Nicaragua’s Rainforest and Indigenous Peoples: a Story of Falsehood, Lies and US-based Political Campaigns
Indigenous peoples and the rainforests that many inhabit are under threat. Everyone knows it. In Latin America especially, international NGOs like Global Witness and Frontline Defenders tell a story which seems self-evidently true: outsiders are exploiting natural resources, governments are indifferent or actively complicit, Indigenous people defend the forests and in return face expulsion or […]
Nicaragua rebuffs attacks at human rights hearing
Nicaragua was one of the first countries in Latin America to give constitutional rights to its Indigenous peoples and its laws to protect their territories are justly famous (especially the Autonomy Law of 1986 and the Demarcation Law of 2003). Some 40,000 Indigenous families live in areas that are legally owned and administered by over […]
Progressive Media Promoted a False Story of ‘Conflict Beef’ From Nicaragua
In October Two Worlds reported on news stories appearing in the US, calling for a boycott of meat imports from Nicaragua. Attempts were made to persuade Reveal News and PBS Newshour to correct their stories or provide a right of reply. They refused, hence the following article published by the website FAIR, which aims to […]
Hurricane Eta hits the Mosquito Coast
Central America’s ‘Mosquito Coast’, the home of the Miskito people, stretches between Honduras and Nicaragua. The border is at a point that juts out into the Caribbean: Columbus called it Cabo Gracias a Dios for the shelter it provided on his last voyage. As the storm that became Hurricane Eta formed above the seas of […]
Branding Nicaraguan meat as ‘conflict beef’ is the latest US political attack
Earlier this year Nicaragua’s opposition and its supporters in the international media were promoting stories about the Sandinista government’s “failure” to address the Covid-19 pandemic. This backfired when Nicaragua became the first country in Central America to get the virus under control. Next they claimed that Sandinista supporters were attacking Catholic churches, but then it […]
Can a coast-to-coast canal solve Nicaragua’s poverty problem?
Nicaragua is a small country that was praised for eventually signing the Paris climate agreement in October, but has since been criticised for pushing ahead with a planned interoceanic canal, with its uncertain environmental effects. So how does it reconcile these apparently conflicting positions? Nicaragua and Syria were the only two countries not to sign […]
Global Witness fails to respond to detailed criticisms
Criticism of the organisation Global Witness and the coverage of Nicaragua in its latest report on ‘environmental defenders’ has so far failed to shift its stance, or even to persuade it to look in detail at the arguments. Here are the latest developments. The Two Worlds article published on July 16 was accompanied by emails […]
Is Nicaragua really the world’s ‘most dangerous country’ to be an environmental defender?
Under a picture of the renowned environmentalist Berta Cáceres, murdered in Honduras last year, the Guardian has launched a major and much-needed project looking at worldwide deaths of environmental defenders. It’s doing this in collaboration with Global Witness, which keeps an ongoing register of such assassinations. To do this it needs to make some difficult […]
Hitch-hiking or bottling?
A few years ago, outside Cuba’s main towns, hitch-hiking was the main way of getting around. State-run buses were few and far between, trains (despite Cuba having the most extensive network in Latin America) might be scheduled to run at least once daily – but whether they ran at all was always subject to a […]
Richard takes action back home in Leicester
Richard Sieff is a member of the Leicester-Masaya Link Group who joined as a result of visiting Nicaragua through Raleigh International. In this guest blog, he writes about his experiences and his commitment to take ‘Action at Home’. ‘Action at Home’ – I knew the requirement of this vital component of the International Citizen Service programme: raise awareness […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on