Nicaragua

The fightback
User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 03, 2019 11:00 pm

NicaNotes: They don’t want to learn because they have too much hatred
April 3, 2019
By Ramon E. Matus
Radio La Primerisima, 01 April 2019

In one year Nicaragua has become unrecognizable. The reality and the dreams of a country have been seriously damaged, precisely when its economic and social indicators took flight towards sustained growth, that is to say, when we were progressing after 50 years of being at the bottom of the pot.

Horrible things happened, typical of wars or those situations where people are confronted by matters of creed, race or hunger. Here it was only hatred, manipulation and political interests. “Nothing more.”

But among so many horrible things, three things were indelibly engraved in my mind: an inconsolable child crying over the coffin of his policeman father who was ambushed and murdered; a humble man from the village killed by gunmen from the roadblocks because the man dared to ask them why they had previously murdered his son. His body was thrown into a garbage dump. And what impacted the whole country was the brutality with which a young policeman was tortured, murdered and burned in Masaya.

But as the rain begins with a drop, these atrocities then began with “simple things” such as vandalism or tagging young people believing them to be members of the Sandinista Youth, as if that were a crime. Then came the beatings, the public scorn, stripping and shaming, lynching people of all ages and sexes, always for the same reason: intolerance and hatred.

So last Saturday, at an accomplice mall in Managua, the movie was filmed again.

They don’t learn because they don’t want to learn. They are motivated by a plan or a salary, but above all they have plenty of hatred. They hate Sandinismo; they hate the country; they hate peace.

Those who from their comfortable exile or their cowardly lairs directed and financed the riots and destruction, those who manipulated hundreds of unthinking young people who today are asking for a piece of bread in Costa Rica or who suffer their wrongdoing in other ways, they have returned to their ways. They have started again.

They don’t care about Nicaragua or its people or the progress or the laws, or their own followers, because there is no reasonable motivation in their actions even though they clothe themselves with our flag and shout our slogans.

Let us hope that our authorities will stop them in their tracks lawfully or everything will get out of control again. That is what these senseless ones want.

But we must warn them that it is impossible to think of a Nicaragua without Sandinistas, even if the gringos want it, because we are part of this people and of this nation. We must be accounted for. They should not underestimate us, nor ignore us, much less want to disappear or kill us. We are millions.

We Sandinistas are good at Peace; we reach out; we forget offenses. But we are great warriors when we are provoked and forced to fight.

For the good of all: let us continue negotiating, seeking peace by conversing.

Don’t provoke us again!



BRIEFS
By Nan McCurdy

Violence and Instability Battered the 2018 GDP
In 2018 the Nicaraguan economy was affected by the attempted coup and subsequent violence with a decrease in the yearly growth recorded in recent years. The results of the preliminary estimate of 2018 GDP indicate that economic activity decreased by 3.8 percent, the Central Bank of Nicaragua said on April 1. In 2018 there was positive growth in fishing and aquaculture (14.7%), electricity (4.3%), water (3.6%), agriculture (3.3%), education (2.9%), health (2.7%), mining (1.7%), and manufacturing (1.1%). This attenuated the negative impact of lower tax collection and of the decline in activities such as hotels and restaurants (-20.2%), construction (-15.7%), commerce (-11.4%), livestock (-5.4%) among others. Production was good in coffee, rice, soybean, sesame and tobacco. This partially offset the decline in the cultivation of corn, beans, peanuts and sugar cane, among others. Fisheries and aquaculture experienced growth but beef and cattle exports declined. The manufacturing industry saw higher production in the processing of sugar, other foods, beverages, tobacco, and textiles.

The report of the Nicaraguan Central Bank indicates that total consumption decreased 4.5 percent. The government’s collective consumption decreased (-8.5%) as did the consumption of households and non-profit institutions (-4.8%).The evolution of private consumption was associated with a decrease in credit provided for personal loans and credit cards; and a less dynamic flow of remittances that entered the country. (Informe Pastran, 4/1/19)

International Red Cross Comparing Lists of Detained
Over the weekend of March 30-31, the government and the opposition delegations to the Negotiation Table delivered lists of those arrested during and after the attempted coup to the International Red Cross. The international organization will compare the very different lists to begin the process of release. There is a period of 90 days for this process. In this context, the government, as a sign of good will, has released more than 100 prisoners, who now enjoy house arrest. (Radio La Primerisima, 4/1/19)

