Dictators never die
A review of ‘Dictators Never Die: a portrait of Nicaragua and the Somoza dynasty’ by Eduardo Crawley, 1978. In the last century, Latin America produced a gallery of gruesome dictators, who vied with each other in their ruthlessness and their ability to cling to power for decades. Who was the worst? There were several outstanding […]
Babar the elephant in sign language
Raise four fingers (the sign for “B”), touch your nose with your thumb and dip your hand down to mimic an elephant’s trunk. You’ve just said “Babar the elephant” in Nicaraguan Sign Language for the deaf – and it’s a sign that’s distinct from that for simply “elephant”. It’s not surprising that ISN (for its […]
Unfair on Nicaragua
In January, the magazine New Internationalist published one of its regular ‘country profiles’ on Nicaragua. In March, they published a brief letter from me complaining about the unfair picture they had presented. Below is the letter and below that the main text of the ‘country profile.’ Your country profile of Nicaragua gives a very unfair […]
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 […]
An Indomitable Beast: The Remarkable Journey of the Jaguar
Alan Rabinowitz begins his compelling story of the jaguar with two experiences of meeting one. The first was in the zoo, as a child. The second, more than two decades later, is set in Belize, a key part of the ‘Jaguar Corridor’ that Rabinowitz has fought to preserve through Mesoamerica and into the northern parts […]
Under the volcano
On my morning walk there is a point from which I can see the sulphurous fumes pouring from the Masaya volcano. On the lip of the crater, although not visible from my viewpoint seven kilometres away, is a large wooden cross. It occupies the pinnacle on which a similar cross was first placed in 1529 […]
Travel advice for visitors to Nicaragua
Would you visit a country if you were warned to ‘exercise a high degree of caution’ because ‘armed violence’ is very common? Having lived in Nicaragua for 13 peaceful years, I haven’t given a lot of thought to the travel advice to visitors issued by Britain’s Foreign Office or by other governments. But my attention […]
Meet me under the Ceiba
La Curva is an unremarkable small Nicaraguan town, a few kilometres south of Masaya. I’ve known it for twenty years, and to me its only outstanding feature is a pair of huge ‘guanacaste’ trees, bedecked with epiphytic plants, that stand on the south side of the main road (or stood, I’ve been told that one […]
Solar-powered irrigation system starts to pump water
The ‘Agrosolar’ project, funded by the British embassy, has begun to pump water to irrigate crops right at the start of Nicaragua’s dry season. El Timal is in the almost forgotten area between Nicaragua’s two large lakes, only about 20km from the international airport but with practically no transport connections to the nearest town. Into […]
Kill the messenger
In January 1983, police in Los Angeles arrested frogmen bringing 400 pounds of cocaine ashore from a Colombian freighter. But they missed their main target, the drug importer Norwin Meneses, who may have been tipped off by officials. In August 1986, a US Customs informant, Joseph Kelso, told his handlers that Drug Enforcement Administration officials […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on