Here’s a headline you won’t see: Nicaragua is at peace. After the violent attempt to overthrow the government in 2018, which cost at least 200 lives, the country has largely returned to the tranquillity it enjoyed before. This is not only the impression that any visitor to Nicaragua will receive, it is confirmed by statistics:…
Under the 1961 Vienna Convention, foreign embassies are ‘inviolable’: the host country’s officials have a ‘special duty’ to protect them and can’t enter without permission. When the Venezuelan embassy in Washington DC was besieged last summer, the National Lawyers Guild said that the US government had flouted the convention by condoning the attacks and protecting…
A review of ‘November’ by Jorge Galán El Salvador is the smallest country in mainland Latin America – only the size of Wales. But in the 1980s El Salvador and its neighbours, Honduras and Guatemala, had an unlooked-for strategic significance. After the success of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, the United States was…
Some of the local ‘human rights’ organisations in Nicaragua, which received foreign funding and operated as propaganda vehicles against the government, lost their legal status earlier this year. One of the these was CENIDH, run by Vilma Nuñez. Several of the staff, including a director, Gonzalo Carrión, left in February to set up a new…
Donald Trump said last year that migrant caravans, mainly of Hondurans, were coming to the US from ‘shithole countries’. But now he says that the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, is doing a ‘fantastic job’. Trump and JOH recently reached an agreement declaring Honduras to be a ‘safe place’ for asylum seekers trying to reach the US….
This week is the launch of the Spanish edition of the ebook about last year’s events in Nicaragua. The launch coincides with the 40th anniversary of the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship on 19 July 1979. Here is a review of the book by Roger Stoll. The English version of Live from Nicaragua is offered…
A deadly arson attack during last year’s regime change attempt was blamed on Nicaragua’s government by everyone from the US State Department to The New York Times and The Guardian. New information has raised serious doubts about the official story, highlighting the wider campaign of misinformation waged by US and UK media.
In February the Sandinista government resumed a “national dialogue” with the opposition, re-establishing a forum to resolve political conflict in the country after the previous dialogue fell apart during last year’s violence. In the new negotiations, the opposition Civic Alliance’s key demand has been the release of those who were imprisoned for crimes committed during…