Protesters Create Chaos at Shopping Mall
Three wounded and a brutally beaten citizen is the toll of the small sit-in held the afternoon of March 30 at the Metrocentro mall. Another small group tried to do the same at the Galeria Mall but they were rejected by the shoppers. Nothing similar took place anywhere else in the country. In fact, the beaches were full of people enjoying themselves. The National Police reported that the group brutally beat Germán Félix Dávila Blanco, 70 years old, who was on the outskirts of that shopping center. In a communiqué issued by Commissioner General Jaime Antonio Vanegas, the authorities said that Dávila is hospitalized in a delicate state as a result of the beating. In another video at the mall the protesters verbally abused women and children. The abused, rather than the abusers, were escorted out by mall security. In the images broadcast by the media those who punched and kicked Davila wore hoods. But one of them is seen in another video receiving orientations from Zayda Hernandez, one of the youth leaders with the opposition in the May 2018 dialogue. A small group of opposition members has staged violent protests the last three Saturdays apparently to try to undermine the negotiations between the opposition and the government. See videos in these links: http://www.radiolaprimerisima.com/notic ... trocentro/, https://www.tn8.tv/nacionales/472079-de ... de-sabado/ (La Primerisima, Canal 8, 3-31-19)

Government Delegation at Negotiations Condemns Violence
The government delegation to the negotiations roundtable issued a statement on March 31 which said, “We declare our condemnation of the violence and delinquency carried out the last three Saturdays…. In a private mall in Managua a group of violent hooded people…and their media apparatus forcibly occupied a shopping mall, frightening, insulting, assaulting those who visited to shop and enjoy themselves with their families. …. [A]mong the violent individuals were members of the self-proclaimed Civic Alliance who are also part of the Negotiations Roundtable.” The statement went on to say: “The government delegation demands coherence and consistency of the Civic Alliance in the interest of the Nicaraguan families who want and deserve peace. We call on you to leave behind the times of terrorism, destruction of lives and homes, of our economy, of the right to work and to a dignified life for all our people. The Government Delegation reiterates to our families and communities that peace is the way; it is the supreme mandate, and with the greatest sense of common good, we continue to be totally dedicated to fulfill our obligation to our people. Managua, March 31, 2019. (http://barricada.com.ni/comunicado-dele ... -y-la-paz/)

Recent Agreements at the Negotiation Round Table
On March 28, the Negotiations Round Table announced that the negotiations will finish on April 3. The Nicaraguan government and the opposition leaders agreed on March 27 on the procedure to follow up on the process of releasing some of those detained accused of crimes between April and July of last year. Communiqué number 9 issued by both parties after a month of negotiations, explains that after reaching agreements, negotiators held a meeting in Managua with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which issued recommendations that have already been incorporated into the preliminary agreement. The Red Cross sent the agreement between the three parties to its world headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, where the ICRC will give the final go-ahead to implement it. In addition, the communiqué No. 9 records that in this week’s sessions the government and the opposition advanced in the content of an eventual agreement “to strengthen the rights and guarantees of citizens established in the Constitution that include individual and social freedoms, and respect for human rights of Nicaraguans. The Papal Nuncio Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag and the OAS Representative Luis Ángel Rosadilla continue to participate in the meetings as international witnesses and accompaniers. (Radio La Primerisima 3/28/19)

Caribbean Nations Express Their Solidarity with Nicaragua
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on March 29 at the 8th meeting of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), in Managua that “the member states of the ACS share the responsibility of defending the consensus that we have built together and of continuing to promote solidarity as a necessary premise for action on all the issues that involve us”. He added “the ACS must continue to be a cornerstone in the unity of the Greater Caribbean, the only alternative in the face of the enormous challenges we face.

The Twenty-Fourth Meeting of the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs and the Third Cooperation Conference is meeting starting March 28 on topics such as tourism, risk reduction, disasters, trade, transportation, and protection of the Caribbean Sea. In this VIII Summit, members celebrate the 25th anniversary of the creation of the organization whose main objective is to serve as a mechanism for consultation, cooperation and concerted action in the areas of trade, transport, sustainable tourism and natural disasters in the Caribbean area. Its member states are Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. Aruba, Curaçao (France, on behalf of French Guiana, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin), Guadeloupe, Netherlands, on behalf of Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius, Martinique, Sint Maarten, Turks and Caicos Islands. (Radio La Primerisima, 3/29/19)

