My Estero de Plátano Limpio

The Municipio de Muisne is the local governing body of all of the communities in this area, including Estero de Plátano. I would rather not rant about the blatant corruption that IS the Municipio or the severe deficiencies in basic services and rights that should be granted to all of the people in every community by their government. Instead, aside from an incomplete and short-lived trash management program that stopped working as soon as it began, the Municipio has taken an entirely hands-off approach to the problems faced by Estero de Platanians.

A lot of the work that my compañeros from Yanapuma and I have been doing these past few months could be generally considered as community organizing. We are here to be ´facilitators´. We´re here to help the people of Estero organize themselves and fight for their basic rights. One of which includes a government-run system of trash pick-up and removal from the community. As of right now, people in the community are forced to either burn their trash or dump it into the river, onto the beach or in ´campo abierto´ (open land).


Almost a year ago, the Municipio created a trash program to deal with the issue and educate the pueblo about the differences between organic and inorganic waste. Trash bins were sold (for 10$ a piece) to the individual families that could afford them and a DONKEY+WAGON were purchased to collect the trash around the community and carry it up a hill to a large box. SERIOUSLY. This system of trash pick-up rarely takes place, the donkey is used for other purposes and the large box has been full for months. What this innovative trash program lacked was continued education/follow-up in addition to an actual TRUCK to pick up the trash from the large box and remove it from the community.

The entire community is polluted. Not only because it is an accepted cultural habit to throw out wrappers, bottles and other pieces of trash into the community and out of windows, but because there is no legitimate trash recollection system. Yanapuma has written a formal letter/solicitud to the Municipio, which is governed by the self proclaimed ¨The Man¨ (a.k.a Mayor), explaining the issue and asking for a regular trash pick-up system complete with an trash truck. We´re also treating it as a petition, and myself, along with many people from Estero, will be going to all of the other communities in the area to speak to them about the lettter and to collect both support and signatures. (This is the way things work here. People write solicitudes for EVERYthing.) We´re also trying to get the media involved in the issue, as the general election for mayor is coming up in mid-April.