Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Although the majority of Nicaraguans were poor and rural, land distributions to the peasantry in the 1980s endured, and the government supported small farmers and agricultural cooperatives, creating universal food self-sufficiency, as well as community health care, especially preventive care. In 2018, Nicaragua ranked second in Latin America and the Caribbean (after Venezuela) in reducing the gap between rich and poor, the poverty level reaching a low 7.6 percent in 2013 (the US poverty rate was 11.8).120 The Trump administration’s secretary of state, John Bolton, branded Nicaragua, along with Cuba and Venezuela, as a “troika of tyranny,” and the US government imposed severe economic sanctions on Nicaragua while fomenting violence there in 2018. The Nicaraguan economy was set back and the future of possible Nicaraguan emigration is not clear, although there were few Nicaraguans in the caravans of Central Americans that arrived at the border in 2018.