“Almost every American overthrow of a foreign government has left in its wake a bitter residue of pain and anger.”
A review of Overthrow by Stephen Kinser, published in 2006.
Hurricane Eta hits the Mosquito Coast
Central America’s ‘Mosquito Coast’, the home of the Miskito people, stretches between Honduras and Nicaragua. The border is at a point that juts out into the Caribbean: Columbus called it Cabo Gracias a Dios for the shelter it provided on his last voyage. As the storm that became Hurricane Eta formed above the seas of Venezuela on 30 October, it headed west towards the cape 2000 kilometres away, following the track of Hurricane Edith in 1971, Mitch in 1998 (which killed seven thousand people in Honduras and three thousand in Nicaragua), Felix in 2007, Ida in 2009 and many other lesser cyclones.
Branding Nicaraguan meat as ‘conflict beef’ is the latest US political attack
Export beef cattle are properly tagged and identified and cannot come from reserves. Photo: El19Digital.com
Earlier this year Nicaragua’s opposition and its supporters in the international media were promoting stories about the Sandinista government’s “failure” to address the Covid-19 pandemic. This backfired when Nicaragua became the first country in Central America to get the virus under control. Next they claimed that Sandinista supporters were attacking Catholic churches, but then it emerged that an opposition politician had paid for one of the robberies that took place. The latest effort to malign Daniel Ortega’s government tries to link Nicaragua’s beef exports to the United States with land conflicts in its remote Caribbean forests.
Nicaraguan cattle ranchers, spurred by a surge in beef exports to the United States, are alleged to be attacking indigenous communities in eastern Nicaragua, destroying “pristine jungle,” forcing people to flee and killing those who resist, according to Reveal News. In a related report on PBS Newshour, beef imported from Nicaragua during the pandemic is said to “come at a high human cost,” while the Center for Investigative Reporting calls the imports “conflict beef.” These claims are based on allegations by the Oakland Institute in California, whose director Anuradha Mittal says that “the supply chain of beef from Nicaragua is anything but clean.”
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What are the real prospects for a surge of investment in affordable housing?
What are the real prospects for a surge of investment in affordable housing? The prime minister has just told us that he will not fix the “broken housing market” by “endlessly expanding the state.” At the same time, as the chart from the latest UK Housing Review Briefing Paper shows, the new Affordable Homes Programme starting next April will be the biggest in cash terms in England for a decade, signalling a growth in investment and the prospect of providers being able to plan ahead for at least five years.
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Nicaragua, attacked for following the same US policies against foreign meddling
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched another attack on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government last month, accusing President Daniel Ortega of being a “dictator” who is “doubling down on repression and refusing to honor the democratic aspirations of the Nicaraguan people.” The State Department openly supports what it calls “a return to democracy in Nicaragua”, saying that “the people of Nicaragua rose up peacefully to call for change.”
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Rhys Evans obituary
Rhys Evans, who died on August 29 aged 80 of motor neurone disease, was a genuine polymath. Formally a schoolteacher, he was also an adult education tutor, youth worker, linguist, musician, internationalist, hillwalker, cyclist and gifted writer of poems and stories (which he only shared with very few). He was fluent in German and Spanish, managed French and Portuguese, and was at home in either English or Welsh. In 1985 he and I established a city link group between Leicester and Masaya, Nicaragua, which still exists, and in 1999 he set up Strides!, a mental health peer support group.
Covid-19: On the Decline in Nicaragua as its Critics Fall Silent
No country can yet claim to have defeated Covid-19, but clearly some are having more success than others. Nicaragua is one of these, and could yet be recognized as a world leader. With under 5,000 Covid-19 cases since the pandemic began, according to official figures, its infection level is far below that of Panama (105,000), Guatemala (85,000), Honduras (71,000), Costa Rica (63,000) or El Salvador (27,000). Of course, it is certain that Nicaragua’s figure, like those of the other countries, undercounts the real incidence of the virus. But even the so-called ‘independent’ Citizens Observatory, which is closely linked to Nicaraguan opposition political groups, only reports around 10,000 cases – still well below the incidence in adjoining countries. And the observatory’s figures – as its website makes clear – are not based on testing but on unverifiable sources, including ‘rumours’ (which it defines as ‘spontaneous public opinions’).
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Is this the end of Section 106?
‘Section 106’ is the power in the planning acts that allows councils to specify how much affordable housing should be included in new, private developments, and what kinds of houses they should be. Otherwise known as developer contributions or planning gain, a system that was put in place by a Conservative government in 1990 is – 30 years later – about to be dismantled in England by a very different Conservative government. Why does this matter?
Coronavirus is being tackled by Nicaragua’s community-based health system
by Kevin Zeese and John Perry
Sadly, only a month after contributing to this article, Kevin Zeese died suddenly. He will be sorely missed.
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is – like every other government – engaged in a struggle to limit the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on its people. But Nicaragua suffers two additional handicaps. One is that it is subject to US and European sanctions, which severely limit the aid it gets from abroad or from multilateral bodies. The other is its internal opposition, which aims to use the pandemic in its latest attempt to destabilize the government and turn opinion against it. To do so it employs a wide range of propaganda methods, at home and abroad. These were very evident in a recent article in the progressive platform Toward Freedom by Rafael Camacho, whose very title shows it is going to repeat the opposition’s messages: Coronavirus met with denial and silence in Nicaragua.
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The US contracts out its regime change operation in Nicaragua
An extraordinary leaked document gives a glimpse of the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.
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John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on