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May 31, 2020
Members of the 300-strong sanitation squad who work for the Managua city council, www.el19digital.com
Every country in the world is trying to balance its fight against the virus with the need to have a functioning economy, and there is plenty of debate about what the balance should be. The world’s poorer countries face the toughest challenge, because a high proportion of their populations engage in a daily struggle to earn enough to eat, whether in small businesses or the informal economy. In Nicaragua, around 80% of people make their living in this way.[1]
Continue reading “Nicaragua battles COVID-19 and a Disinformation Campaign”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, coronavirus |
May 2, 2020
A government worker cleans a market in Managua to combat the coronavirus. Carlos Cortez, El19
“He’s not a doctor, I don’t think.” Trump had just finished a phone call with Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), the de facto president of Honduras who runs a narco-state. On April 30, JOH was indirectly implicated in drug and murder charges by the US Justice Department in a case against a former chief police officer. This is merely the latest of several cases in which he is alleged to be involved, that include drug trafficking and money laundering, as well as protection of drug dealers. The criminal charges have also affected his close family, among them his brother, including connections of both siblings with famous narco-dealer El Chapo. His sister, Hilda Hernández, was also under investigation in Honduras for embezzlement of public funds, at the time she died in a helicopter accident.
Continue reading “COVID-19 as a pretext for repression”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, drugs, US intervention, El Salvador, panama, coronavirus
May 2, 2020
Nicaragua’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is the subject of correspondence in the medical journal, The Lancet. A letter from 13 health professionals, based in the USA (except for one in Costa Rica), criticised the Nicaraguan government’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic as ‘careless’ and ‘perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date’. My response is reproduced here. They then replied, but did not address most of the key points I made in examining their original arguments. They quote the Pan-American Health Organisation as criticising Nicaragua – but while there is specific disagreement on the advisability of a national ‘lockdown’, the Nicaraguan government has been working closely with the PAHO (part of the World Health Orgainsation) since a joint commission was established to confront the epidemic on January 30, when it was one of the first countries outside Asia to recognise the potential impact of the virus.
Continue reading “‘Love in the time of COVID-19’ – a cynical analysis of Nicaragua’s efforts to combat the epidemic”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, coronavirus
April 18, 2020
A friend in Managua, Paul Baker, holds up one of the leaflets his family was given after a visit by a health brigade
The right-wing opposition in Nicaragua, having failed in their attempted coup in 2018, still looks at any potential crisis as a new opportunity to attack the Sandinista government. Their latest chance, of course, arrived with the coronavirus pandemic. Even though the virus has barely hit the country yet, the government is under attack. The international media are lapping up opposition propaganda and ignoring or disparaging the government’s efforts to deal with the coming crisis, even though preparations began before those in many other countries.
Continue reading ““Never let a good crisis go to waste””
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, coronavirus
March 24, 2020
Nicaraguan border post Photo: Orlando Miranda, from www.el19digital.com
The coronavirus epidemic is still in its early stages in Central America but it has already put a focus on Costa Rica’s dependency on workers from Nicaragua. At any one time there are around 400,000 Nicaraguans working in the neighbouring country, especially doing building work, domestic work, as security guards or in agriculture. Given that a large proportion are undocumented, the real figure could be much higher, a very significant addition to Costa Rica’s population of under five million people. Yet the Vice-President of Costa Rica, Epsy Campbell, made a call this month to employers to persuade their Nicaraguan workers to stay put over the coming Easter holidays when otherwise they might leave to see their families. She was clearly worried about the impact on Costa Rica’s economy if workers left the country and were unable to return because of the restrictions at the border resulting from the coronavirus epidemic.
Continue reading “As the coronavirus strikes, Nicaraguans in Costa Rica are urged to stay”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Nicaragua crisis, coronavirus
March 10, 2020
March 11 is Budget day, and the housing lobby is right to feel anxious about what it will reveal. Despite some increases in funding by the last government, the current affordable homes programme is worth just £1.5 billion a year. In real terms it’s only one third of what it was a decade ago. Surely this tiny sum can’t be squeezed any further?
Continue reading “The housing sector is right to feel anxious about tomorrow’s Budget”
Category: Housing | Tags: housing finance, housing investment
February 19, 2020
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: Insight Crime analysed homicide levels across Latin America in 2019 and showed that only three countries were safer than Nicaragua in the whole continent. What’s more, three of its neighbours, the ‘northern triangle’ of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, were all among the worst countries. They also have high levels of fatal violence against women. In the first 24 days of 2020, for example, 27 Honduran women met violent deaths, while next-door Nicaragua continues to have one of the lowest levels of femicide in Latin America.
Continue reading “A headline you won’t read”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, human rights |
February 19, 2020
Members of the Embassy Protection Collective before they were evicted (EFE)
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 those who were carrying them out.
Donald Trump withdrew recognition from Nicolás Maduro’s government on 24 January 2019, recognising instead the self-declared ‘interim president’ of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó. Maduro responded by closing the Washington embassy and ordering the US mission to leave Caracas. Five days later, Guaidó appointed Carlos Vecchio as his ‘US ambassador’, but he couldn’t move into the embassy because it was still occupied by Maduro officials. The State Department revoked their visas and told them to leave by 25 April.
Continue reading “Whose embassy?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Venezuela |
January 26, 2020
A mural showing Archbishop Oscar Romero
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 determined to stop what it saw as communism creeping through these countries, towards its southern border. Some $4 billion was spent in bolstering the efforts of El Salvador’s army to suppress the revolutionary forces of the FMLN who threatened to follow in Nicaragua’s footsteps.
Continue reading “Murder in El Salvador”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: US intervention, Guatemala, El Salvador |
December 22, 2019
Seymour Hersh, 1972: Wally McNamee/Corbis, Getty Images
The title of Seymour Hersh’s memoir is simply Reporter. It’s what he did and what he does: dig out and report important facts that need to be seen in the daylight, no matter how much the CIA, a US vice-president or secretary of state, or a mafia boss, may want to keep them hidden. Hersh, as the editor of the New Yorker says on the book’s cover, is ‘quite simply the greatest investigative journalist of his era’.
Continue reading “The slow death of investigative journalism”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, El Salvador, Nicaragua crisis
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on