April 17, 2024
Nicaragua’s lawyers at the Hague
Last Thursday, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian war surgeon, gave his first address as the newly-appointed rector of Glasgow University, chosen in recognition of his work at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. The following day he flew to Berlin, where he had been invited to address a major conference about Palestine. On arrival he was taken away by police, interrogated for several hours and eventually told he had to leave Germany and wouldn’t be allowed to return until at least the end of April. Any attempt to speak to the conference via Zoom could result in a fine or even a year’s prison sentence. By the time he was released he couldn’t have taken part in the conference anyway, since it had been already invaded by at least 900 police and closed down. Berlin’s mayor said that it was ‘intolerable’ that the conference was taking place at all.
Continue reading “Germany buries the evidence of complicity in genocide: Nicaragua exposes it”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua |
April 10, 2024
When armed Ecuadorian police gathered outside the Mexican embassy in Quito last Friday evening, a casual observer might have thought they were there to protect it. Instead, they launched an attack: brandishing assault rifles, police climbed the walls, entered the building by force and kidnapped Ecuador’s former vice-president, Jorge Glas, who had that day been granted political asylum by Mexico. Within ten minutes Glas was being driven away.
Continue reading “On the Quito Embassy Raid”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Ecuador, human rights |
April 8, 2024
Alfred de Zayas and John Perry
When the United Nations sets up a “commission of inquiry,” it can result in a powerful analysis of violations of human rights law, such as the one appointed in 2021 to examine Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and its Apartheid practices. But other commissions can become political platforms aimed at demonizing a particular government by crafting narratives that give the semblance of objectivity, while suppressing all evidence that contradicts the prevailing geopolitical consensus.
Continue reading “UN Human Rights Council again supports US regime change plans for Nicaragua”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, US intervention, Venezuela, human rights |
March 17, 2024
Prosecutors in New York this month claimed they had cracked ‘the largest drug trafficking conspiracy in the world’. While it lasted, more than four hundred tons of cocaine were shipped to the United States from clandestine airstrips in Honduras by characters with aliases such as ‘The Tiger’ and ‘El Porky’. Million-dollar bribes were paid to government officials. A drug payment of $4 million was handed over in a duffel bag at a filling station.
Continue reading “The Narcodictator in His Labyrinth”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, Honduras, drugs
February 22, 2024
Why do United Nations’ human rights bodies focus on some countries, but not others? Why do organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International appear to ignore important evidence presented to them? And why do the media repeat stories of human rights abuses without questioning their veracity?
Continue reading “The “Human Rights Industry” and Nicaragua”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, human rights
December 10, 2023
Iván Acosta (right) speaking with the author [Source: Photo courtesy of Camila Escalante]
Is it true that 50% of Nicaraguans want to leave their country owing to a climate of repression and economic decline, supposedly resulting from socialist policies? This was the allegation in
a report published by
AmericasBarometer, a research agency based at Vanderbilt University, which failed to note that its previous forecast, that 30% of Nicaraguans would leave after 2018, proved wildly wrong.
Continue reading “Nicaragua’s Finance Minister details how US sanctions impact Nicaragua’s poor”
Category: Migration, Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, sanctions, US intervention
November 25, 2023
Is this the last of Theroux’s travel books? If it is, he has created an impressive cannon, and this is a fitting finale. In this book he joins the many writers who have travelled through Mexico, but his story is a refreshing one as many others have covered the violence of the cartels or the horrors faced by migrants travelling to the US border, while Theroux finds new angles from which to view a huge, complex country which has a capital city with (as he points out) a population far larger than that of any of the Central American countries to its south.
Continue reading “On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux”
Category: Latin America, Book reviews | Tags: drugs, Mexico, migration
November 24, 2023
Victorias de Noviembre co-op members at work
An article written by Winnie Narváez Herrera, Facilitator at ÁBACOenRed /FUPECG, and edited/translated by John Perry.
In Latin America, the problem of housing quality is even more serious than the problem of not having a home, and this is made worse by the increasing effects of climate change, violence in some parts of the region and migration.
Continue reading “Mission accomplished! Members of a cooperative in Nicaragua build their own homes”
Category: Housing, Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, housing
November 7, 2023
Meeting Ivan Acosta, Nicaragua’s finance minister
Which country spends nearly two-thirds of its budget on tackling poverty? When I met Nicaragua’s finance minister, Ivan Acosta, he had just presented his 2024 budget to its national assembly, and he made clear that a large part of it is aimed at doing just that.
Continue reading “US sanctions hit Nicaragua’s social investment programmes”
Category: Latin America | Tags: US intervention, sanctions, Nicaragua |
August 6, 2023
Three previous articles described the attempted coup in Nicaragua in 2018, and how public support grew initially but then waned. This final article, covering the period from mid-July to the present day, shows how the coup was defeated and what happened in the aftermath.
By July 2018, three months of violence – over 200 deaths on both sides, including 22 police officers, kidnappings, torture and destruction of property – had exhausted the Nicaraguan population, and they were desperate for the government to restore order. The calls for the government to clear the tranques (roadblocks) that had strangled the country became deafening. Daniel Ortega’s strategy had worked: had he removed the roadblocks too soon, the resistance might have been much more violent, and it would have left deeply divided communities. He had waited until he had the backing of most of the population.
Continue reading “The Nicaraguan Coup Attempt: How Peace Was Restored and What Has Happened Since”
Category: Latin America | Tags: Nicaragua, Nicaragua crisis, US intervention