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…
Despite the violent protests of a year ago, Managua has largely returned to normal. While never the most attractive capital city in Latin America, it remains one of the safest. There are more police on the streets than there were before last year’s violence, but most people find that reassuring. A recent opinion poll shows…
A reflection on Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the rise of the new imperialism, by Greg Grandin, published in 2006 and updated in 2010. So many books have been written about US intervention in Latin America that, when this one was published a decade ago, it might easily have been overlooked. Grandin’s…
Hawks in the Trump administration have their sights set on regime change, not because of freedom or democracy, but to ‘settle historic scores.’ It’s been almost 200 years since the US declared that it would allow no more European colonies in the western hemisphere. A 100 years later this was twisted into a declaration that…
A new online reader on the Nicaragua crisis, Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?, was published in May 2019. Here is one of the articles, which focuses on the role played by social media and the alarming lack of balance both in Nicaragua’s corporate media and in the international press. It makes use of material…
In 2018 Amnesty International produced two reports on Nicaragua, accusing the Nicaraguan government of ‘a strategy of indiscriminate repression’. The context was violent protests which broke out in April last year and ended last July. The Nicaraguan government was accused by AI of using ‘arbitrary detention’ and ‘excessive, disproportionate and unnecessary force’ in dealing with…
A review of a book by George Lambie. Those who love Cuba live in fear that what seems an inevitable future change towards a more market-oriented economy will sweep away all that is good about the country – its excellent health system, the absence of extreme poverty, its schools, its largely crime-free streets and the…
A fraudulent election one year ago gave Juan Orlando Hernández a second term as president of Honduras. The protests that followed were violently repressed. By the year’s end, 126 demonstrations had been held, leaving 30 people dead, 232 injured and more than 1000 in jail. But on 22 December 2017 the US government congratulated Hernández…
by Nan McCurdy There has been a great deal of inaccurate and biased reporting about Nicaragua written in support of regime change and presenting a false narrative of what occurred in the Nicaraguan uprising. The article below is about a self-trained reporter, Carl David Goette-Luciak, who was the source of consistently biased reporting which had…