January 27, 2023
After Harry Dunn was killed by a car that emerged from a US base in Northamptonshire on 27 August 2019, the driver, Anne Sacoolas, claimed diplomatic immunity and within three weeks was whisked out of the country on a US military aircraft, with the British police only being informed after she’d left. Sacoolas eventually appeared by video at the Old Bailey last month, but is unlikely to serve the suspended sentence she received. The US government refused an extradition request to return her to the UK to face trial, even though her diplomatic immunity arose from a legal ‘anomaly’ that has now been closed.
Continue reading “Diplomatic immunity”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Venezuela |
January 10, 2023
A review of the report Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy, edited by Sara Flounders for the Sanctions Kill campaign and published by World View Forum.
Sanctions imposed without United Nations endorsement are illegal. That is why they could be legally imposed on South Africa by a resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1962, but are unlawful when imposed by one government, often with selected allies, against any other country, for whatever reason. Known correctly as “unilateral coercive measures,” such actions are not only contrary to international law in themselves, but may lead to other breaches of the law if their effects are so severe as to become “crimes against humanity.”
Continue reading “Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Cuba, US intervention, Venezuela |
December 23, 2022
Children play by the fence on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border
After two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, four times as many undocumented migrants are trying to cross the border into the United States, and he’s getting desperate to explain away the increase. In September, the administration discovered a new narrative: that migrants are fleeing “communism.”
Continue reading “Washington blames record migration on ‘communism’ when the causes are closer to home”
Category: Migration, Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, migration
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
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on