Then Mendoza, who returned to Los Milagros with a reporter, walked up and Ortiz froze. He adjusted the machete on his belt, then calmly looked Mendoza in the eye.
"I've never seen you before in my life," he said.
Mendoza looked forlornly at a reporter. "Jaime was my boss," he said.
"No," Ortiz said. "I've never seen him."
When Ortiz was distracted, the other workers quietly greeted Mendoza with handshakes. "Hey, neighbor," they said.
Back in Matagalpa, others told the same story as Mendoza. All knew key facts about the plantation -- for example, the name of a resident's wife or a description of Ortiz -- that proved they had lived there. Workers who remained at Los Milagros also confirmed the firings, though they became quiet when Ortiz showed up.
Eduardo Fernandez, legal adviser to the repossession branch of the Finance Bank, also denied the homeless group came from Los Milagros.
"We haven't fired anyone, not in the sense that we told them to leave," he said in a telephone interview. "The bank isn't interested in bad publicity, so if we can give work to the people we do it with pleasure."
Asked about the workers' version of events, Fernandez said: "I know the idiosyncrasies of Nicaraguans. People like to feel like victims, and if a foreigner shows up, they invent anything to tell them."
It would have been hard for Mendoza to invent his story. His father and grandfather both worked and lived in Los Milagros, and he has worked the fields since age 11. Except for a few years fighting along the Honduras border for the US-funded Contra rebels in the 1980s, he had never known anything else.
So after he was laid off, he and the others stayed in the crumbling wood-plank stables that they had called home for generations, surviving off a patch of plantains that grew in the coffee fields.
After a few weeks, Mendoza and others said, Ortiz ordered the plantains chopped down, figuring starvation would drive them off his land. Ortiz denied there were ever plantains on the farm, but Mendoza took a reporter straight to a patch, the trees hacked to the ground.
With nothing to eat, the group hit the road.
Thousands more Nicaraguans from coffee plantations across the country have made similar exoduses, and the highways of the countryside are lined with black tarps strung up by the new homeless.
In many of the camps, there is talk of moving to the park in front of the presidential palace in Managua, to pressure President Arnoldo Aleman to help them.
Aleman responded last month by offering to bus the people back to their homes, where he said he would give them jobs building roads and bridges. Few jobs have been created.
He also pushed a law through Congress creating a 300-day grace period before banks can foreclose on the homes of debt-ridden coffee workers, but that is little consolation to the people of Los Milagros, who live in a litter-strewn park in Matagalpa and beg for rotten vegetables from merchants at the central market.
A few charitable groups have given donations of rice, beans or crackers, but during a recent visit, nobody had brought anything in five days.
Mendoza's 2-year-old daughter, Reina Epifania, sat on the ground atop a dirty, empty burlap sack, crying and coughing in weak spurts. Mendoza took her to a public clinic, where a doctor said she had parasites and anemia, but Mendoza can't afford to buy the medicine the doctor prescribed.
RSS