During the three months of political crisis in Nicaragua, The Guardian has produced some twenty reports, including a number from Managua and two from Masaya, a city that for several weeks was effectively under opposition control. Unfortunately, its coverage has been seriously unbalanced. A group of us based in Nicaragua, the US and the UK…
The role of the police in Nicaragua’s current crisis is a key one. From the opposition standpoint, they are the source of most if not all the violence. Yet in practice, ever since the national dialogue began in response to the demonstrations and deaths in mid-April, the police have been operating under severe constraints. Here…
If there’s no negotiated peace with a return to order, the conflict could spin out of control, bringing the chronic violence and insecurity of the country’s northern neighbours. In a video clip, a young boy stands at a makeshift barricade across a road. He holds a toy gun to the head of his friend. Off…
Tom Ricker of the Quixote Center in Maryland interviewed me about the current situation in Masaya (June 2018). Here is what I said. There has been a tremendous amount of violence in Masaya over the last week. Several people have been killed, a school was set on fire, and people assumed to be supporters of…
When Spanish ships first reached the Americas in 1492, they had no idea of the size of the lands on which they’d set foot, nor did they realise that they were twin continents in their own right. Columbus died believing he’d found an alternative route to the ‘Indies’, because although the early explorers new the…
Yesterday (Sunday 6 May 2018) I travelled with a ‘peace caravan’ organised by the local FSLN in Masaya, to respond to the violent protests by opposition groups. I’ll try to report objectively what happened. Note: this article had to be removed soon after it was posted, because of threats of violence to my family. I…
Nicaragua had a record 1.8 million tourists last year. It’s a beautiful country, and in 2017 it officially became the safest in Central America. But after three days of political violence last month, one of the few certainties in 2018 is that it will lose both records. More than 40 people died in the protests,…
On 9 April 1948, the Colombian politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán stepped out of his office with a group of friends to walk to Bogotá’s Hotel Continental for lunch. An assassin confronted him in the street and shot him three times in the face and chest. He died shortly afterwards. His supporters caught the 20-year-old culprit,…
A review of Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement by Graham Greene. For anyone interested in the politics of Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, which of course also requires an interest in the US intervention in the isthmus that intensified during the later stages of the Cold War, this…