It's almost a miracle that it comes out of nowhere and so this place is revered for very good reason.

There aren't many places where this kind of parrot makes its home.

It requires cliffs that already have holes in them.

They come here and they live in pairs and the local people say that if one of the pairs dies, the other never finds another mate.

They live alone for life and it's ideal because they actually extract nutrients from the rock and they've got a great water source.

The rock here was laid down by ash flows from all of the volcanic activity around, so it's fairly easy to make holes in.

The parrots don't dig the holes but other elements have sometimes wind, sometimes water, or sometimes other critters, but the parrots see the holes, they like that.

They love the volcanic rock.

Nicaragua has a long history of earthquakes, volcanoes, civil strife and foreign interventions.

In spite of that troubled history, Nicaraguans, today believe they have arrived.

North Eastern Brazil is home to a Carnival celebration different from the well-known Carnival in Rio de Janeiro or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

It begins in the city of Recife in the state of Pernambuco and spreads to other parts of the state.

The celebration lasts for five days.

Join us next time In the Americas , with me, David Yetman.

[music] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman , was provided by AgneseHaury.

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