Economics in Ciudad Dario: The Life of a Liniero

Talking to linieros or former linieros, the stories they tend to tell fall into two categories: the tragic story; and the sleazy story.  The first is told with a heavy-heart, recounting the moral dilemma of taking money from people clearly suffering to make ends meet.  It is the story of the liniero who, after a few beers, looks down at his glass and remembers the families in houses made of sheets of zinc he visits.  The second category involves the sexual habits of linieros.  Linieros are considered by many to be seamy womanizers.  Stories of linieros with numerous different families in different parts of the country abound.  Other stories of indebt women offering themselves to the linieros as payment are also common.

Here I offer an example of each, as told to me by a friend who spent a few months working as a liniero:

Economics in Ciudad Dario: Are Linieros Taking Advantage of the Poor?

This is the third installment in a series. Check out the first installment here, and the second installment here.


Linieros are traveling salesmen that sell common everyday household items on credit (the purchaser pays in regular installments, which the linieros goes back to pick up).

It is said that linieros charge up to three times the wholesale price on the items they sell.  So, who is buying irons for twice as much as they would pay in a store?  Well, it tends to be the poor. (Clarification: its twice as much as in a store, but three times as much as the wholesale price, because the retail price [the cost of the individual item at a store] is normally higher than the wholesale price [the cost of buying goods in bulk].)

Linieros go everywhere, from neighborhoods in Managua to tiny communities hidden away in far off hills.  They offer products that some people would only be able to acquire by traveling to the big city (which can sometimes be a long walk, and several multihour bus rides away).  Many people in the tiniest of communities have probably never visited a city, and to them the linieros and their array of goods must look a lot like the traveling gypsies and their ice in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Economics in Ciudad Dario: The Business of Running Lines

This is the second installment in a series.  Check out the first installment here.


Liniero: A traveling door-to-door salesman, who sells common household items on credit.

So how doe running a liniero business work?  What do the linieros sell?  How do the linieros get their merchandise?  How could they make so much money? (Especially taking into account that they have to make a trip to the person’s house every time a payment is due.)

The business works as follows: at the top, the head of the operation uses start-up capital to buy stock from El Salvador and stores it somewhere in his house.  He hires distributors, and the distributors contract the actual linieros.  Each distributor hires numerous linieros to cover different routes, and assigns some linieros to sell stock, other linieros to collect payments, and a third group to do a little bit of both.  The distributor is essentially a middle man, who makes sure the linieros are covering their routes, collecting payments from the debtors, and keeping their hands out of the money jar.

Economics in Ciudad Dario: The Rise of the Liniero

Twenty-some years ago in Nicaragua, around the time when the Sandinistas lost power, there were businessmen who would travel from Managua to Ciudad Dario, to sell goods that could only be found in the capital.  These businessmen were known to make good money, and a few ambitious locals decided to copy the business.  They began to travel around the country, selling goods only found in bigger towns from the back of their pick-up trucks.  As time passed, they began to hire others to do the selling for them (these hires tended to travel by bus rather than by pick-up truck), and began to offer customers the option of paying in installments, thereby introducing the concept of credit.

These newly hired salesmen would be assigned a route (or line) to travel and be told to sell as much of their merchandise as possible.  They would also be instructed to return regularly to the houses where sales had been made, in order to collect payments.  Thus, the liniero, a traveling salesmen who sells everday products on credit, was born in Nicaragua.  Its birthplace: Ciudad Dario. (Liniero in Spansih literally means “liner,” in reference to the route the salesman must travel.)

The founding fathers of the linieros (those men driving around in pick-ups packed with random household products) made a fortune.  When they started hiring people to sell for them, those new hires began to make good money as well.  Suddenly, everyone in town wanted nothing else but to be a liniero.  And so began the great liniero craze in Ciudad Dario.  There was a time when almost everyone in town was a traveling salesmen.  When little children told their teachers they wanted to be linieros when they grew up.  When the unhappy few who were not linieros, would awake to a ghost town, everyone having packed up and left to work their route hours before the crack of down.  This was a time when Ciudad Dario became little more than a hotel town, somewhere people go simply to sleep.

The huge influx of linieros inevitably lowered the profit margins for the salesmen and the coordinators of the routes, to the point where people say being a liniero now-a-days is good enough to feed your family but not much more. Nevertheless,  twenty-years later it remains the dominant industry in town.  It is likely that around fifty percent of the workforce in Ciudad Dario earns their income by working as linieros.

Next installment in the series: How does the business work?