From Nicaragua, the impeachments against the capitalist and colonial system implemented by the United States and Europe rain down torrentially; its protagonist, the president of the Latin American country, Daniel Ortega, this time, has affirmed that illiteracy is a virus of capitalism.
Ortega takes advantage of any opportunity to reaffirm Nicaragua’s anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist position. The recent statements he made in his official speech in celebration of the greatest educational feat of the 20th century, according to UNESCO, carried out by the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaraguan territory, in 1980, the Great National Literacy Crusade.
“Illiteracy is a disease, a virus that is caused by the Capitalist System” affirms the Nicaraguan president, who also assures that “there are the causes. A system made to make the rich richer and the make poor poorer, and where it is not a priority to eradicate Poverty or Extreme Poverty, or illiteracy, but simply, it is a system that has been imposed on the world”.
Ortega details that capitalism «has been overcome in many countries…», and that in Nicaragua «we confront this virus with the Triumph of the Revolution. There was no other chance! Only with a revolution could Literacy occur, otherwise it would be to continue with the darkness of illiteracy” he highlighted.
The Nicaraguan head of state, illustrated about illiteracy, that it is a «virus that is throughout the world, even in developed countries there are statistics where there are groups of young people or adults, who due to the conditions of poverty that exist in the developed countries, with so much wealth there is also poverty, there is also misery”.
In this context, Ortega, statesman of Latin America and the Caribbean, recalled the Nicaraguan poet and Father of Modernism, Rubén Dario, who in his lyrics would detail the paradox of the United States, that being the nation with the greatest wealth on the planet, its citizens they also suffered from misery.
“Also there in these times is repeated what Ruben Dario saw when he walked through New York City, which he said, 50-story houses, admiring the wealth of the United States; he said, but what is sad, my God, is to see there under the bridges those who die of cold. Because the winters there, there are terrible and they kill families that live under the bridges and that eat from the garbage cans, from the leftovers that others throw into the garbage cans. And that they die, my God, said Rubén Dario, of pain, pain, pain”.
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Likewise, the president recalled that «illiteracy rates were around 60%, that is, 60 out of 100 Nicaraguans could not read or write,» at the time of the Somocista tyranny.
In this sense, he denounced that it was “something really monstrous, but that capitalism saw it as something normal. The more illiterate, the better, say the capitalists, because we are going to have more cheap labor. Because it is the poor who need to work, and the rich who want to pay very little; the poorer, they said, we will have more workers willing to earn what we want to pay them. They didn’t care about illiteracy back then; it wasn’t even mentioned as a social disease.”
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Ortega, detailed about the Literacy process carried out even in the most remote places of Nicaragua, in 1980, when he was also in charge of the country, that «at that moment what is an essential right of humanity was being fulfilled: The Right to Knowledge. A Human Being without knowledge is simply a slave to ignorance, and if he is a slave to ignorance then he is a slave to exploitation”.
