This week is the launch of the Spanish edition of the ebook about last year’s events in Nicaragua. The launch coincides with the 40th anniversary of the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship on 19 July 1979. Here is a review of the book by Roger Stoll. The English version of Live from Nicaragua is offered free by Alliance for Global Justice (afgj.org) as an ebook and a PDF.
A deadly arson attack during last year’s regime change attempt was blamed on Nicaragua’s government by everyone from the US State Department to The New York Times and The Guardian. New information has raised serious doubts about the official story, highlighting the wider campaign of misinformation waged by US and UK media.
Ten European cities are demanding action from the European Union to help them control the growth of short-term lets in their local housing markets. The fear is that providers like Airbnb could become exempt from local regulations that enable authorities to control lettings in the private rental sector, because they will be under no legal obligation to declare the existence of lettings or how much rent is being charged, even though they have this information.
Continue reading “Could Airbnb devastate the housing markets in key cities?”
Bismarck Martinez’s family demand justice for his murder
In February the Sandinista government resumed a “national dialogue” with the opposition, re-establishing a forum to resolve political conflict in the country after the previous dialogue fell apart during last year’s violence. In the new negotiations, the opposition Civic Alliance’s key demand has been the release of those who were imprisoned for crimes committed during the failed coup. In late March, the government agreed to release all detained prisoners by 18 June, a process completed several days before the deadline, in co-operation with the International Red Cross.
Despite the violent protests of a year ago, Managua has largely returned to normal. While never the most attractive capital city in Latin America, it remains one of the safest. There are more police on the streets than there were before last year’s violence, but most people find that reassuring. A recent opinion poll shows that the government maintains close to 60% support and that 85% of Nicaraguans would oppose any return to last year’s protests. Nevertheless, if you buy a newspaper, you’ll find it full of anti-government rhetoric. If you watch TV news, there’s a good chance you’ll find the same. According to the world-wide Committee to Protect Journalists, opposition media are in a stronger position than they were before the crisis.
But this is far from the picture painted in the UK by the Channel 4 series ‘Unreported World’.
Continue reading “‘Unreported World’ and the misreporting of Nicaragua”
Right to Buy continues to fiercely divide opinion. Here, John Perry argues why he believes calling time on the 40-year-old policy is now the sensible thing to do
Here’s a good question for a pub quiz: what was Britain’s biggest ever privatisation? Was it British Gas, or perhaps water or electricity? All of these raised more than £5bn each but neither was the biggest. Perhaps, surprisingly, the answer can be found in table 60 of the annual UK Housing Review. The correct answer is, of course, the Right to Buy, which has so far raised over £55bn across England, Wales and Scotland and dwarfs all of the other privatisations.
Continue reading “Right to Buy is shocking value for money – a sensible government would ditch it”
A reflection on Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the rise of the new imperialism, by Greg Grandin, published in 2006 and updated in 2010.
So many books have been written about US intervention in Latin America that, when this one was published a decade ago, it might easily have been overlooked. Grandin’s approach was different however: he concentrates not so much on how the US intervened, but why it does, and how this fits into evolving US foreign and domestic policies more generally. He shows that US intervention has at different times had strong political, economic and even religious motives, with the US often treating Latin America as its ‘workshop’ for new approaches to intervention that it has yet to try elsewhere.
Continue reading “Latin America is still the empire’s workshop”
President Daniel Ortega speaks at a rally in Managua, March 21, 2019. REUTERS/Oswaldo Rivas
Hawks in the Trump administration have their sights set on regime change, not because of freedom or democracy, but to ‘settle historic scores.’
It’s been almost 200 years since the US declared that it would allow no more European colonies in the western hemisphere. A 100 years later this was twisted into a declaration that Latin America is exclusively the US’s sphere of influence, giving it a self-proclaimed right to interfere in other countries’ affairs.
Continue reading “Here’s why the US has no right to interfere in Nicaragua”
A new online reader on the Nicaragua crisis, Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?, was published in May 2019. Here is one of the articles, which focuses on the role played by social media and the alarming lack of balance both in Nicaragua’s corporate media and in the international press. It makes use of material that has appeared elsewhere in Two Worlds.
In a video clip, a young boy stands at a makeshift roadblock, play-acting something that he must have seen for real on a smartphone or a TV. He holds a toy gun to the head of his friend, who has just been ‘kidnapped’. Off camera, an adult asks, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘We’ll kill him and leave him naked,’ replies the boy. The adults laugh. This scene from Nicaragua, filmed in one of the dozens of towns paralyzed by roadblocks in 2018, epitomizes the violence that occurred then and the role that social media played in promoting it.
Continue reading “Nicaragua’s crisis: the struggle for balanced media coverage”
How much has government housing investment been cut since 2010? Headlines at the time reported that it fell by 60% and many people’s impressions are that it has since stayed at something like that level. But as the UK Housing Review has shown by looking at the detailed figures over the last four years, the reality is very different.
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on