With Nicaragua, Scary Covid Projections Are More Newsworthy Than Hopeful Results
One year ago, as both the Trump administration in the US and the Johnson government in the UK responded fitfully to the growing pandemic, the international media were looking for whipping boys: other countries whose response to the virus was even worse.
Covid control lessons from Nicaragua
A letter published in the Guardian, arguing that the UK should take the lead from Nicaragua, where early strict measures have kept the coronavirus death rate one of the lowest in the world.
Covid-19: On the Decline in Nicaragua as its Critics Fall Silent
No country can yet claim to have defeated Covid-19, but clearly some are having more success than others. Nicaragua is one of these, and could yet be recognized as a world leader. With under 5,000 Covid-19 cases since the pandemic began, according to official figures, its infection level is far below that of Panama (105,000), […]
Coronavirus is being tackled by Nicaragua’s community-based health system
by Kevin Zeese and John Perry Sadly, only a month after contributing to this article, Kevin Zeese died suddenly. He will be sorely missed. Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is – like every other government – engaged in a struggle to limit the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on its people. But Nicaragua suffers two additional handicaps. […]
Why the Labour movement should support Nicaragua’s Sandinista government
The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was an inspiration to many on the left in the 1980s. Forty-one years later, it still urgently needs and deserves our support. The case for doing so is a very strong one. After the US-inspired “Contra war” led to electoral defeat for the Sandinistas in 1990, the country endured 16 […]
Nicaragua battles COVID-19 and a Disinformation Campaign
Every country in the world is trying to balance its fight against the virus with the need to have a functioning economy, and there is plenty of debate about what the balance should be. The world’s poorer countries face the toughest challenge, because a high proportion of their populations engage in a daily struggle to […]
COVID-19 as a pretext for repression
“He’s not a doctor, I don’t think.” Trump had just finished a phone call with Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), the de facto president of Honduras who runs a narco-state. On April 30, JOH was indirectly implicated in drug and murder charges by the US Justice Department in a case against a former chief police officer. This […]
‘Love in the time of COVID-19’ – a cynical analysis of Nicaragua’s efforts to combat the epidemic
Nicaragua’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is the subject of correspondence in the medical journal, The Lancet. A letter from 13 health professionals, based in the USA (except for one in Costa Rica), criticised the Nicaraguan government’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic as ‘careless’ and ‘perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world […]
“Never let a good crisis go to waste”
The right-wing opposition in Nicaragua, having failed in their attempted coup in 2018, still looks at any potential crisis as a new opportunity to attack the Sandinista government. Their latest chance, of course, arrived with the coronavirus pandemic. Even though the virus has barely hit the country yet, the government is under attack. The international […]
As the coronavirus strikes, Nicaraguans in Costa Rica are urged to stay
The coronavirus epidemic is still in its early stages in Central America but it has already put a focus on Costa Rica’s dependency on workers from Nicaragua. At any one time there are around 400,000 Nicaraguans working in the neighbouring country, especially doing building work, domestic work, as security guards or in agriculture. Given that […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on