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 […]
The discoverer of the New World
A review of ‘The Invention of Nature’ by Andrea Wulf On 16 July 1799 a revolutionary thinker arrived in Latin America. Unlike most Europeans who had preceded him to the continent, he didn’t believe in slavery and he promoted the rights of indigenous people. He saw mining for gold and silver for the exploitation it […]
1519: A Journey to the End of Time
So much has been written about the Spanish conquest of Latin America that it has become difficult to find new approaches to the topic. Hugh Thomas’s definitive history of the invasion of Mexico, now called simply Conquest, is 20 years old, but his monumental history of the Spanish monarchy is much more recent, and volume […]
Letters: Denis Healey’s depth of knowledge
This letter was in response to the The Guardian’s obituary of Denis Healey. David McKie says that Denis Healey was “formidably equipped” for the job of foreign secretary, despite never getting it. I had an experience in the 1980s that made me draw the same conclusion but which also gave an insight as to why […]
Empire’s Crossroads: A history of the Caribbean from Columbus to the present day
There are many histories of the Americas that begin with Columbus’s landing in what were to become known as the West Indies, but this is perhaps one of the few accessible accounts which focus on the Caribbean itself, and which follow through right to the present day. Carrie Gibson’s thesis is that the Caribbean was […]
Book Review: Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution by Matilde Zimmermann
Living in Nicaragua I’m keen to learn all I can about its history and particularly that of the Sandinista revolution. I’ve always been interested in Fonseca’s role as the political inspiration for the Sandinista party and – within the party itself – its most respected figure, even though he died before the ‘triumph’ of 19 […]
Book Review: The Hacienda by Lisa St Aubin de Teran
I declare an interest. I own a farm in Latin America. It is much smaller than the one of which this author became the Doña for several years. Also, I came to my farm late in life, whereas when she came to hers when she was a teenager. Sometimes, when I walk the few hundred […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on