June 7, 2018
A barricade in Masaya. Photo: Reuters.
Tom Ricker of the Quixote Center in Maryland interviewed me about the current situation in Masaya (June 2018). Here is what I said.
There has been a tremendous amount of violence in Masaya over the last week. Several people have been killed, a school was set on fire, and people assumed to be supporters of the government have been attacked, or houses set aflame. What have you been seeing and hearing from friends in the area?
Until mid-April, Masaya was a peaceful city (and Nicaragua the most peaceful country in Central America). All that changed when police responded violently to a student protest in Managua. This awoke a lot of resentment in Masaya against the government, including from its previous supporters, and barricades appeared in the streets. There were pitched battles between pro- and anti-government groups. Even demonstrations calling for an end to violence (like one I took part in on Sunday May 6) were attacked.
Since then the violence has become far worse. Ransacking of businesses (with people running off with TV sets and motor bikes), destruction of public buildings (including the tourist market) and burning down the houses of Sandinista sympathisers have become a nightly occurrence. We are in the bizarre situation where Masaya’s people (for the most part) are destroying their own city.
Continue reading “An interview about the situation in Masaya”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Masaya |
May 30, 2018
The problems experienced by the Windrush generation highlight the effects of the “hostile environment” created by Theresa May when she was home secretary. Anyone needing rented housing is affected, alongside those going to hospital or applying for a job or bank account. Social housing applicants have long had to comply with eligibility rules but landlords in England now have to check their right to rent. Rough sleepers and those in poor-quality rented accommodation can be affected by Home Office enforcement action. How can social landlords respond? Here are seven tips.
First, it’s vital that housing staff know the rules or can get expert guidance. We at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) have received reports of people being told they are not eligible for social housing because (for example) they are EU nationals or have limited leave to remain. Many people in these groups are eligible and will continue to be after Brexit. You can find all the rules on the Housing Rights website run by the CIH and BME National. Remember that there may be different rules for housing allocations, homelessness and benefits.
Continue reading “The hostile environment: what social landlords need to know”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: private rented sector, migration policy, immigration checks, destitution, right to rent |
May 22, 2018
When Spanish ships first reached the Americas in 1492, they had no idea of the size of the lands on which they’d set foot, nor did they realise that they were twin continents in their own right. Columbus died believing he’d found an alternative route to the ‘Indies’, because although the early explorers new the world was a sphere, they thought it was much smaller than it turned out to be. Only eight years after Columbus’s first landing, the mouth of the Amazon was discovered, and the river’s size could be guessed by the extent of the ‘sweet water’ that it produced, changing the colour of the Atlantic Ocean across more than two million square kilometres. But the Amazon basin remained unknown to Europeans for 50 more years, and then its discovery was an accident.
It is commonly supposed that before the Conquest the Americas were sparsely inhabited. Yet Charles Mann argues in the book that in the US was called ‘1491’, that it is possible that the total population at the time was actually greater than Europe’s. There is an ongoing controversy about this, not least because only a few of the more advanced civilisations left written records and these are not easily decoded. Part of the controversy centres on an area – the Amazon – where there were no written records at all and few if any permanent structures. John Hemmings, in ‘Tree of Rivers’, judges there to have been 4-5 million people in the Amazon basin before the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived, pitching his estimate between the extremes of those that have been put forward by different scientists.
Continue reading “River of Darkness”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: Ecuador, Brazil, Amazon river |
May 8, 2018
After the recent demonstrations (see below), this is my experience of events in Masaya on 6 May, when I travelled with a ‘peace caravan’ organised by the local Sandinista party (FSLN) in Masaya. I’ll try to report objectively what happened. I should emphasise that, at the moment, violence is limited to parts of Masaya and to parts of the capital, Managua.
About 200 people gathered with flags and signs (‘No a la violencia’) near the old fort on the north side of Masaya, El Coyotepe. The people were all from Masaya and I knew many of them. We set off in about 20 cars and 30 motorbikes into the city, playing Sandinista music. I was interested to see the response of bystanders – the vast majority simply came out to watch, a minority waved support or signalled disagreement. My rough count put the supporters slightly ahead of the dissenters but this was hardly scientific. We passed around the parque central and into the main street leading to Monimbo (the oldest ‘indigenous’ neighbourhood in Masaya).
On arriving in front of the San Sebastian church in the centre of Monimbo, the leaders of the caravan were met with a hail of stones. This was not just a few youths throwing stones picked up at the side of the road. This was dozens armed with piles of fist-sized stones that could have badly injured anyone they hit. There was chaos on the street with vehicles of all kinds trying to do U-turns to escape the stones. The caravan turned around, there was no attempt to throw stones back and everyone eventually returned by different routes to El Coyotepe.
Continue reading “Sunday in Masaya”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Masaya |
May 2, 2018
Nicaragua had a record 1.8 million tourists last year. It’s a beautiful country, and in 2017 it officially became the safest in Central America. But after three days of political violence last month, one of the few certainties in 2018 is that it will lose both records. More than 40 people died in the protests, ostensibly over government social security reforms.
Crises in social security funding are hardly unique to Nicaragua, where poor management of investments and a growing elderly population have led to a growing shortfall. However, unlike in neighbouring Honduras, no one suggests the president has simply robbed the money. Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government proposed a rise in employer contributions, a smaller one in employee payments and a 5% cut in pensions (offset by stronger health care entitlements). The employers’ federation, COSEP, opposed to paying more and instead offering more drastic cuts, called for protests. University students obliged. The government dispatched anti-riot police who (having never done so before) fired live rounds.
