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July 26, 2018
Events in Morrito, Rio San Juan, Nicaragua, July 12 2018
A national newspaper once called it a hidden treasure. The small fishing town of Morrito, on the shore of Lake Nicaragua, could hardly be a quieter place. But on July 12 it was the scene of a brutal attack that cost the lives of five of its inhabitants.
Beginning in mid-April, Nicaragua has been experiencing violent conflicts between opponents of President Daniel Ortega and government supporters. While both sides have held numerous peaceful demonstrations, both sides have also been the subject of attacks. There are conflicting accounts of how many have died so far, ranging from around 100 to well over 300. As well as the violence, a propaganda war is taking place, in the local press, in the international press and – especially – in social media. Events in Morrito provide a case study of the distorted messages and downright lies that are now flourishing.
Continue reading “Anatomy of a massacre”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis |
July 24, 2018
During the three months of political crisis in Nicaragua, The Guardian has produced some twenty reports, including a number from Managua and two from Masaya, a city that for several weeks was effectively under opposition control. Unfortunately, its coverage has been seriously unbalanced. A group of us based in Nicaragua, the US and the UK decided to compile an international protest letter to send to The Guardian’s editor. The letter (below) was signed by a number of activists but also by some well-known journalists such as Max Blumenthal, Greg Grandin, Abby Martin and Patricia Villegas (of Telesur) and others. The only reply was a brief response from the international news editor, which said that he was “firmly of the view that the Guardian’s coverage has been accurate and fair.”
Continue reading “A letter to The Guardian”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Masaya, Nicaragua crisis |
June 28, 2018
The role of the police in Nicaragua’s current crisis is a key one. From the opposition standpoint, they are the source of most if not all the violence. Yet in practice, ever since the national dialogue began in response to the demonstrations and deaths in mid-April, the police have been operating under severe constraints. Here are some examples.
Continue reading “Why are the police not able to control the violence in Nicaragua?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua crisis |
June 25, 2018
A masked protester shoots off a homemade mortar in the Monimbó neighborhood of Masaya, June 2, 2018. (AP Photo / Esteban Felix)
If there’s no negotiated peace with a return to order, the conflict could spin out of control, bringing the chronic violence and insecurity of the country’s northern neighbours.
In a video clip, a young boy stands at a makeshift barricade across a road. He holds a toy gun to the head of his friend. Off camera, an adult asks, “What are you going to do?” “We’ll kill him and leave him naked,” replies the boy. The adults laugh. This scene from Nicaragua, filmed at one of the hundreds of towns paralyzed by street protests, epitomizes the violence that has taken hold since April 18. Before that date, local media proudly quoted figures showing that Nicaragua had become the safest country in Central America. But the two months since then have seen more than 170 violent deaths, thousands injured, and scores of public buildings burned down or ransacked.
Continue reading “After 2 Months of Unrest, Nicaragua Is at a Fateful Crossroads”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Masaya, Nicaragua crisis |
June 7, 2018
A barricade in Masaya. Photo: Reuters.
Tom Ricker of the Quixote Center in Maryland interviewed me about the current situation in Masaya (June 2018). Here is what I said.
There has been a tremendous amount of violence in Masaya over the last week. Several people have been killed, a school was set on fire, and people assumed to be supporters of the government have been attacked, or houses set aflame. What have you been seeing and hearing from friends in the area?
Until mid-April, Masaya was a peaceful city (and Nicaragua the most peaceful country in Central America). All that changed when police responded violently to a student protest in Managua. This awoke a lot of resentment in Masaya against the government, including from its previous supporters, and barricades appeared in the streets. There were pitched battles between pro- and anti-government groups. Even demonstrations calling for an end to violence (like one I took part in on Sunday May 6) were attacked.
Since then the violence has become far worse. Ransacking of businesses (with people running off with TV sets and motor bikes), destruction of public buildings (including the tourist market) and burning down the houses of Sandinista sympathisers have become a nightly occurrence. We are in the bizarre situation where Masaya’s people (for the most part) are destroying their own city.
Continue reading “An interview about the situation in Masaya”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Masaya, Nicaragua crisis |
May 30, 2018
The problems experienced by the Windrush generation highlight the effects of the “hostile environment” created by Theresa May when she was home secretary. Anyone needing rented housing is affected, alongside those going to hospital or applying for a job or bank account. Social housing applicants have long had to comply with eligibility rules but landlords in England now have to check their right to rent. Rough sleepers and those in poor-quality rented accommodation can be affected by Home Office enforcement action. How can social landlords respond? Here are seven tips.
