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September 8, 2021
From left to right: President JOH of Honduras, Vice President Biden, President Morales of Guatemala and President Sánchez Cerén of El Salvador in a 2016 meeting.
For Biden, backing a candidate for the November elections in Honduras is a choice between protecting U.S. business interests and condemning the corruption, drug trafficking, and violence that increase migration.
Of the countries in Central America’s “northern triangle,” Honduras is the one that sends the most migrants to the United States. Already this year over 32,000 Honduran migrants have been deported from the United States, including more than 2,600 children. The country’s president, Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), was supported by President Trump because he is a strongman willing to forcibly stop Honduran migrants from leaving the country. He even signed a misnamed “safe country” agreement implying that Honduras was a haven for asylum seekers. In return, Trump was willing to acquiesce in JOH’s disastrous domestic policies even though they are one of the main drivers for migrants to leave.
Continue reading “United States struggles to pick a side in upcoming Honduran elections”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras
September 8, 2021
Ivan Acosta is Nicaragua’s minister of housing and public credit, with responsibility for key aspects of government planning. In July, he presented the country’s new “National Plan for the Fight against Poverty and for Human Development.” This builds on the achievements of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government since it returned to power in 2007 and sets out how they will continue if Daniel Ortega’s government is returned at November’s elections. Ivan Acosta is currently subject to personal US sanctions, along with many other Nicaraguan government officials and their family members.
Codepinks’s Teri Mattson spoke to the minister in a Zoom call and asked him to explain the plan and its background [transaltion and editing by John Perry].
Continue reading “Nicaragua launches a new plan to fight poverty and promote human development”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua
August 29, 2021
As elections approach in Nicaragua, there has been a spate of left-wing criticism of Daniel Ortega’s government that, to someone living in the country, seems bizarrely out of sync with what most Nicaraguans see as their pressing priorities. A string of opinion polls confirm what my day-to-day conversations tell me: that support for government policies remains strong, that hardly anyone wants a return to the roadblocks and violence deployed by government opponents in 2018, and that economic recovery after the damage done then and by the pandemic and hurricanes in 2020 are much bigger priorities than any concerns about recent government action against the opposition.
The reasons for all this are not hard to find: everywhere the government is building hospitals, affordable homes, roads and schools and the country’s much prized safety has returned. Nicaragua’s economy was the least affected in Latin America by the pandemic and Covid-19 has been well handled by the country’s community-based health system.
Continue reading “Ordinary Nicaraguans should guide progressive left’s stance”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, human rights, Nicaraguan elections |
August 12, 2021
This piece is translated from one by Yorlis Luna, a young Nicaraguan living in the small city of San Marcos, on the high plateau to the south of the capital, Managua. The translation inevitably loses some of the poetry of her original Spanish.
Going to the popular market in one of Nicaragua’s Pacific towns is to feel the immense strength of the Nicaraguan people and to discover the real lives that exist behind the lies that the mass media tell about our country. I go to the market and see the stalls full of fresh vegetables and local fruits, I ask for some pieces of ginger and the young woman tells me proudly: “they are today’s, they were cut today… smell them, they are fresh!”.
Continue reading “A short interlude in one of Nicaragua’s local markets”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua |
August 8, 2021
When hurricane ETA flooded Nicaragua’s northeastern coast in November 2020, U.S. organizations like the IMF and World Bank delayed sending relief funds. (D. Membreño, EU, Flickr)
In 1985, when President Reagan declared Nicaragua “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” his words were followed by a trade blockade, a ban on commercial flights and—most seriously of all—the financing of the “Contra” war, which led to 30,000 deaths. When, 33 years later, Donald Trump made the same declaration, its effect was far more limited. Yet presumably neither president saw the absurdity in designating a country as an “extraordinary threat” when it has just six million people, is one of the poorest in the hemisphere, and has only a tiny military budget. Nor, apparently, does President Joe Biden, who has renewed the declaration and added to the sanctions.
Continue reading “Sanctions May Impoverish Nicaraguans, but Won’t Change their Vote”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaraguan elections |
July 23, 2021
Photo from the Sri Lanka Guardian
After the U.S.-Russian summit in June, there was no apparent irony in President Biden’s response to a question about electoral interference. “Let’s get this straight,” he said. “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?” But of course much of the world does take this view; by one count the United States has intervened in no fewer than 81 elections between 1946 and 2000, many of them in Latin America. Biden’s question reveals a fundamental gap in U.S. foreign policymaking: Why do its leaders appear unable to judge how U.S. actions are seen by ordinary people in the countries they affect?
Continue reading “Why U.S. Policy Toward Nicaragua Isn’t Working”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaraguan elections
July 4, 2021
This short video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) explains part of the legal basis for the actions being taken against people who have accepted $millions from the US to disrupt the coming elections, or are demanding tougher US sanctions against their own country, likely to be most damaging for the poorest sections of Nicaragua’s population.
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaraguan elections |
June 8, 2021
The US base, Soto Cano, in Honduras
Both Honduras and Nicaragua hold presidential elections in November 2021 and the US government has a strong interest in both, although for rather different reasons. Both have incumbent presidents who will either stand again or, in the case of Honduras, more likely be replaced as candidate by a successor seen as reliably committed to the same style of government. Given that both countries are economically and militarily tiny, it might be thought that Washington would be unconcerned by their internal affairs, but in reality it sees much at stake.
Continue reading “The US stake in Nicaragua and Honduras’s 2021 elections”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaraguan elections
May 24, 2021
Cristiana Chamorro (from CNN)
This article, published in the United States, questions the stance on Nicaragua taken by the US National Public Radio (NPR), which is roughly equivalent to BBC Radio in the UK.
Imagine what would happen if the US media discovered that a candidate in the mid-term elections was under investigation by the FBI for receiving money from a foreign government. Then, suppose it was one that’s hostile to the US, perhaps Syria or Iran, and that the same government was also covertly funding election coverage in, say, Fox News. How would the rest of the media respond? By claiming that the candidate’s democratic rights were under threat from the FBI? Or by expressing shock and horror at foreign interference in US elections and urging the FBI to arrest the culprits?
Continue reading “They should ask where the money comes from”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaraguan elections
May 1, 2021
Gioconda Belli at the Masaya Volcano
Gioconda Belli, the Nicaraguan writer perhaps best known for her autobiography The Country Under My Skin, has been described as ‘an icon of Latin American feminist literature’. She spoke recently of the ‘extraordinary power’ of being a woman, and that despite this power ‘women have often been relegated to a second place, one where they are only seen from the role of reproduction, pleasure and service.’ Nevertheless, she added, ‘there have been enough ground-breaking women who have been and are still breaking into lots of situations where we couldn’t have been found before.’
Continue reading “Women’s rights in Nicaragua under attack from an unlikely source”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis |
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on