Nicaragua is a small country that was praised for eventually signing the Paris climate agreement in October, but has since been criticised for pushing ahead with a planned interoceanic canal, with its uncertain environmental effects. So how does it reconcile these apparently conflicting positions? Nicaragua and Syria were the only two countries not to sign…
While Donald Trump gives the appearance of wavering over his decision to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Nicaragua has decided to sign it. It was one of only two countries not to sign in Paris last year; the other was Syria. Nicaragua abstained out of principle: the agreement didn’t go far…
Criticism of the organisation Global Witness and the coverage of Nicaragua in its latest report on ‘environmental defenders’ has so far failed to shift its stance, or even to persuade it to look in detail at the arguments. Here are the latest developments. The Two Worlds article published on July 16 was accompanied by emails…
Under a picture of the renowned environmentalist Berta Cáceres, murdered in Honduras last year, the Guardian has launched a major and much-needed project looking at worldwide deaths of environmental defenders. It’s doing this in collaboration with Global Witness, which keeps an ongoing register of such assassinations. To do this it needs to make some difficult…
A review of ‘Dictators Never Die: a portrait of Nicaragua and the Somoza dynasty’ by Eduardo Crawley, 1978. In the last century, Latin America produced a gallery of gruesome dictators, who vied with each other in their ruthlessness and their ability to cling to power for decades. Who was the worst? There were several outstanding…
Raise four fingers (the sign for “B”), touch your nose with your thumb and dip your hand down to mimic an elephant’s trunk. You’ve just said “Babar the elephant” in Nicaraguan Sign Language for the deaf – and it’s a sign that’s distinct from that for simply “elephant”. It’s not surprising that ISN (for its…
In January, the magazine New Internationalist published one of its regular ‘country profiles’ on Nicaragua. In March, they published a brief letter from me complaining about the unfair picture they had presented. Below is the letter and below that the main text of the ‘country profile.’ Your country profile of Nicaragua gives a very unfair…
Doña Concepción’s straw bale house near Masaya One of the regular donors to projects in Masaya is the London-based Southern Housing Group, a large housing association. In January we were able to visit two local farming families with Will Routh, Southern’s Head of Sustainability and ask how they’d benefited from the LMLG-ADIC project work….
Richard Sieff is a member of the Leicester-Masaya Link Group who joined as a result of visiting Nicaragua through Raleigh International. In this guest blog, he writes about his experiences and his commitment to take ‘Action at Home’. ‘Action at Home’ – I knew the requirement of this vital component of the International Citizen Service programme: raise awareness…
Would you visit a country if you were warned to ‘exercise a high degree of caution’ because ‘armed violence’ is very common? Having lived in Nicaragua for 13 peaceful years, I haven’t given a lot of thought to the travel advice to visitors issued by Britain’s Foreign Office or by other governments. But my attention…