First, it’s vital that housing staff know the rules or can get expert guidance. We at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) have received reports of people being told they are not eligible for social housing because (for example) they are EU nationals or have limited leave to remain. Many people in these groups are eligible and will continue to be after Brexit. You can find all the rules on the Housing Rights website run by the CIH and BME National. Remember that there may be different rules for housing allocations, homelessness and benefits.
Continue reading “The hostile environment: what social landlords need to know”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: private rented sector, migration policy, immigration checks, destitution, right to rent |
May 22, 2018
When Spanish ships first reached the Americas in 1492, they had no idea of the size of the lands on which they’d set foot, nor did they realise that they were twin continents in their own right. Columbus died believing he’d found an alternative route to the ‘Indies’, because although the early explorers new the world was a sphere, they thought it was much smaller than it turned out to be. Only eight years after Columbus’s first landing, the mouth of the Amazon was discovered, and the river’s size could be guessed by the extent of the ‘sweet water’ that it produced, changing the colour of the Atlantic Ocean across more than two million square kilometres. But the Amazon basin remained unknown to Europeans for 50 more years, and then its discovery was an accident.
It is commonly supposed that before the Conquest the Americas were sparsely inhabited. Yet Charles Mann argues in the book that in the US was called ‘1491’, that it is possible that the total population at the time was actually greater than Europe’s. There is an ongoing controversy about this, not least because only a few of the more advanced civilisations left written records and these are not easily decoded. Part of the controversy centres on an area – the Amazon – where there were no written records at all and few if any permanent structures. John Hemmings, in ‘Tree of Rivers’, judges there to have been 4-5 million people in the Amazon basin before the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived, pitching his estimate between the extremes of those that have been put forward by different scientists.
Continue reading “River of Darkness”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: Ecuador, Brazil, Amazon river |
May 2, 2018
Nicaragua had a record 1.8 million tourists last year. It’s a beautiful country, and in 2017 it officially became the safest in Central America. But after three days of political violence last month, one of the few certainties in 2018 is that it will lose both records. More than 40 people died in the protests, ostensibly over government social security reforms.
Crises in social security funding are hardly unique to Nicaragua, where poor management of investments and a growing elderly population have led to a growing shortfall. However, unlike in neighbouring Honduras, no one suggests the president has simply robbed the money. Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government proposed a rise in employer contributions, a smaller one in employee payments and a 5% cut in pensions (offset by stronger health care entitlements). The employers’ federation, COSEP, opposed to paying more and instead offering more drastic cuts, called for protests. University students obliged. The government dispatched anti-riot police who (having never done so before) fired live rounds.
Continue reading “After Ortega?”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Masaya, Nicaragua crisis |
April 28, 2018
Jeremy Corbyn launched Labour’s affordable housing green paper last Thursday, promising one million new homes over ten years of which a significant number would be for social rent. The ambition was clear: funding will be restored to the level when Labour last held office, and councils will once again become “major deliverers” of social housing. This would contrast with recent Conservative governments which Corbyn said “have made it their mission to eliminate it”. The only time England has built enough housing, he added, was when councils have stepped in to do it.
Shadow housing minister John Healey was at pains to point out that housing associations would also retain a big role. And it’s clear they will need to, as one of the unanswered questions is how councils will build up the development capacity that has been depleted over the last eight years. As one participant said in discussion afterwards, the skills no longer exist in many local authorities and if many start new build programmes for the first time in years, they will all be competing for the same scarce skills such as architects and quantity surveyors.
Continue reading “Encouraging messages, now Labour must work on the detail”
Category: Housing | Tags: council housing, borrowing rules, housing investment, housing policy, rents, housing associations |
April 17, 2018
In response to demands that he produce the evidence for his claim that immigration is driving up house prices, the housing minister has now published the calculations. Do they back up his argument?
First, it must be said that researching the drivers of house price increases is fraught with difficulty as there are so many factors involved – not least a degree of sometimes irrational human behaviour given that houses are not merely places to live in but for many are an investment, a source of income or bought in order to speculate on future prices. Especially in the past few years, would-be owner-occupiers have been operating in the same market as a rapidly expanding private rented sector. So if projecting the demand for housing in terms of the number of units is a challenge, translating that into effects on house prices is much more so.
What strikes the reader immediately about the new calculation is its simplicity. The original piece of work produced what was really a rule-of-thumb relationship between household growth and house prices: if the former increases by 1%, the latter will go up by 2%. The context – the years up to 2008 when the research was published – was a period of very strong house price growth.
Continue reading “Raab’s use of outdated and oversimplified evidence is foolhardy”
Category: Housing, Migration | Tags: migration statistics, housing market |
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on