Richard Sieff is a member of the Leicester-Masaya Link Group who joined as a result of visiting Nicaragua through Raleigh International. In this guest blog, he writes about his experiences and his commitment to take ‘Action at Home’. ‘Action at Home’ – I knew the requirement of this vital component of the International Citizen Service programme: raise awareness…
A review of ‘The Invention of Nature’ by Andrea Wulf On 16 July 1799 a revolutionary thinker arrived in Latin America. Unlike most Europeans who had preceded him to the continent, he didn’t believe in slavery and he promoted the rights of indigenous people. He saw mining for gold and silver for the exploitation it…
Alan Rabinowitz begins his compelling story of the jaguar with two experiences of meeting one. The first was in the zoo, as a child. The second, more than two decades later, is set in Belize, a key part of the ‘Jaguar Corridor’ that Rabinowitz has fought to preserve through Mesoamerica and into the northern parts…
Several books on my recent reading pile might broadly be categorised as being about ‘exiles’, and few exiled people have been in a worse position than those who left their homelands to avoid the Central American guerilla wars of the 1980s. This applied especially to combatants, but almost equally at risk were left-wing sympathisers or…
According to the campaign group Global Witness, 116 environmental activists were killed in 2014, a fifth more than the year before. Many of them were leaders of indigenous communities defending their land. The most dangerous place for environmental campaigners is Honduras, where 101 were reported killed between 2010 and 2014. The chief activist of the…
Would you visit a country if you were warned to ‘exercise a high degree of caution’ because ‘armed violence’ is very common? Having lived in Nicaragua for 13 peaceful years, I haven’t given a lot of thought to the travel advice to visitors issued by Britain’s Foreign Office or by other governments. But my attention…
Thawing relations between the United States and Cuba have brought an upsurge in Cubans trying to leave the island. They’re worried that they may lose their favourable US immigration status, becoming no more welcome than any other Latino who fancies life in the US. Since 1995, the ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy has deterred people…
This story takes an unusual premise, adds some excellent research, and results in a very readable and sympathetic novel which convincingly describes one of the mosy bizarre episodes in the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The long walk undertaken by the Spanish adventurer Cabeza de Vaca is already chronicled (and a contemporary description forms a…
So much has been written about the Spanish conquest of Latin America that it has become difficult to find new approaches to the topic. Hugh Thomas’s definitive history of the invasion of Mexico, now called simply Conquest, is 20 years old, but his monumental history of the Spanish monarchy is much more recent, and volume…