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A Tale of Two Countries: Honduras & Nicaragua face the shock doctrine
Jenny Atlee, Jim Phillips and I presented a webinar on neighbouring countries, Honduras and Nicaragua, that have both suffered what Naomi Klein called the “shock doctrine”. Both rejected neoliberalism in elections last year, but both are under renewed pressure to conform to Washington’s expectations. My contribution compares the two countries’ approaches to the pandemic, and…
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David vs. Goliath: Nicaragua’s independence
This week Nicaragua celebrates its Independence Days – on September 14th the celebration of the Battle of San Jacinto won against U.S. filibusters in 1856, and on September 15th the commemoration of Central America’s independence from Spain in 1821. Becca Renk, who lives in Nicaragua, penned the piece below.
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It began with a shipwreck
Some time in the 17th century, a vessel carrying enslaved people from the west coast of Africa ran aground near the Caribbean island of St Vincent, close enough to shore that the survivors swam to land, disposed of their captors and settled alongside the Indigenous Carib-Arawak people, who already offered a safe haven to runaway…
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Nicaragua celebrates 43 years of revolution: a clash between reality and media misrepresentation
July 19th is a day of celebration in Nicaragua: the anniversary of the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. But the international media will have it penciled in their diaries for another reason: it’s yet another opportunity to pour scorn on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. We’ll hear again about how the government “clamps down on dissent,” about…
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The UN Refugee Agency is exaggerating the number of Nicaraguan refugees
Two years ago, COHA reported on the manufactured “refugee” crisis around Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica. Now the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is saying that “102,000 people fled Nicaragua and sought asylum in Costa Rica” in 2021. As this article shows, this statement is inaccurate, adding further to the myth that Nicaragua is suffering…
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Nicaragua a ‘Dictatorship’ When It Follows US Lead on NGOs
Daniel Ortega’s government in Nicaragua is “laying waste to civil society” according to the Associated Press. The Guardian called it a “sweeping purge of civil society,” while for the New York Times, Nicaragua is “inching toward dictatorship.” According to the Washington Post, the country is already “a dictatorship laid bare.” In a call repeated by…
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“Summit of Exclusion” Backfires on Biden
Jill Clark-Gollub, COHA Assistant Editor/Translator; Alina Duarte, COHA Senior Fellow; John Perry, COHA Senior Fellow “We would definitely have wanted a different Summit of the Americas. The silence of those absent challenges us. So that this does not happen again, I would like to state for the future that the fact of being the host…
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How “virtual crime scenes” became a propaganda tool in Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria
Written jointly with Rick Sterling This article shows how media uses computer modeling and “virtual crime scenes” to assign blame for some extremely important international events. In these examples from Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria, many people died in complex circumstances. The deaths at the “Mother’s March” in Managua, Nicaragua precipitated an attempted coup. The Maidan…
