One of the parties contesting Sunday’s election in Honduras has seen 18 of its activists murdered in the last 18 months. The LIBRE party’s presidential candidate is Xiomara Castro, the wife of the former president Manuel Zelaya, who was deposed in the military coup of July 2009. Despite the intimidation, LIBRE shows signs of breaking…
Last week the local school celebrated completion of about $80,000 worth of work to totally refurbish its two buildings and provide a proper outside play and assembly area. The school, a basic structure originally built by local organisation MASINFA in 1993, with funding from Masaya’s twin city of Nijmegen in Holland, was badly in need…
In recent stories in the Nicaragua Dispatch, Nicaragua has been described as a renewable energy paradise and as ranking third in the Latin America renewables market. But neither story mentions what has become Nicaragua’s forgotten resource: solar energy. Perhaps this is not surprising as the government’s own assessments of its achievement in moving away from…
Shangri-La and El Dorado: hoped-for earthly utopias, searched for but never quite found. Last month offered glimpses of the real stories of both, through the debut of the restored version of John Noel’s 1924 film The Epic of Everest and the British Museum’s exhibition Beyond El Dorado. Though separated by almost 400 years, the searches…
In the 1980s, perhaps in reaction against the suffocating atmosphere of Thatcher’s Britain, there was a tremendous appetite for knowledge about and if possible direct contact with inspiring political and social movements in other countries. Many seemed to offer hope for the kind of progressive change that no longer seemed possible in the UK. With…
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the coup that toppled Salvador Allende. There are still many unresolved crimes from his period in power. Twenty years ago, I spent a week working on a housing project in one of Santiago’s poorest barrios. It was only three years since Pinochet had left office; people guardedly expressed a…
The Robber of Memories by Michael Jacobs, Granta, 2012. Colombia’s Magdalena River could claim to be the second most important in South America after the Amazon. In some ways it’s more important, if a judgement hinges on the Spanish conquest and its aftermath, since the Magdalena allowed the invaders to reach the Andean regions where…
Proyecto Sol (‘Project Sun’) has been installing solar panels in remote rural communities for nine years. It’s about to start a new phase in the community known simply as ‘Sector 80’, an isolated area to the north of Lake Nicaragua. This community, which had no electricity at all and still has no water supply, received…