Truth, Justice and Peace Commission Clarify Numbers of Detained
On March 26, the Truth, Justice and Peace Commission (CVJP) challenged the data on detainees issued by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and a committee of people involved in the 2018 coup attempt. During a press conference, Jaime López Lowery stated that the commission verified that 261 people are currently being detained, contrary to the IACHR’s list of 647 inmates handed over to the Nicaraguan government. Lowery explained that of the 386 prisoners remaining from IACHR data, CVJP members stated that 152 have been released, 61 are not linked to the conflict, 54 do not have complete personal information, “which makes it impossible to verify their real state”; 112 are not in any penitentiary or police establishment and seven names are duplicated. (Radio La Primerisima, 3/27/19)

New Hospital in San Juan del Sur
The Nicaragua Ministry of Health announced that a new primary hospital will be inaugurated in San Juan del Sur Municipality, Rivas Department, on April 3. “The new US$5.4 million hospital has 45 beds and will offer services in general medicine, orthopedics, surgery, gynecology, pediatrics, dentistry, laboratory and X-rays,” the MINSA report stated. (Nicaragua News, 3/27/19)

More New Homes in Matagalpa
The government announced a new phase of the Bismarck Martinez housing program where two thousand families in Matagalpa will benefit. The first phase will launch with 429 homes. (19Digital 4/2/19)

https://afgj.org/nicanotes-they-dont-wa ... uch-hatred
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Fri May 03, 2019 9:25 pm

POLITICAL-IDEOLOGICAL IDENTITY: NICARAGUAN OPPOSITION VS SANDINISMO
Germán Van de Velde 14 hours ago 323

After a little more than a year of the events that took place in Nicaragua between the months of April and July 2018, it is necessary to reflect on the different ideological identities that support the bases of Sandinismo and the Nicaraguan opposition.

On the one hand, we have the Nicaraguan opposition, which is made up of an agglomeration of institutions named Civic Alliance, MRS, COSEP, Hierarchy of the Catholic Church, lumpen of the bourgeoisie and political lumpen.

On the other hand, there is the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) , which is a revolutionary, socialist, solidarity, democratic and anti-imperialist pluralist party that defends popular interests and collects the traditions of historical struggle of the Nicaraguan people. national sovereignty, peace and national independence. Commander Bayardo Arce (1988) defines it as: "Sandinismo is the Nicaraguan application of three great currents of universal thought: Marxism, Christianity and nationalism". [one]

WHAT DIFFERENCES DO WE FIND BETWEEN BOTH?
THE OPPOSITION
The small group of movements that make up the Nicaraguan opposition took relevance from the events that took place between April and July of 2018 , when they tried to give a coup "failed" to the current Government of Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan opposition resumes its ideals and raises the interventionist flag of the Government of the United States, who defend the concepts of interference, looting and subjection of the peoples of Our America. They fill their mouths talking about freedom and democracy using the strategies of Gene Sharp's manual, soft blows or soft blows to topple governments democratically elected by popular vote.

In addition, this movement does not have a national project and arises for the elites of the bourgeoisie of Nicaragua, which historically have been characterized by representing the country through puppet governments at the service of Yankee imperialism. It is not difficult to remember that, throughout history, Nicaragua had presidents such as Adolfo Díaz, Emiliano Chamorro Vargas, the Somoza dictatorship, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Enrique Bolaños and Arnoldo Alemán, all serving the enemy of humanity.

This agglomeration of institutions has as a base manual the coup and terrorism as a way to get to power. It uses media and social networks to distribute false news and foment violence and discomfort among the Nicaraguan population. They are referenced by William Walker, General Stimpson, President Coolidge, and currently the government policies of Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. They use the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) as a way to promote Yankee intervention. They are in favor of the war of Israel against the free people of Palestine, as well as, in favor of the aggressions that the people of Venezuela receive.

SANDINISMO
The Sandinista National Liberation Front takes up the ideals and brandishes the Sandino flag, which defends the concepts of national sovereignty and independence, Latin Americanism, solidarity and opposes any form of intervention that harms these principles . Understand democracy not as an end in itself, but as a means by which the people discover, participate and expand the exercise of power in favor of their interests, to make the transformations of society that allow to achieve freedom, progress , social justice and integral democratization. [two]

"Sandinismo is the project of a nation that emerges from the popular classes in Nicaragua for the revolutionary transformation of society, breaking the parallel scheme that responded to the interests of the dominant classes that hegemonized the political life of Nicaragua."

