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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
December 6, 2019
All the main parties in the 2019 election are putting forward energy efficiency measures in some form. CIH’s John Perry and Orbit’s Christoph Sinn look at how the sector responds and whether it can frame an ambitious yet realistic programme and do its part in tackling the climate emergency.
Continue reading “It’s a do or die moment”
Category: Housing, Energy and the environment | Tags: housing investment, climate change, energy efficiency
October 27, 2019
Some of the local ‘human rights’ organisations in Nicaragua, which received foreign funding and operated as propaganda vehicles against the government, lost their legal status earlier this year. One of the these was CENIDH, run by Vilma Nuñez. Several of the staff, including a director, Gonzalo Carrión, left in February to set up a new body in Costa Rica, the Colectivo de Derechos Humanos Nicaragua Nunca Más, allegedly using money that belongs to CENIDH (The Grayzone has reported more widely on The Rise and Fall of Nicaragua’s ‘Human Rights’ Organisations and the recent conflicts within them).
Nicaragua Nunca Más is clearly well-resourced, as it now has an office in San Jose, publishes elaborately produced reports, and is able to present its arguments and hold meetings with the United Nations, the Organisation of American States (OAS), the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights (IACHR), and other international bodies. Although there is nothing on its website to indicate where this money comes from, as was also the case with CENIDH, its Facebook page suggests it gets support from the UK embassy in Costa Rica and other sources. Nicaragua Nunca Más enjoys the collaboration of the Costa Rican government, which regularly condemns Nicaragua despite having its own considerable human rights issues.
Continue reading “‘Human rights’ propaganda against Nicaragua comes from Costa Rica”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Nicaragua crisis
October 23, 2019
Court sketch of witnesses in the trial of Tony Hernández (The Limited Times)
Donald Trump said last year that migrant caravans, mainly of Hondurans, were coming to the US from ‘shithole countries’. But now he says that the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, is doing a ‘fantastic job’. Trump and JOH recently reached an agreement declaring Honduras to be a ‘safe place’ for asylum seekers trying to reach the US.
JOH also promised to help the US tackle transnational criminal organisations. He’s well placed to do this. Last November, his brother Tony was arrested in Miami and accused of drug trafficking and possessing illegal weapons. At his trial in New York, which concluded last week, the jury found Tony Hernández guilty. He faces at least 30 years in prison for bringing 200,000 kilos of cocaine into the US between 2004 and 2018, in packets often stamped with his own initials.
Continue reading “The Hernández Brothers”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Honduras, drugs, US intervention
September 18, 2019
It was only in June that then Home Secretary Sajid Javid apologised for the impact that his department’s “hostile environment” policies had on the Windrush generation, many of whom lost their homes and jobs or were even deported from the UK. His promised review of the policy is incomplete, however, and is one of the tasks facing new minister Priti Patel. She supported the tough immigration measures that were brought in originally by Theresa May, but can she now learn the lessons from the Windrush scandal and make the department’s policies less hostile?
Continue reading “The “right to rent” is discriminatory – enough is enough”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: private rented sector, right to rent
August 30, 2019
Photo: Getty
Last week’s report suggesting supply is not the answer to the housing crisis is just the latest in a series to make this claim, but it remains misleading.
Continue reading “The Tony Blair Institute is wrong – we do need to build more homes to solve the housing crisis”
Category: Housing | Tags: housing policy, housing market
August 26, 2019
In their hunger for US funding, Nicaraguan “human rights” NGO’s inflated the death toll during last year’s coup. Today, these groups are in a state of complete disarray.
Continue reading “Counting deaths for dollars: the rise and fall of Nicaragua’s ‘human rights’ organizations”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Nicaragua crisis
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on