Continue reading “After Ortega?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Masaya |
April 28, 2018
Jeremy Corbyn launched Labour’s affordable housing green paper last Thursday, promising one million new homes over ten years of which a significant number would be for social rent. The ambition was clear: funding will be restored to the level when Labour last held office, and councils will once again become “major deliverers” of social housing. This would contrast with recent Conservative governments which Corbyn said “have made it their mission to eliminate it”. The only time England has built enough housing, he added, was when councils have stepped in to do it.
Shadow housing minister John Healey was at pains to point out that housing associations would also retain a big role. And it’s clear they will need to, as one of the unanswered questions is how councils will build up the development capacity that has been depleted over the last eight years. As one participant said in discussion afterwards, the skills no longer exist in many local authorities and if many start new build programmes for the first time in years, they will all be competing for the same scarce skills such as architects and quantity surveyors.
Continue reading “Encouraging messages, now Labour must work on the detail”
Category: Housing | Tags: council housing, borrowing rules, housing investment, housing policy, rents, housing associations |
April 17, 2018
In response to demands that he produce the evidence for his claim that immigration is driving up house prices, the housing minister has now published the calculations. Do they back up his argument?
First, it must be said that researching the drivers of house price increases is fraught with difficulty as there are so many factors involved – not least a degree of sometimes irrational human behaviour given that houses are not merely places to live in but for many are an investment, a source of income or bought in order to speculate on future prices. Especially in the past few years, would-be owner-occupiers have been operating in the same market as a rapidly expanding private rented sector. So if projecting the demand for housing in terms of the number of units is a challenge, translating that into effects on house prices is much more so.
What strikes the reader immediately about the new calculation is its simplicity. The original piece of work produced what was really a rule-of-thumb relationship between household growth and house prices: if the former increases by 1%, the latter will go up by 2%. The context – the years up to 2008 when the research was published – was a period of very strong house price growth.
Continue reading “Raab’s use of outdated and oversimplified evidence is foolhardy”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: migration statistics, housing market |
April 12, 2018
Dominic Raab, the housing minister, has rightly been asked to produce the evidence to back up his claim that immigration has put up house prices by 20 per cent over the past 25 years when the research suggests that immigration is just one factor pushing up housing demand and a minor one at that.
The Migration Observatory, which publishes regular briefings on housing and migration, says that evidence on the link with housing costs reaches no firm conclusion.
Two recent studies have even shown that an increase in an area’s foreign-born population brings a slight fall in house prices. Christine Whitehead looked at housing demand from highly skilled migrants and concluded that the effect on the market is very small, even in London. Meanwhile, the last report from the official Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) in 2014 concluded (from lack of evidence to the contrary) that “migrants reduce house prices”.
The housing minister says that the MAC “airbrushes” the impact on housing, citing unpublished evidence from the ONS to back his claim that house prices have increased by 20 per cent in 25 years because of immigration.
Continue reading “Raab’s claims about immigration oversimplify a complex housing problem”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: migration statistics, housing market |
April 12, 2018
On 9 April 1948, the Colombian politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán stepped out of his office with a group of friends to walk to Bogotá’s Hotel Continental for lunch. An assassin confronted him in the street and shot him three times in the face and chest. He died shortly afterwards. His supporters caught the 20-year-old culprit, Juan Roa Sierra, and beat him to death. His body, naked except for a blue and red striped tie, was dumped in front of the Presidential Palace. It remained there for two days. ‘El Bogotazo’, the night of violence sparked by Gaitán’s assassination, left more than 3000 people dead and Bogotá half in ruins.
Gaitán had carried the hopes of a new radical politics in Colombia. At the age of 26, he had led the condemnation of the army’s massacre of striking banana workers in Ciénaga in December 1928 (a central episode in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). During his speech to the senate, Gaitán displayed the skull of a child killed by the tirade of bullets aimed at the peaceful demonstrators. In 1948, after a short spell as mayor of Bogotá, he was leader of the Liberal party and its candidate for the coming presidential election. With the support of the growing urban working class, he stood a real chance of forming the first government led by someone outside the country’s elite. It wasn’t to be. More than 200,000 people were killed in the ten-year civil war (1948-58) known as La Violencia. Decades of guerrilla warfare followed, from which Colombia is only now emerging.
Continue reading “The man with the typewriter”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Cuba, Colombia, Latin writers |
March 25, 2018
A review of Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement by Graham Greene.
For anyone interested in the politics of Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, which of course also requires an interest in the US intervention in the isthmus that intensified during the later stages of the Cold War, this book provides fascinating insights into some of the key personalities involved. Of course, apart from Greene himself (whose knowledge of the region grows with his friendship with the general), we mainly find ourselves getting to know the Panamanian president, Omar Torrijos, and his political amanuensis and bodyguard, Chuchu. Simply as a travelogue the book works because of the personalities – the quirky and enigmatic Torrijos, the ever-willing and slightly crazy Chuchu, and the pliable, curious Graham Greene, happy to be pushed into various political roles and (literally) to enjoy the ride as he gets dispatched to various parts of Panama or the wider region, often in the presidential plane.
In those couple of decades Torrijos was an influential figure – not only in Panama, principally in steering the agreement on the future of the canal and its return to Panamanian control, but also in his involvement in regional politics. He often operated behind the scenes, giving support to the rebel armies challenging right-wing governments in various countries, providing refuge to people who needed a place of safety away from the different struggles (not only guerilla leaders but also ordinary campesinos), and publicly or clandestinely seeking solutions to the conflicts. Greene is fascinated by Torrijos’s self-adopted regional role and becomes a willing co-conspirator.
Continue reading “Getting to know the General”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: US intervention, panama |
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on