The Sandinista Front bases its content on National Liberation and Anti-imperialism, political and economic democracy, representative and participatory democracy and is inspired by the example of the Próceres de la Patria, of Independence and of Sovereignty : Diriangén, José Dolores Estrada, Andrés Castro, Benjamín Zeledón, Augusto C. Sandino, Santos López, Rigoberto López Pérez, Carlos Fonseca, Camilo Ortega S., Bernardino Díaz, Gaspar García Laviana, Luis Alfonso Velásquez, Luisa Amanda Espinoza, Angelita Morales, Claudita Chamorro , Martha Angélica Quezada, Carlos Núñez Téllez, Tomás Borge Martínez, Bismarck Martínez, among others and is committed to transmit their intellectual, moral and spiritual heritage to the new generations.

When talking about political - ideological identity, a fundamental issue for the people of Nicaragua, it is possible to highlight radical differences between both fractions. On the one hand, we find a Nicaraguan opposition with a pro-Yankee political identity, interventionist, sold homeland and worm. On the other hand, we find the Sandinista Front, a Nationalist, Anti-imperialist, Solidarity Revolutionary party characterized by an ideology defined and marked through history with blood, heroism and patriotism.

Here, then, it is possible to affirm that the Nicaraguan opposition ends up being a cancer with political - ideological pro - Yankee identity and at present, its adventures are controlled by a people that fight for peace, for self - determination and for national sovereignty.

In contrast, Sandinismo:

"This movement is national and anti-imperialist. We maintain the flag of freedom for Nicaragua and for all of Spanish America. For the rest in the social field, this movement is popular. " (Augusto C. Sandino).

Unity and
Fatherland Love is Humanity

Homeland and Freedom

Germán J. Van de Velde

http://redvolucion.net/2019/05/03/ident ... andinismo/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Tue May 07, 2019 11:18 am

Uber - a lesson in economic democracy from Nicaragua
Submitted by tortilla on Jue, 23/03/2017 - 19:55
Tortilla con Sal, Telesur, March 23rd 2017
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opini ... mart-to-Re

Back in July 2016, New York radio journalist Don Debar, reporting on the the Democrat Party Convention in Philadelphia, found that people arriving for the Convention in taxis were stopped at the security cordon over a mile from the convention center. From there, they had to get out and walk in the exhausting Philadelphia summer sun in order to attend Hillary Clinton’s preordained triumph. But passengers arriving with the Uber social network taxi service were driven right up to the convention center into Uber’s air conditioned reception area. Debar’s anecdote about the Democrat elite’s cozy crony favoritism towards Uber is a microcosm of why Trump in the end easily defeated an out of touch Democrat leadership committed to Clinton’s corrupt, war-mongering, candidacy.

In January this year, Nicaragua’s Sandinista government under President Daniel Ortega announced it would not give Uber permission to operate in Nicaragua. In Central America, Uber operates in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama. Its regional representatives say it has over 20,000 drivers serving more than 700.000 customers. Uber projects the image of an innovative business, offering greater efficiency, convenience, economy and security for its customers, benefiting its drivers and the local economies where it operates. But Uber’s business model is aggressive, secretive and predatory, glossing over its questionable sustainability and distorting comparisons with competitors it seeks to displace. As a private company, Uber is not obliged to publish its accounts nor to have them audited by accepted accounting standards applicable to public companies. Transport analyst Hubert Horan reckons that through 2015 Uber’s investors were effectively subsidizing passenger fares by as much as 49%.

That is especially relevant in the case of Nicaragua where the taxi sector of the transport industry is dominated by low income drivers grouped in cooperatives, and by very small family businesses, especially in the capital Managua. Nicaragua’s government policy supports providers of public transport across the country, from Managua’s urban bus and taxi services to the river buses of the Rio San Juan, or from Nicaragua’s very efficient inter-city transport network to the boats that serve communities along the country’s Caribbean Coast. The support takes various forms, for example compensating bus cooperatives for the cap on bus fares in Managua, preferential prices to taxi and bus cooperatives for lubricants, tires and spare parts or credit support for the purchase of new vehicles. This support for Nicaragua’s transport industry keeps fares within the reach of ordinary Nicaraguan families, most of whom are on very low incomes.

By contrast, the clear business strategy of Uber’s investors is to work ruthlessly to gain a monopoly position both within individual countries and internationally too. That strategy has involved years of pricing fares at below cost in order to hijack market share and promote an image of Uber as some kind of unstoppable natural force, encouraging more investors and creating an enormous wannabe gravity-defying Ponzi-like contraption vainly trying to generate enough business to be able to take off. A more likely outcome is that the business will eventually fall apart into one or more smaller viable components, for example selling data extracted from customers' patterns of using Uber's service.

