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: Nicaragua crisis, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, US intervention, Mexico, migration |
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: coronavirus, Nicaragua, media |
November 21, 2022
AP (Washington Post, 11/6/22) presented Nicaraguan local elections as a “consolidation of the totalitarian regime of Daniel Ortega.”
The headline in the Washington Post ahead of Nicaragua’s local elections hinted at skepticism: “Nicaragua Ruling Party Seeks to Expand Hold in Local Votes” (11/6/22). The story itself, taken from an Associated Press report filed from Mexico City, was worse, framing the elections as a “farce” carried out “under the absolute control” of the governing Sandinista party.
Continue reading “For Corporate Media, Sandinistas’ Electoral Success Proves Their Repressiveness”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, media, Nicaraguan elections |
October 31, 2022
The Biden administration has announced new sanctions which are intended to hit the poorest Nicaraguans – both in their pockets and in the public services on which they depend. This latest attack on a small Central American country is, as usual, dressed up as promoting democracy: the sanctions will “deny the Ortega-Murillo regime the resources they need to continue to undermine democratic institutions in Nicaragua.” But everyone knows the real target is ordinary Nicaraguans who voted overwhelmingly to return a Sandinista government in last year’s elections.
Continue reading “New US sanctions are designed to hit Nicaragua’s poorest citizens”
Category: Latin America, Energy and the environment | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, mining |
October 27, 2022
With Camila Escalante, a journalist with Kawsachun News, I gave a presentation to a webinar for the Friends of ATC, a support group for the Nicaraguan agricultural workers union, about the violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. You can watch it on youtube.
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaragua crisis
October 12, 2022
Jenny Atlee, Jim Phillips and I presented a webinar on neighbouring countries, Honduras and Nicaragua, that have both suffered what Naomi Klein called the “shock doctrine”. Both rejected neoliberalism in elections last year, but both are under renewed pressure to conform to Washington’s expectations. My contribution compares the two countries’ approaches to the pandemic, and how this turned out.
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, Nicaragua, Covid-19
September 14, 2022
Andrés Castro throws a rock, hitting and killing a filibustero (painting by Luis Vergara Ahumada)
By Becca Renk
This week Nicaragua celebrates its Independence Days – on September 14th the celebration of the Battle of San Jacinto won against U.S. filibusters in 1856, and on September 15th the commemoration of Central America’s independence from Spain in 1821. Becca Renk, who lives in Nicaragua, penned the piece below.
Continue reading “David vs. Goliath: Nicaragua’s independence”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Nicaragua
August 9, 2022
Garifuna people in Orinoco celebrate 185 years since their arrival in Nicaragua
Some time in the 17th century, a vessel carrying enslaved people from the west coast of Africa ran aground near the Caribbean island of St Vincent, close enough to shore that the survivors swam to land, disposed of their captors and settled alongside the Indigenous Carib-Arawak people, who already offered a safe haven to runaway slaves from other islands. The Afro-Indigenous culture that resulted came to be known as ‘Garifuna’ (meaning ‘Black Carib’). Their language derives from that of the Arawak, a people whose pre-Colombian origin is in the Orinoco River basin in Venezuela.
Continue reading “It began with a shipwreck”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, Nicaragua, caribbean, Indigenous people
July 21, 2022
Street march in Masaya, July 2022
July 19th is a day of celebration in Nicaragua: the anniversary of the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. But the international media will have it penciled in their diaries for another reason: it’s yet another opportunity to pour scorn on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. We’ll hear again about how the government “clamps down on dissent,” about its “political prisoners,” its recent “pantomime election,” its “damaging crackdown on civil society” and much more. All of these accusations have been answered but the media will continue to shut out any evidence that conflicts with the consensus narrative about Nicaragua, that its president, Daniel Ortega, has “crushed the Nicaraguan dream.”
Continue reading “Nicaragua celebrates 43 years of revolution: a clash between reality and media misrepresentation”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, media |
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on