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April 13, 2023
Five years ago, Nicaragua was subject to a violent attempted coup that lasted from April through July, 2018. In the first of four articles, Dan Kovalik and John Perry look at how it was planned and how it started.
In the first few months of 2018, Nicaragua hardly appeared to be a strong candidate for an attempted coup. Daniel Ortega’s government had an 80 per cent approval rating in a poll a few months earlier. There had been eight years of continuous economic growth, during which the country achieved 90 per cent food sovereignty and cut hunger by 40 per cent (according to the UN’s global hunger index). In the decade since Ortega had been re-elected to the presidency, his government had rebuilt public health and education services, repaved the country’s roads and established a reliable, virtually nationwide electricity supply, based largely on renewable sources. It was hardly surprising that the Sandinista government had increased its vote share in three successive elections. Even the international media, though hostile towards Daniel Ortega, had to concede that he had “cemented popular support among poorer Nicaraguans” (The Guardian) and that “Many poor people who receive housing and other government benefits support him” (The New York Times).
Continue reading “Five years ago in Nicaragua: a coup attempt begins”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaragua crisis, human rights
April 2, 2023
While the United States pays little regard to the human rights of many of its own citizens, it manifests intense interest in those of countries that it regards as its enemies. Nicaragua, designated by both Trump and Biden as a “strategic threat,” is seen as one of those enemies. Of the countries selected for their own annual human rights assessment by the U.S. State Department, Nicaragua merited special attention in 2022, with a 43-page report compared with, for example, only a 36-page analysis of neighboring El Salvador, where 66,000 people have been subject to mass arrests in the past year. This is part of a highly selective approach in which human rights violations by U.S. allies are downplayed or ignored.
Continue reading “The United Nations is being used by the U.S. in its propaganda war against Nicaragua”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaragua crisis, human rights
March 31, 2023
Alfred de Zayas, former UN Independent Expert on International Order, has joined other human rights specialists in condemning an “expert” report on Nicaragua published on March 2nd as being unprofessional, biased, incomplete and concocted to justify further coercive sanctions that will damage Nicaragua’s economy. Such unilateral coercive measures have been condemned by the General Assembly year after year, most recently in Resolution 77/214 of December 2022 and by the Human Rights Council in Resolution 49/6.
Continue reading “Human rights experts call for withdrawal of biased UN report on Nicaragua”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua crisis, Nicaragua, human rights
March 2, 2023
Sandinistas march in Masaya after the ‘political prisoners’ had left the country
“Nicaragua Frees Hundreds of Political Prisoners to the United States,” the New York Times reported. In an unexpected move on February 9, the Nicaraguan government deported to the United States 222 people who were in prison, and moved to strip them of their citizenship. The prisoners had been convicted of various crimes, including terrorism, conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected government, requesting the United States to intervene in Nicaragua, economic damage and threatening the country’s stability, most relating to the violent coup attempt in 2018 and its aftermath.
Continue reading “Nicaragua’s ‘Political Prisoners’ Would Be Criminals by US Standards”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, media |
January 27, 2023
After Harry Dunn was killed by a car that emerged from a US base in Northamptonshire on 27 August 2019, the driver, Anne Sacoolas, claimed diplomatic immunity and within three weeks was whisked out of the country on a US military aircraft, with the British police only being informed after she’d left. Sacoolas eventually appeared by video at the Old Bailey last month, but is unlikely to serve the suspended sentence she received. The US government refused an extradition request to return her to the UK to face trial, even though her diplomatic immunity arose from a legal ‘anomaly’ that has now been closed.
Continue reading “Diplomatic immunity”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Venezuela |
January 10, 2023
A review of the report Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy, edited by Sara Flounders for the Sanctions Kill campaign and published by World View Forum.
Sanctions imposed without United Nations endorsement are illegal. That is why they could be legally imposed on South Africa by a resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1962, but are unlawful when imposed by one government, often with selected allies, against any other country, for whatever reason. Known correctly as “unilateral coercive measures,” such actions are not only contrary to international law in themselves, but may lead to other breaches of the law if their effects are so severe as to become “crimes against humanity.”
Continue reading “Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, US intervention
December 23, 2022
Children play by the fence on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border
After two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, four times as many undocumented migrants are trying to cross the border into the United States, and he’s getting desperate to explain away the increase. In September, the administration discovered a new narrative: that migrants are fleeing “communism.”
Continue reading “Washington blames record migration on ‘communism’ when the causes are closer to home”
Category: Migration, Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, migration
November 26, 2022
Why are more Nicaraguans heading north to the United States looking for jobs? Until July 2020, numbers were tiny. But in the last 1½ years numbers have increased sharply. Suddenly this has become a story, and government detractors argue, with little evidence, that people are fleeing political repression. “They’d rather die than return to Nicaragua,” is a typical headline. Manuel Orozco, a Nicaraguan based in Washington who strongly opposes the Sandinista government, told The Hill that “Nicaragua’s dictatorship is criminalizing democracy and fueling migration to the U.S.” Then, on September 20, this became the official explanation when White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Nicaraguans are “fleeing political persecution and communism.”
Continue reading “Nicaraguan migrants at the U.S. border – are they being “pushed” or “pulled”?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, migration, Nicaragua crisis
November 24, 2022
In this podcast, CG steering committee member Toby Green talks with John Perry, contributor to the London Review of Books, FAIR and other publications on Nicaraguan affairs.
Continue reading “The Power of a Good Example: Nicaragua and the Covid Response – Collateral Global”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, Nicaragua, coronavirus
November 24, 2022
In Nicaragua, Latin America’s third poorest country, people who don’t work don’t eat. Three-quarters of jobs are in small businesses or the informal economy. So when its first Covid case was diagnosed on 18 March 2020, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega knew that shutting down the economy would be catastrophic.
Continue reading “Nicaragua’s inconvenient Covid victory”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, media, coronavirus