Uber’s public relations falsely suggest it introduces healthy competition into a transport market vitiated by special interests jealously protecting poor service and anti-competitive practice. But the basis of Uber’s business model has nothing to do with innovation or fair competition and everything to do with classic predatory capitalism, maximizing profits by externalizing costs as much as possible and minimizing costs it cannot externalize. For example, prior to 2016, Uber’s commission on each journey. was 20%. Then, Uber hiked its take to 25% of each fare. In contrast to conventional car hire and taxi businesses Uber’s model avoids taxation and regulation and costs like auto insurance, vehicle purchase, maintenance, taxes and depreciation or security. All that burden is absorbed by the drivers before they even begin to make any income.

Similarly, Uber’s multinational business tax profile offers minimal contribution to the upkeep of roads and highways. Uber may pay the authorities of a given country for permission to operate there, but the amount will certainly be much less than the revenue lost from transport operators displaced by Uber’s predatory business model. Nor is it true, as Uber’s promoters argue, that Uber makes more efficient use of its drivers’ vehicles. A typical Uber driver wastes 40% of their time driving between fares. So it is false to argue that Uber contributes to the local economy or is environmentally more sustainable than other taxi businesses. Uber contributes nothing to public health systems to cover costs from accidents involving their drivers’ or to mitigate environmental pollution their drivers’ vehicles create.

Uber’s app is easy for anyone technically competent to write and was hardly innovative even when it appeared. For decades, local car-sharing and solidarity-taxi initiatives have pooled resources to reduce costs and make more efficient use of transport resources by reducing operating, administrative and insurance costs and parking problems. They too use contemporary communications technology via smart phones and the Internet. The only thing uniquely extraordinary about Uber is how its promoters have managed to network elites so effectively as to attract over US$60bn in investment for a business model that, as Hubert Horan demonstrates, will never match the development of Internet based companies like Amazon or Facebook.

The idea that Uber might start operating in Nicaragua was floated by the private business umbrella organization COSEP based on the suggestion that Uber would help modernize, diversify and make more efficient Nicaragua’s existing taxi services. COSEP’s support for Uber is logical given the corporate business interests dominating its membership. Nor was it surprising that Uber’s public relations bamboozled consumer organizations and media outlets with shallow “innovation” gobbledygook. Announcing the government’s policy decision, leaders of Nicaragua's cooperative movement attributed it to the need to avoid conflict with the cooperatives and family businesses that operate Nicaragua’s taxi services. Nicaragua’s transport services may be defective in some respects, but they deliver a proven, robust service to millions of Nicaraguans every day.

More importantly, they do so as a grass roots associative network defending the still precarious standard of living of many thousands of Nicaraguan families in a mutually beneficial relationship with local and national government. As more people in Nicaragua adapt to new technologies, they will themselves develop new ways of mediating exchanges in goods and services without paying a cut to foreign multinationals like Uber. For the moment, Nicaragua has been able to defend an important component of its grass roots cooperative, associative, community and family driven economy against Uber.

As Sandinista strategist Orlando Nuñez Soto argues in his introduction to the Foro Sao Paulo’s just published “A Consensus for Our America” the region’s progressive governments and social and political movements have created a new economy based on strategies by which people at grass roots across Latin America and the Caribbean survived the long years of neoliberal catastrophe. That new economy, much of it still precarious, contributes over 50% of the region’s GDP. As it becomes more sophisticated it is progressively expanding into regional and global markets despite increasing corporate efforts to exclude them so as to preserve the chokehold of capitalist businesses leeching surpluses from the region’s economies. Since 2010, that new economy has made it possible for Nicaragua to grow faster than its Central American neighbors. Excluding Uber shows Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is serious about defending that new economy and promoting genuine economic democracy.

http://www.tortillaconsal.com/tortilla/node/2412
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 15, 2019 10:22 pm

Nicaragua in the Shadow of Western Fascism

By: Tortilla con Sal

Image
Pro governement march in Nicaragua | Photo: teleSUr

Published 21 May 2019

Current US and EU foreign policy embodies fascism in terms of its aspect combining corporate power with State power and policy.

