The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was an inspiration to many on the left in the 1980s. Forty-one years later, it still urgently needs and deserves our support. The case for doing so is a very strong one. After the US-inspired “Contra war” led to electoral defeat for the Sandinistas in 1990, the country endured 16…
A new book, The Revolution Won’t Be Stopped: Nicaragua Advances Despite US Unconventional Warfare, is published this month to celebrate the 41st anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. An extract below deals with how the media have treated Nicaragua in 2019 and the first part of 2020. Look at the media in 2019 and the first…
A report issued at the end of May repeats allegations of government repression in Nicaragua during violent protests in 2018. It was commissioned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a body of the Organization of American States (OAS), and revives arguments that the Sandinista government is violating human rights. It purports to provide…
“They build dams and kill people.” These words, spoken by a witness when the murderers of environmental defender Berta Cáceres were brought to trial in Honduras, describe Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA), the company whose dam project Berta opposed. DESA was created in May 2009 solely to build the Agua Zarca hydroelectric scheme, using the waters…
Every country in the world is trying to balance its fight against the virus with the need to have a functioning economy, and there is plenty of debate about what the balance should be. The world’s poorer countries face the toughest challenge, because a high proportion of their populations engage in a daily struggle to…
“He’s not a doctor, I don’t think.” Trump had just finished a phone call with Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), the de facto president of Honduras who runs a narco-state. On April 30, JOH was indirectly implicated in drug and murder charges by the US Justice Department in a case against a former chief police officer. This…
Nicaragua’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is the subject of correspondence in the medical journal, The Lancet. A letter from 13 health professionals, based in the USA (except for one in Costa Rica), criticised the Nicaraguan government’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic as ‘careless’ and ‘perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world…
The right-wing opposition in Nicaragua, having failed in their attempted coup in 2018, still looks at any potential crisis as a new opportunity to attack the Sandinista government. Their latest chance, of course, arrived with the coronavirus pandemic. Even though the virus has barely hit the country yet, the government is under attack. The international…
The coronavirus epidemic is still in its early stages in Central America but it has already put a focus on Costa Rica’s dependency on workers from Nicaragua. At any one time there are around 400,000 Nicaraguans working in the neighbouring country, especially doing building work, domestic work, as security guards or in agriculture. Given that…