8 May - Yelba to obliterate CDCA property

Yelba Carvajal is continuing her attempts to take the CDCA's land. We need you to stay tuned to this blog for further details.

Currently, Yelba has submitted, to the City Council of Ciudad Sandino, a multi-page proposal for a free trade zone which includes our original property in its diagrams. Her narrative and photos show nothing but neglected farmland as if that was the only terrain involved! The borders of her proposal do not include the women's sewing cooperative land or the new spinning plant project, but would wipe out the CDCA's office building, main house, generator (also used by the sewing cooperative), well and pump house (water for everyone and for spinning plant construction), and dorm... all of the administrative and volunteer support infrastructure for all the CDCA's projects. It would also clear-cut all of the huge trees (the CDCA is on the city's map as a nature reserve) as Yelba's plans call for the CDCA's property becoming her parking lot for buses delivering shift-workers!

We are currently requesting meetings with the Attorney General of Nicaragua, the city government of Ciudad Sandino, and the Free Trade Zone Commission of Nicaragua to address Yelba Carvajal's proposal. If any of these meetings are hard to obtain, we may be calling on you to send emails on our behalf in order to get the attention of those entities. So please watch for updates here at this blogsite.

5 May - Genesis sets first columns in ground

Regardless of the pending lawsuit, members of Genesis, the spinning plant cooperative, set their first building columns today! They have been leveling the land and digging postholes and making the preformed columns up until now.

Following up on our announcement (see below) of the second lawsuit filed against the CDCA, on the advice of our lawyer we did not attend the mediation hearing scheduled for April 17, 2008. This was because we are requesting that the two suits against the CDCA be consolidated into one. It appears that Yelba Carvajal's plan is to throw as many legal actions against the CDCA at one time as possible, in the hopes that eventually she'll wear the CDCA down and she'll be able to snake the property out from under CDCA ownership.