In her Sorbonne University exam results, French philosopher Simone Weil scored better than Simone de Beauvoir or Jean-Paul Sartre. She well understood the varieties of Western fascism and imperialism. So it’s worth paying attention to her remark that Europeans were shocked by Nazi crimes because the Nazis did to them what Europeans did to the people in their colonies. Weil’s remark was hardly news to people in the majority world, but it bears repeating to people in North America and Europe now.

Current US and EU foreign policy embodies fascism in terms of its aspect combining corporate power with State power and policy. The glitzy contemporary version prioritizes monopoly corporate finance and media as a means to achieving what the US and EU elites want, avoiding the mass destruction of war with uncertain global outcomes against obdurate, determined antagonists. That is the underlying meaning of contemporary sanctions and psychological warfare against Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and, in Latin America, against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, this reality is self-evident given the nature of US and EU proxies. The US and the EU support repressive organized-crime regimes in Colombia, Brazil and Argentina and those regimes’ counterparts among the political opposition of Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. A corollary of that support is the inability of these subaltern political blocs to tell the truth or honor agreements, exactly like their overseers in North America and Europe.

Examples abound of this reality. Early in 2018 the Venezuelan opposition was on the point of signing an agreement with President Nicolas Maduro’s government but dropped out at the very last minute on orders from US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Similarly, the US authorities unilaterally abandoned the process easing tensions with Cuba after years of negotiations and just recently they intensified sanctions by activating previously unused measures under the notorious Helms-Burton Act.

In Colombia, the latest violation of the increasingly debased peace agreement has been the re-arrest of Jesus Santrich on phony narcotics charges after his release under the agreement’s key judicial provision, the Special Peace Jurisdiction. That abuse of the agreement follows over 120 murders of demobilized FARC fighters by Colombia’s army and their narco-terror paramilitary allies. Similar gross bad faith characterizes right-wing abuse of judicial practice in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador and the desperate, unsuccessful maneuvers of the opposition in Bolivia against the presidential candidacy of Evo Morales.

This is the regional context for the political negotiations here in Nicaragua between President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government and the US bought-and-paid-for opposition. In contrast to the political opposition in Venezuela, in Nicaragua, the talks are not even with elected politicians. The US controlled opposition representatives have deliberately excluded electorally bankrupt right-wing political parties from the talks The opposition negotiators are almost without exception individuals from organizations dependent one way or another on US financial support.

The Nicaraguan government has accepted talks with these unrepresentative opposition figures in a process mediated by the Papal Nuncio and a delegate from the Organization of American States. The discussions have been continuing formally since March this year with some progress on issues like the conditional release of prisoners convicted of crimes during last year’s failed coup attempt, the return of opposition supporters who fled the country last year, electoral reforms and reinforcing existing constitutional guarantees. All of these are important concessions by the government.

For their part, the opposition refuses to commit either to renouncing future violence or to a joint call with the government for an end to sanctions damaging the Nicaraguan economy. Nor do they seem open to agreeing on a mechanism guaranteeing the implementation of any final agreement that may be reached. In effect, they seem to think the threat of continuing US sanctions and even intervention exonerates them from making any meaningful concessions.

As the talks wear on, the government’s good faith contrasts more and more strongly with the opposition’s bad faith, both to the majority of Nicaragua’s people and to the mediating delegates. As a smokescreen for their perfidy, the opposition periodically stages distractions either via media theatricals or calculated violence. The latest example of this has been a series of attacks by opposition prisoners in the penitentiary where they are detained. But the Nicaraguan authorities preempted the propaganda value of those attacks by inviting the Red Cross to monitor conditions for those prisoners, a measure which has undercut the opposition’s false claims of abuse.

Two things remain absolutely clear at this stage of the failed US and EU attempts to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Firstly, people supporting the Nicaraguan opposition are accomplices to profoundly anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian Western government efforts at regime change against a successful progressive government. Secondly, like their fascist counterparts in Venezuela and Colombia, the Nicaraguan opposition is treacherous quislings committed to serving and obeying foreign corporate interests. They have nothing to offer in response to the impeccable national human development plan of President Ortega’s Sandinista government.

