When armed Ecuadorian police gathered outside the Mexican embassy in Quito last Friday evening, a casual observer might have thought they were there to protect it. Instead, they launched an attack: brandishing assault rifles, police climbed the walls, entered the building by force and kidnapped Ecuador’s former vice-president, Jorge Glas, who had that day been…
When the United Nations sets up a “commission of inquiry,” it can result in a powerful analysis of violations of human rights law, such as the one appointed in 2021 to examine Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and its Apartheid practices. But other commissions can become political platforms aimed at demonizing a particular government…
Prosecutors in New York this month claimed they had cracked ‘the largest drug trafficking conspiracy in the world’. While it lasted, more than four hundred tons of cocaine were shipped to the United States from clandestine airstrips in Honduras by characters with aliases such as ‘The Tiger’ and ‘El Porky’. Million-dollar bribes were paid to…
Why do United Nations’ human rights bodies focus on some countries, but not others? Why do organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International appear to ignore important evidence presented to them? And why do the media repeat stories of human rights abuses without questioning their veracity?
Is it true that 50% of Nicaraguans want to leave their country owing to a climate of repression and economic decline, supposedly resulting from socialist policies? This was the allegation in a report published by AmericasBarometer, a research agency based at Vanderbilt University, which failed to note that its previous forecast, that 30% of Nicaraguans…
Three previous articles described the attempted coup in Nicaragua in 2018, and how public support grew initially but then waned. This final article, covering the period from mid-July to the present day, shows how the coup was defeated and what happened in the aftermath. By July 2018, three months of violence – over 200 deaths…
On the fifth anniversary of the 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua, conflicting accounts of the violence and killings still persist. The mainstream media has characterized the opposition protests as generally peaceful and cases of opposition violence as counter violence against brutal repression of dissent by the government. John Perry has written a series of articles…