Nicaragua Wants to Lure American Tourists

Fifteen years after the Contras stopped battling the Sandinistas, Nicaragua still finds itself fighting that notorious war. Not on the ground, but in the minds of U.S. travelers who continue to fear the lush, rustic country just north of Costa Rica.

“The image of Nicaragua is either negative or nonexistent,” lamented Maria Rivas, a former marketing executive for Coca-Cola and Nestle who now serves as Nicaragua´s minister of tourism. “It´s not an easy job.”

But with the help of a Coral Gables firm and more tax dollars to fund promotions, Nicaragua hopes to erase its lingering war-torn reputation. It has a new slogan, “A Country With Heart,” to offer distance from the camouflaged Marxists and U.S.-backed rebels that Americans saw on their television screens throughout the 1980s.

On a recent trip to New York, Rivas´ staff handed travel writers crime statistics that put Nicaragua second only to Canada among the safest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Instead of Cold War history, Nicaragua has made its colonial past a big part of its new marketing campaign, which emphasizes 16th-century Spanish architecture.

Nicaragua´s emotional appeal to travelers as a place with heart in some ways mirrors the campaign El Salvador waged earlier this decade to woo foreign investors. Even though that country´s civil war ended in 1992, it weighed on the minds of U.S. business executives.

But aside from its Cold War notoriety, Nicaragua faces other challenges in the increasingly competitive Latin American travel market. The country boasts expansive rain forest canopies, but Costa Rica already dominates the so-called “ecotourism” niche for Central America. Nicaraguans tout their coffee and beef, but Colombia and Argentina get most of the attention on those fronts.

So Nicaragua has assembled a grab bag of other attractions to lure visitors: The rare chance to see fresh water sharks where a briny river meets Lake Nicaragua. Orchids growing near the Nicaraguan volcanoes that are part of the famous Pacific “Ring of Fire.” Mark Twain´s trek across the country in 1866 –a journey made popular during the California Gold Rush, when Nicaragua was seen as the safest trans-continental route available.

Travel to Nicaragua has climbed in recent years, according to official figures, from about 500,000 in 2002 to about 600,000 last year. Tourism officials and travel executives alike describe Nicaragua as still facing an uphill battle convincing Americans to vacation there.