Everything suggests that the opposition delegates are determined to find an excuse either to walk away from the current talks or to renege on any eventual agreement. President Ortega’s government negotiators have already made and implemented important concessions but are sticking to their demand that the opposition call for an end to sanctions. In the end, a final agreement may well be reached, but the US and EU owners of Nicaragua’s opposition will never let them honor it. In fact, it may not be entirely true that Nicaragua’s opposition has no plan for their country: they want to be the rulers of a neoliberal hell like Honduras or Haiti.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/ ... -0022.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 12, 2019 1:32 pm

Nicaragua: 4,800 Local Peace Commissions in Place for Dialogue

Image
Supporters of Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega during 40th anniversary of the "Repliegue" (Withdrawal) of Samoza government. Managua, Nicaragua July 6, 2019 | Photo: Reuters

Published 11 July 2019 (10 hours 49 minutes ago)

FSLN legislator Carlos Emilio Lopez says the commissions are, "healing the pains, traumas, resentments," from last year's opposition protests.


Nicaragua's government announces that it has created over 4,800 peace commissions throughout the country that allows the population to dialogue to reach peace.

The government of Nicaragua reported Thursday that 4,802 Reconciliation, Justice and Peace Commissions have begun throughout the Central American nation that are working to promote discussions toward peace among all sectors of the population.

During the July 11 presentation, FSLN legislator Carlos Emilio Lopez said these commissions demonstrate unity as a necessary element to consolidate the economic and social growth of the country.

The meetings amongst citizens are held at the municipal, departmental and national levels, which allows the participation and inclusion of all Nicaraguans.

Participants "continue to advance and grow these spaces of fraternal coexistence where the common denominator is that we must work for peace," said Lopez in the capital of Managua.

The lawmaker also said the commissions are a space for people affected by the acts of violence that occurred last year to overcome the damage caused by extremist groups, and have developed rapidly over the past several months.

"Step by step they are healing the pains, traumas, resentments, psychosomatic effects and internal wounds. ... We continue to advance and grow in these spaces of coexistence," said the Sandanista.

When the creation of the commissions were announced earlier this year, Vice President Rosario Murillo said of the participatory space: “Nicaraguan families want security, work, prosperity, peace and we are winning it, it is the truth, because the majority of Nicaraguans want to live in peace.”

Protests, with the links to the U.S. government, broke out in April 2018 against Nicaragua’s leftist government after President Daniel Ortega proposed a social security reform that sought to overcome the system’s financial crisis by increasing contributions by both employees and employers to avoid raising the nation's retirement age.

The president quickly withdrew the reform and issued calls for dialogue, but demonstration were nearly immediately coopted by right-wing insurgents that tried to overthrow the Sandanista government. ​​​​​

According to the national Commission, 270 people died and over 2,100 were injured during the three months of protests. In addition, a number of attacks were carried out against police stations, government buildings and ruling party institutions resulting in the deaths of 22 police officers and several local Sandinista activists.

In a previous statement, the Nicaragua Commission said it "rejects the interventionism" and "antagonistic" nature of the U.S. in the nation's peace process.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Nic ... -0021.html

*******************************
Nicarauga Has the Lowest Murder Rate in Central America: UN

Image
Granada, Nicaragua | Photo: Flickr

Published 9 July 2019
Nicaragua has the lowest homicide rate of 8.3 murders per 100,000 citizens, which comes in stark contrast to neighbors Honduras and El Salvador that have nearly 70 murders per 100,000 citizens.


A new report issued on Monday by the U.N. has revealed shockingly high homicide rates across Central America and the Carribean, however, Nicaragua was shown to have the lowest in the region, coming well below the average for the Americas.

The global study on homicide is issued annually by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which revealed this year that Nicaragua has the lowest homicide rate in Central America with 8.3 murders per 100,000 citizens, which comes in stark contrast to neighbors Honduras and El Salvador that have nearly 70 murders per 100,000 citizens.

For the Carribean, Jamaica has the highest with a score of over 40, followed by Trinidad and Tobago which has a similar figure to Colombia and Brazil, standing at around 30.

Those with the lowest homicide rates include Chile and Bolivia, both lower than Nicaragua.

Another revelation was that those countries with the highest murder rates in Latin America have significantly higher numbers than African countries with the highest murders rates. Both El Salvador and Honduras have around double the rate of South Africa.

Nicaragua has long had a relatively low crime rate for the region. Despite suffering many years of interal armed conflict in the 1980s when the U.S. government sponsored the "Contras," a counter insurgency against the leftist Sandinista government.

Despite the violence of those years, some say that it’s precisely the spirit of solidarity engendered by the Sandinista revolution that has contributed to the country’s relative social peace.

