September 21, 2024
Claims that Nicaragua is “weaponizing” immigration by allowing free passage of migrants towards the U.S. border have been appearing regularly in the media over the last twelve months. The claim was made on NPR in January, in the Associated Press last October, in El Pais last November and by the BBC this July, to cite just a few. In May, the Biden administration accused the Nicaraguan government (the “Ortega-Murillo regime”) of “repressing people and preying on migrants,” imposing new sanctions on those it believed responsible. Is there any basis to these claims?
Continue reading “Is it Nicaragua that is “weaponizing” immigration? – or is it Washington?”
Category: Migration, Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Costa Rica, US intervention, migration |
June 29, 2024
[Source: georgiatoday.ge]
Politicians in the small Caucasian state of Georgia have been
sanctioned by Washington for “undermining democracy” and depriving Georgian people of “fundamental freedoms”, simply because its parliament has passed a law to control foreign influence over Georgian politics. Politicians in another small country, Nicaragua, were subjected to U.S. sanctions doing the same. Although the two countries are very different, there are striking similarities in the ways that Washington and its allies have striven to undermine their sovereignty.
Continue reading “The US has imposed sanctions on Georgia and Nicaragua for instituting laws that copy U.S. legislation and were designed to ward off coups”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Georgia, NGOs
June 25, 2024
Alfred de Zayas and John Perry examine the ways that human rights can be manipulated for geopolitical ends and used to justify illegal coercive measures like sanctions. Watch here.
Category: Latin America | Tags: NGOs, Nicaragua crisis, human rights
June 6, 2024
A briefing for the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition, June 2024
Draft legislation currently passing through the United States Congress appears to conflict with an important US trade treaty. A bill (S.1818, the ill-named “Restoring Sovereignty and Human Rights in Nicaragua Act”) has passed with amendments through the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. A similar bill (H.R.6954), but thus far without the same amendments, has been introduced in the House of Representatives. If this legislation were to be approved, it could enable the US administration to impose sweeping new economic sanctions on Nicaragua.
Continue reading “The CAFTA treaty and the prospect of new US sanctions against Nicaragua”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, sanctions
May 30, 2024
When Nicaragua accused Germany of aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last month, readers of corporate media might have seriously wondered whether Nicaragua’s case had any legitimacy.
The case targeted Germany as the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, because the US, Israel’s biggest supplier, does not accept the court’s jurisdiction on this issue. The object (as Nicaragua’s lawyer explained) was to create a precedent with wider application – that countries must take responsibility for the consequences of their arms sales to avoid them being used in breach of international law.
Continue reading “When Nicaragua Took Germany to Court, Media Put Nicaragua in the Dock”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, human rights, palestine, media
May 10, 2024
This book is the fruit of an extraordinary coming together of two very different people. One was a burgeoning poet living in Southern California, the other a coffee-growing entrepreneur turned political activist from El Salvador. Wanting more people to know about the disaster that was beginning to befall his country in the turbulent late 1970s, Leonel Gómez Vides turns up at the home of Carolyn Forché, who is a friend of a relative of his, to persuade her to visit and learn about El Salvador, a country of which she knows almost nothing.
Continue reading “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, by Carolyn Forché”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: El Salvador, US intervention
April 20, 2024
Above photo: The “roadblocks of death” strangled the country’s transport system and became the scene of intimidation, robberies, rape, kidnappings and murder. Here we see armed roadblock operators south of Estelí, several with conventional weapons.
Human rights experts and activists are expressing concern over a flawed and seriously unbalanced report of the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN), released by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on February 24, 2024.
Continue reading “UN Human Rights Council Is Lending Support To US Regime Change Plans”
Category: Latin America | Tags: human rights, Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, NGOs
April 17, 2024
Nicaragua’s lawyers at the Hague
Last Thursday, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian war surgeon, gave his first address as the newly-appointed rector of Glasgow University, chosen in recognition of his work at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. The following day he flew to Berlin, where he had been invited to address a major conference about Palestine. On arrival he was taken away by police, interrogated for several hours and eventually told he had to leave Germany and wouldn’t be allowed to return until at least the end of April. Any attempt to speak to the conference via Zoom could result in a fine or even a year’s prison sentence. By the time he was released he couldn’t have taken part in the conference anyway, since it had been already invaded by at least 900 police and closed down. Berlin’s mayor said that it was ‘intolerable’ that the conference was taking place at all.
Continue reading “Germany buries the evidence of complicity in genocide: Nicaragua exposes it”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua |
April 10, 2024
When armed Ecuadorian police gathered outside the Mexican embassy in Quito last Friday evening, a casual observer might have thought they were there to protect it. Instead, they launched an attack: brandishing assault rifles, police climbed the walls, entered the building by force and kidnapped Ecuador’s former vice-president, Jorge Glas, who had that day been granted political asylum by Mexico. Within ten minutes Glas was being driven away.
Continue reading “On the Quito Embassy Raid”
Category: Latin America | Tags: human rights, Ecuador
April 8, 2024
Alfred de Zayas and John Perry
When the United Nations sets up a “commission of inquiry,” it can result in a powerful analysis of violations of human rights law, such as the one appointed in 2021 to examine Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and its Apartheid practices. But other commissions can become political platforms aimed at demonizing a particular government by crafting narratives that give the semblance of objectivity, while suppressing all evidence that contradicts the prevailing geopolitical consensus.
Continue reading “UN Human Rights Council again supports US regime change plans for Nicaragua”
Category: Latin America | Tags: human rights, Venezuela, US intervention, Nicaragua |
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on