June 16, 2022
Associated Press: “the government seems intent on wiping the landscape clean of any organization it does not control.”
Daniel Ortega’s government in Nicaragua is “laying waste to civil society” according to the Associated Press. The Guardian called it a “sweeping purge of civil society,” while for the New York Times, Nicaragua is “inching toward dictatorship.” According to the Washington Post, the country is already “a dictatorship laid bare.” In a call repeated by the BBC, the UN human rights commissioner urged Nicaragua to stop its “damaging crackdown on civil society.”
Continue reading “Nicaragua a ‘Dictatorship’ When It Follows US Lead on NGOs”
Category: Latin America | Tags: human rights, Nicaragua, media |
June 14, 2022
Photo: Teri Mattson, Workers’ Summit, Tijuana, at the U.S. Border Wall
Jill Clark-Gollub, COHA Assistant Editor/Translator; Alina Duarte, COHA Senior Fellow; John Perry, COHA Senior Fellow
“We would definitely have wanted a different Summit of the Americas. The silence of those absent challenges us. So that this does not happen again, I would like to state for the future that the fact of being the host country of the Summit does not grant the capacity to impose a ‘right of admission’ on the member countries of the continent.” President of Argentina and president pro tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC), Alberto Fernández, at the Summit of the Americas, June 10, 2022, Los Angeles.
Continue reading ““Summit of Exclusion” Backfires on Biden”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Cuba, US intervention, Venezuela |
May 28, 2022
Protesters at a Managua roadblock, 30 May 2018, SITU Research
Written jointly with Rick Sterling
This article shows how media uses computer modeling and “virtual crime scenes” to assign blame for some extremely important international events. In these examples from Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria, many people died in complex circumstances. The deaths at the “Mother’s March” in Managua, Nicaragua precipitated an attempted coup. The Maidan Massacre in Kyiv led to an actual coup. The claims of a chemical attack in Douma led to the US, France and the UK bombing Syria.
Continue reading “How “virtual crime scenes” became a propaganda tool in Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua crisis, ukraine, syria, Nicaragua, media |
May 16, 2022
The grandly named Summit of the Americas is due to be held in Los Angeles next month, if the Biden administration can decide who to invite and what to talk about if they turn up. As things stand, Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina, Honduras and most of the Caribbean states have said they will not attend if Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are not included.
Continue reading “The Summit of the Americas could be Biden’s next foreign policy embarrassment”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Cuba, US intervention, Venezuela |
April 21, 2022
Until 27 January, Juan Orlando Hernández was president of Honduras; he’s now on his way to a high-security prison in New York, awaiting trial. On the day JOH handed power to Xiomara Castro, charges were filed against him that would lead to an extradition request from the US embassy in Tegucigalpa. He was arrested on 15 February and lost his appeal to the country’s supreme court on 28 March. A Drug Enforcement Agency plane came to pick him up today.
Continue reading “JOH’s luck runs out”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, drugs, US intervention
March 3, 2022
A debate with William Robinson, University of California, Santa Barbara, Sociology professor and author of books such as “Faustian Bargain” about Nicaragua, hosted by TheAnalysis.
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaraguan elections
January 22, 2022
Gabriel Boric was elected president of Chile on December 19th. In an LRB article about his campaign, he was said to be embarrassed by one of the parties that supported him, when it welcomed Daniel Ortega’s re-election in Nicaragua the previous month. LRB published the letter below in its issue of January 27th, in response to the December article.
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, chile, Nicaraguan elections
December 19, 2021
People queueing to vote. Photo by Rick Stirling
On November 7, Nicaragua held elections in which current president Daniel Ortega received 75% support and, as a result, begins a new term of office in January. Not surprisingly, the US government described the election as a “sham.” Of more concern is that many on the left seem to agree. William Robinson’s NACLA article, Nicaragua: Chronicle of an Election Foretold, is a scathing critique, repeated in an interview with The Real News.
Continue reading “How can Some Progressives get Basic Information about Nicaragua so Wrong?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaraguan elections, Nicaragua, US intervention |
November 26, 2021
Honduran presidential candidate for the LIBRE party, Xiomara Castro. Orlando Sierra—AFP/Getty Images
Joe Biden has a Central America problem. Countries that turned reliably neoliberal after the ‘small wars’ of the 1980s have become unwieldy again. After sixteen years of neoliberalism, Nicaraguans returned Daniel Ortega to power in 2007 and re-elected him this month in a vote which Biden dismissed as a ‘pantomime’. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019 with Trump’s blessing, has been described as a ‘narcissistic dictator’ by a senior Democrat because of his growing authoritarianism, secret deals with violent gangs, making bitcoin legal tender and fostering links with China. Riding high in opinion polls, he now calls himself ‘the world’s coolest dictator’.
Continue reading “End of a Narcostate?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, US intervention, migration
November 17, 2021
People waiting in line to vote (photo: El 19 Digital)
Official results from Nicaragua’s elections on November 7 showed Daniel Ortega re-elected as president with 75% of the vote. On the same day, President Joe Biden dismissed the ballot as a “pantomime election” and within 48 hours the Organization of American States (OAS) had produced a 16-page report setting out its criticisms. It demanded the annulment of the elections and the holding of new ones, disregarding international and OAS rules that require respect for the sovereignty of nations. Yet it contained no evidence of problems on election day itself that would substantiate its objections. Nevertheless, local and international media were quick to endorse the accusations that widespread fraud had taken place.
Continue reading “If there was “fraud” in Nicaragua’s elections, where’s the proof?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, media, Nicaraguan elections |
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on