Murals, reading, revolution and Spanish

Estelií has lots of murals - most of them on a social theme, exhorting people to take care of each other & the wrold they live in - it seems to be Nicaraguan tradition

In Salman Rushdie's book about Nica in the 1980s, 'The Jaguar Smile', he refers to the fact that a lot of the leading Sandinista were poets - because they hadn't time to write novels.
In 1980, one year after the Revolution, the Sandinistas mounted a literacy crusade - you could even get a Literacy Guerilla badge or a Cruzada certificate. Literacy levels went up  from 50% to 88%. But I have been here for a month now and only seen 1 Nicaraguan reading a book - and that was in the libaray in Estelí. I have seen about a dozen reading a newspaper.
So what happened?   The Sandinistas lost power for one thing, and a lot of their programmes were stopped as the god of privitization was worshipped.. 
And then as people got electricity they got televisons - and the telenovelas. These are the Central and South American version of soaps - and in Nicaragua they are watched all day and night long. There are some differences to soaps in the UK. For a start all the women are thin, have long hair and are somewhat beautiful - they may be under-employed models.  Then there are the sets - they all seem to live in modern large apartments or large haciendas where they have numerous horses and cattle - a bit different to Coronation Street. Most of the actors are in the 25 - 35 age range and spend a lot of time looking anxiously at their latest amour.   For most peolpe here life is exactly the opposite. So television and the clichéd tyranny of the music video has taken over. More crusaders please to switch televisons off so folk can do summat more interesting.

It could also be due to the nature of Spanish as an oral culture. It's a loud language, but an  easy one in that its pronunciation is very regular (unlike English with our umpteen pronunciations of -ough). The stress is nearly always on the penultimate vowel, as in aZUcar - unless there is a stress mark as in Málaga.
BEsides the names that seem Mexican, like Ocatal, I think some pre-Spanish influence may be at work in the place names here that stress the last vowel, such as Tonalá, Estelí, Potosí and Yalí.
In the bus station the conductors shout out the names repeatedly - TonalatonalatonalatonalatonaLA or EsteliesteliesteliesteliesteliestelliesteLI. Sadly as yet I haven't been there when the bus for Wiwilí has been in.