April 18, 2025
Roger D. Harris and John Perry
Nobody is complaining anymore about Latin America and the Caribbean being neglected by the hegemon to the north. The Trump administration is contending with it on multiple fronts: prioritizing “massive deportations,” halting the “flood of drugs,” combatting “threats to US security,” and stopping other countries from “ripping us off” in trade. The over 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine is alive and on steroids.
Continue reading “Latin America three months into the Trumpocalypse”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, El Salvador, chile, Bolivar, Brazil, panama |
April 9, 2025
El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) opened in 2023. It has capacity for up to forty thousand prisoners, although is said to be only half full. CECOT was built to incarcerate alleged members of violent gangs, who by 2015 had made El Salvador the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous country. Dispensing with warrants and court hearings, in 2022 the government jailed almost 2 per cent of the population, many on the basis only of their tattoos. The official murder rate fell from 18 per day to one every three days.
Continue reading “Irregular Warfare”
Category: Latin America, Uncategorized | Tags: Venezuela, migration, El Salvador |
April 7, 2025
These top Washington think tanks are lobbying lawmakers for sadistic sanctions on some of the hemisphere’s poorest countries while raking in millions from corporations and arms makers.
Continue reading “Meet the Washington think tanks impoverishing masses of Latin Americans”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Cuba, US intervention, Venezuela, sanctions |
April 7, 2025
“Liberation Day” [photo: White House}
Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.”
Continue reading “Nicaragua’s opposition media welcome Trump’s new tariffs – and ignore how they were calculated”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, sanctions |
April 4, 2025
Three speakers who live and work in Nicaragua explain how Nicaragua has implemented such successful, well-integrated poverty-reduction programmes despite unrelenting US attempts to overthrow the government and impose ‘democracy’, US style.
Continue reading “‘A better world is possible…’”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention |
March 7, 2025
One of scores of violent barricades, or tranques, created around Nicaragua during the 2018 coup attempt
MASAYA, NICARAGUA – Reynaldo Urbina rides his motorbike around the streets of Masaya, Nicaragua, with agility, despite having only one arm. Nearly seven years ago, at the height of a US- supported coup attempt against Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, Urbina was one of those guarding the city’s municipal warehouse when it was attacked by around 200 armed protestors. Warned of the impending attack, the guards had been ordered to hide their weapons and not resist capture, to minimize casualties.
Continue reading “Biased UN report on Nicaragua ignores victims of US-backed opposition violence”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, human rights
February 26, 2025
President Trump has just closed down USAID after Elon Musk branded it “a criminal organization,” adding “it’s time for it to die.” Is there any truth at all in Musk’s allegation?
Continue reading “Is USAID “a criminal organization?” – in Nicaragua, the evidence suggests it was”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, Nicaraguan elections, NGOs
February 16, 2025
A briefing by the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition, February 2025
Draft legislation from the last session of the United States Congress, likely to be reintroduced in the 119th session, appears to conflict with an important US trade treaty. If approved, the ill-named “Restoring Sovereignty and Human Rights in Nicaragua Act” (formerly numbered S.1881 in the Senate and H.R.6954 in the House) 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, sanctions, US intervention
February 11, 2025
John Bolton, notorious coup-monger, with a grenade memento he received when he left USAID. It describes him as “The Truest Reaganaut.”
By John Perry and Roger D. Harris
“Take your money with you,” said Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, when told about Trump’s plans to cut aid to Latin America, “it’s poison.”
Continue reading “The Demise of USAID: Few Regrets in Latin America”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Cuba, US intervention, Venezuela, human rights
February 5, 2025
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio meeting Sunday with Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino in Panama City. (State Department, Freddie Everett)
After intense pressure by the U.S. on Panama to return possession of its canal to Washington because the Trump administration thinks China is threatening it, the Central American nation on Sunday sought a compromise by announcing it would study whether or not to renew contracts with a Chinese company managing two ports on the waterway and would withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Continue reading “Panama Tries Compromise; US Says It’s Not Enough”
Category: Latin America | Tags: panama, US intervention
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on