Official results from Nicaragua’s elections on November 7 showed Daniel Ortega re-elected as president with 75% of the vote. On the same day, President Joe Biden dismissed the ballot as a “pantomime election” and within 48 hours the Organization of American States (OAS) had produced a 16-page report setting out its criticisms. It demanded the…
This article was written jointly with three young Nicaraguans, Patricia Ruiz, Winnie Narvaez, and Yorlis Luna U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently accused Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega of planning a “sham” election on November 7 and aiming to create an “authoritarian dynasty” after arrests of opposition figures ahead of the vote. Also referring to…
A few days before the Nicaraguan presidential elections on November 7, Facebook and other social media companies began closing down many of the pages used by Sandinista supporters in their campaign to re-elect President Daniel Ortega. This blatant censorship move was said to be because they had discovered “troll farms” operated by government agencies. But…
“Record numbers” of migrants are coming into the United States from Nicaragua, according to Newsweek, which blames the increase on “arbitrary arrests and human rights abuses” by the Nicaraguan government. Former Sandinista leader Sergio Ramírez, writing for El Salvador’s El Faro, claims that “repression” by President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government is causing a “dramatic growth”…
This letter, signed by solidarity, human rights, religious, labor and other organizations, has been sent to the UN Human Rights Council and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. It denounces the misrepresentation and exploitation of disputes over land in Nicaragua’s autonomous Indigenous territories for political purposes by local and international organizations which claim to represent…
Frances Haugen’s cutting accusations against her former employers, Facebook, on October 5 included references to how social media are used to provoke and coordinate violence. This happened in Nicaragua too. It’s June 2018 on a backstreet somewhere in Nicaragua. Filmed by an adult, a boy holds a toy gun to the head of his friend,…
Indigenous peoples and the rainforests that many inhabit are under threat. Everyone knows it. In Latin America especially, international NGOs like Global Witness and Frontline Defenders tell a story which seems self-evidently true: outsiders are exploiting natural resources, governments are indifferent or actively complicit, Indigenous people defend the forests and in return face expulsion or…
Ivan Acosta is Nicaragua’s minister of housing and public credit, with responsibility for key aspects of government planning. In July, he presented the country’s new “National Plan for the Fight against Poverty and for Human Development.” This builds on the achievements of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government since it returned to power in 2007 and sets out…
As elections approach in Nicaragua, there has been a spate of left-wing criticism of Daniel Ortega’s government that, to someone living in the country, seems bizarrely out of sync with what most Nicaraguans see as their pressing priorities. A string of opinion polls confirm what my day-to-day conversations tell me: that support for government policies…
This piece is translated from one by Yorlis Luna, a young Nicaraguan living in the small city of San Marcos, on the high plateau to the south of the capital, Managua. The translation inevitably loses some of the poetry of her original Spanish. Going to the popular market in one of Nicaragua’s Pacific towns is…