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May 15, 2023
John Perry and Dan Kovalik
Five years ago, Nicaragua was subject to a violent insurrection that lasted from April through July, 2018. In the second of four articles, we look at how initial support for the coup relied on widespread use of social media.
The “groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua was laid down months and years before the coup attempt began, as our first article explained. But the coup could only succeed if it mobilized sufficient people into demanding that President Daniel Ortega should resign. How was this to be done, with polls showing his government had some 80% support in a country that had enjoyed several years of prosperity and social development?
Continue reading “How “peaceful protests” in Nicaragua became an attempted coup”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, media, Nicaragua crisis
April 29, 2023
Reviewed by John Perry and Jill Clark-Gollub
The latest book by labor and human rights attorney, Daniel Kovalik, Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance (2023, Clarity Press, 292 pages), is a worthy addition to the author’s collection of works on countries targeted by US imperialism, such as Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. While giving readers a thoughtful and much fuller picture than one can glean from the corporate media, this volume tells an engaging tale based on personal experience and extensive research.
Continue reading “Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention & Resistance, by Daniel Kovalik”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaragua crisis, Nicaraguan elections
April 23, 2023
ChatGPT is a powerful AI chatbot that is as easy to use as Google and provides more direct answers to users’ questions. Ask it anything you like, and you will receive an answer that sounds like it was written by a human, based on knowledge and writing skills gained from massive amounts of data from across the internet. Because of its growing popularity, there are already political questions about it, for example assertions that it has a left-wing bias or concerns about privacy issues, which have led to the bot being banned in Italy just this month. It is already banned in China and Russia.
Continue reading “Should we be concerned about what ChatGPT “thinks” about Latin America?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, US intervention, media, Guatemala, chile
April 13, 2023
Five years ago, Nicaragua was subject to a violent attempted coup that lasted from April through July, 2018. In the first of four articles, Dan Kovalik and John Perry look at how it was planned and how it started.
In the first few months of 2018, Nicaragua hardly appeared to be a strong candidate for an attempted coup. Daniel Ortega’s government had an 80 per cent approval rating in a poll a few months earlier. There had been eight years of continuous economic growth, during which the country achieved 90 per cent food sovereignty and cut hunger by 40 per cent (according to the UN’s global hunger index). In the decade since Ortega had been re-elected to the presidency, his government had rebuilt public health and education services, repaved the country’s roads and established a reliable, virtually nationwide electricity supply, based largely on renewable sources. It was hardly surprising that the Sandinista government had increased its vote share in three successive elections. Even the international media, though hostile towards Daniel Ortega, had to concede that he had “cemented popular support among poorer Nicaraguans” (The Guardian) and that “Many poor people who receive housing and other government benefits support him” (The New York Times).
Continue reading “Five years ago in Nicaragua: a coup attempt begins”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaragua crisis, human rights
April 2, 2023
While the United States pays little regard to the human rights of many of its own citizens, it manifests intense interest in those of countries that it regards as its enemies. Nicaragua, designated by both Trump and Biden as a “strategic threat,” is seen as one of those enemies. Of the countries selected for their own annual human rights assessment by the U.S. State Department, Nicaragua merited special attention in 2022, with a 43-page report compared with, for example, only a 36-page analysis of neighboring El Salvador, where 66,000 people have been subject to mass arrests in the past year. This is part of a highly selective approach in which human rights violations by U.S. allies are downplayed or ignored.
Continue reading “The United Nations is being used by the U.S. in its propaganda war against Nicaragua”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Nicaragua crisis, human rights, Nicaragua
March 31, 2023
Alfred de Zayas, former UN Independent Expert on International Order, has joined other human rights specialists in condemning an “expert” report on Nicaragua published on March 2nd as being unprofessional, biased, incomplete and concocted to justify further coercive sanctions that will damage Nicaragua’s economy. Such unilateral coercive measures have been condemned by the General Assembly year after year, most recently in Resolution 77/214 of December 2022 and by the Human Rights Council in Resolution 49/6.
Continue reading “Human rights experts call for withdrawal of biased UN report on Nicaragua”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, human rights
March 2, 2023
Sandinistas march in Masaya after the ‘political prisoners’ had left the country
“Nicaragua Frees Hundreds of Political Prisoners to the United States,” the New York Times reported. In an unexpected move on February 9, the Nicaraguan government deported to the United States 222 people who were in prison, and moved to strip them of their citizenship. The prisoners had been convicted of various crimes, including terrorism, conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected government, requesting the United States to intervene in Nicaragua, economic damage and threatening the country’s stability, most relating to the violent coup attempt in 2018 and its aftermath.
Continue reading “Nicaragua’s ‘Political Prisoners’ Would Be Criminals by US Standards”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Nicaragua, media |
January 27, 2023
After Harry Dunn was killed by a car that emerged from a US base in Northamptonshire on 27 August 2019, the driver, Anne Sacoolas, claimed diplomatic immunity and within three weeks was whisked out of the country on a US military aircraft, with the British police only being informed after she’d left. Sacoolas eventually appeared by video at the Old Bailey last month, but is unlikely to serve the suspended sentence she received. The US government refused an extradition request to return her to the UK to face trial, even though her diplomatic immunity arose from a legal ‘anomaly’ that has now been closed.
Continue reading “Diplomatic immunity”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Venezuela |
January 10, 2023
A review of the report Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy, edited by Sara Flounders for the Sanctions Kill campaign and published by World View Forum.
Sanctions imposed without United Nations endorsement are illegal. That is why they could be legally imposed on South Africa by a resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1962, but are unlawful when imposed by one government, often with selected allies, against any other country, for whatever reason. Known correctly as “unilateral coercive measures,” such actions are not only contrary to international law in themselves, but may lead to other breaches of the law if their effects are so severe as to become “crimes against humanity.”
Continue reading “Sanctions: A Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela
December 23, 2022
Children play by the fence on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border
After two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, four times as many undocumented migrants are trying to cross the border into the United States, and he’s getting desperate to explain away the increase. In September, the administration discovered a new narrative: that migrants are fleeing “communism.”
Continue reading “Washington blames record migration on ‘communism’ when the causes are closer to home”
Category: Migration, Latin America | Tags: migration, US intervention, Nicaragua
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on