Whose embassy?
Under the 1961 Vienna Convention, foreign embassies are ‘inviolable’: the host country’s officials have a ‘special duty’ to protect them and can’t enter without permission. When the Venezuelan embassy in Washington DC was besieged last summer, the National Lawyers Guild said that the US government had flouted the convention by condoning the attacks and protecting […]
Murder in El Salvador
A review of ‘November’ by Jorge Galán El Salvador is the smallest country in mainland Latin America – only the size of Wales. But in the 1980s El Salvador and its neighbours, Honduras and Guatemala, had an unlooked-for strategic significance. After the success of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, the United States was […]
The slow death of investigative journalism
The title of Seymour Hersh’s memoir is simply Reporter. It’s what he did and what he does: dig out and report important facts that need to be seen in the daylight, no matter how much the CIA, a US vice-president or secretary of state, or a mafia boss, may want to keep them hidden. Hersh, […]
The Hernández Brothers
Donald Trump said last year that migrant caravans, mainly of Hondurans, were coming to the US from ‘shithole countries’. But now he says that the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, is doing a ‘fantastic job’. Trump and JOH recently reached an agreement declaring Honduras to be a ‘safe place’ for asylum seekers trying to reach the US. […]
Counting deaths for dollars: the rise and fall of Nicaragua’s ‘human rights’ organizations
In their hunger for US funding, Nicaraguan “human rights” NGO’s inflated the death toll during last year’s coup. Today, these groups are in a state of complete disarray.
Live from Nicaragua
This week is the launch of the Spanish edition of the ebook about last year’s events in Nicaragua. The launch coincides with the 40th anniversary of the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship on 19 July 1979. Here is a review of the book by Roger Stoll. The English version of Live from Nicaragua is offered […]
A year after Nicaragua’s coup, the media’s regime change deceptions are still unraveling
A deadly arson attack during last year’s regime change attempt was blamed on Nicaragua’s government by everyone from the US State Department to The New York Times and The Guardian. New information has raised serious doubts about the official story, highlighting the wider campaign of misinformation waged by US and UK media.
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 […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on