Latin America is still the empire’s workshop
A reflection on Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the rise of the new imperialism, by Greg Grandin, published in 2006 and updated in 2010. So many books have been written about US intervention in Latin America that, when this one was published a decade ago, it might easily have been overlooked. Grandin’s […]
Here’s why the US has no right to interfere in Nicaragua
Hawks in the Trump administration have their sights set on regime change, not because of freedom or democracy, but to ‘settle historic scores.’ It’s been almost 200 years since the US declared that it would allow no more European colonies in the western hemisphere. A 100 years later this was twisted into a declaration that […]
Nicaragua’s crisis: the struggle for balanced media coverage
A new online reader on the Nicaragua crisis, Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?, was published in May 2019. Here is one of the articles, which focuses on the role played by social media and the alarming lack of balance both in Nicaragua’s corporate media and in the international press. It makes use of material […]
Dismissing the Truth
In 2018 Amnesty International produced two reports on Nicaragua, accusing the Nicaraguan government of ‘a strategy of indiscriminate repression’. The context was violent protests which broke out in April last year and ended last July. The Nicaraguan government was accused by AI of using ‘arbitrary detention’ and ‘excessive, disproportionate and unnecessary force’ in dealing with […]
The Plot to Control the World
‘Make America Great Again’: Trump’s slogan seems both to yearn for a time when the United States had more influence, and to call for its pre-eminence to be restored. In its own way, it asserts that the US is – or should be – different. In fact it was only Trump’s predecessor, Obama, who was […]
Why Didn’t Carl David Goette-Luciak Report on the Torture He Witnessed?
by Nan McCurdy There has been a great deal of inaccurate and biased reporting about Nicaragua written in support of regime change and presenting a false narrative of what occurred in the Nicaraguan uprising. The article below is about a self-trained reporter, Carl David Goette-Luciak, who was the source of consistently biased reporting which had […]
The Guardian continues its shameless misinformation campaign against Nicaragua and its people
This article is by Camilo Mejia, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience because he refused duty in the US army in Iraq, who is also son of the famous Nicaraguan singer Carlos Mejia Godoy. In its September 7 article, the once progressive Guardian reports that Nicaragua was brought to a standstill by a general strike […]
Misinformation on Nicaragua: It was a coup, not a massacre
There is so much misinformation on the left about recent events in Nicaragua that it is a pity that Mary Ellsberg’s article for Pulse has added to it. She says that recent articles often ‘paint a picture of the crisis in Nicaragua that is dangerously misleading’. Unfortunately, her own article is subject to just that criticism. It […]
Nicaragua’s failed coup
For three months Daniel Ortega and his government in Nicaragua were under intense pressure to resign – from protesters and opposition groups, from local media and from right-wing politicians in the US. But while the international pressure continues, in mid-July it became clear that, for the time being at least, the opposition no longer has […]
Opposition behind the violence in Nicaragua
Following the Guardian’s rejection of a longer letter with multiple signatories on this issue, they accepted this shorter one. Your report says Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s president, is facing a “nationwide revolt” by “peaceful” protesters (Ortega decries ‘terrible lies’ over protest deaths in rare interview, 25 July). I live in the city of Masaya, which was […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on