“The revolution didn’t just radically alter policing structures, it also altered consciousness. That consciousness and the reforms to the police remain one of the most important and lasting legacies of the revolution, something we’re very proud of,” said Argentina Martínez, the country director of the Nicaragua office of the 'Save the Children’ NGO. , in an interview with The Nation last year.

Progressive policies of social inclusion have also contributed to reducing poverty and inequality, key drivers of crime and violence. A 2017 World Bank report recognized Nicaragua’s achievements, saying that they have “undergone a solid economic recovery from a very low base.”

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Nic ... -0010.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 26, 2019 8:39 pm

Image

FSLN statement: Sandino Yes, Somoza No!
August 25, 2019 German Van de Velde no comment
In November 1966, the central leadership of the FSLN published a manifesto repudiating the Republican policy Mobilization of PSN (Nicaraguan Socialist Party), entitled «Yes Sandino, Somoza no, Revolution Yes, election no! Farce" . The content of this manifesto is presented below:

Date: November 25, 1966

Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) Press Release

Nicaraguan brothers:

Sincerity and shame
The Nicaraguan people are being victims of the maneuver of an electoral farce, which is proposed to impose Anastasio Somoza Debayle in the presidency of the country. It is intended to prolong for a longer time the long regime of misery and pain, which our people have suffered; it is intended to unite our homeland to the yoke of the dollar for longer.

Faced with the perfidious lunge that is perpetrated against the anguished people of Nicaragua, the FSLN, while analyzing the national situation we suffer, raises its voice to reaffirm the oath of free country or die. We are a movement whose unwavering decision to defend justice, has as infallible witness the blood of our fallen comrades in the mountains of the rivers north of the country.

While there is sincerity in the oath to reaffirm at this time, there is also some shame in our voice. It is that, in our opinion, the current moments, with the people martyred and besieged, are appropriate, not for kind promises, but for courageous actions.

There is a lot of mud that floods morale in our country; and we who have aspired to be generous, not yet able to resume libertarian action, it seems that this mud has splashed us. Maybe so. But in the ranks of the FSLN militates a youth that will know how to shake the mud drop, to wield the patriotic and popular weapon. Let's briefly see what is happening in Nicaragua.

They turned the opposition union into a ploy
In its growth the rebellion against the Somocista regime, has encountered tremendous obstacles, provoked within the same opposition forces. The leading groups of the entities are charged with this grave guilt: Conservative Party of Nicaragua, Nicaraguan Social Christian Party and Independent Liberal Party. For long months, such elements were determined to keep the opposition divided, considerably distracting energy in internal complaints. Finally, the rival fractions into which the Conservative Party and the Social-Christian Party are divided, and the preferences of the capitalist class are disputed, turned the National Opposition Union into a sectarian ploy. Beside these,

In fact, the leading groups that control the National Opposition Union, and in particular the addresses of the Conservative Party and the Social-Christian Party, have lent themselves to the games of the Somocist regime. These elements make an opposition with «droppers». It is no coincidence that these gentlemen's attitude coincides with that of their predecessors, the conservative politicians who, for more than thirty years, have thwarted popular resistance against the Somocist regime with their compromises and flirtations.

In the face of opposition adopted by the conservative leadership and its acolytes, a deduction can be drawn. And, what they propose, more than the overthrow of Somocismo, is to remain as a reserve of the reactionary system, to go out to the fore when the time comes, when the people, tired of so much reproach, get up in search of new fair directions.

The electoral farce and the military coup
Politicians who have taken over the opposition union intend to drag our people towards the electoral farce. From the first moment we have declared repudiation of such a farce, which in short is nothing more than a brown to distract and lead to failure the deep discontent of the oppressed masses. But these politicians realize that the Nicaraguan people have evolved in conscience, and that, despite all the electoral tricks, this people can find new routes in its search for a different life, full of happiness. It is due to this circumstance, that while talking about elections, such politicians encourage the verification of a military coup against the Somocista clique. This coup can never be confused with popular violence, that has to face the antipopular somocista violence. This coup is nothing more than a trick to find a way out that prevents the effective participation of the great masses in achieving a change within the political landscape of the country.

In denouncing the reactionary nature of a military coup, we do not want in any way to belittle the important role of the patriotic sector that undoubtedly exists within the National Guard. It is a sector that has as glorious precursors a series of military martyrs. There is only a solid basis, so that the decision of struggle of all sectors is not diverted to new deceptions by the ambitious unscrupulous. Such a basis is the open participation of the crowds and their combat conscious bodies.

Intransigence before electoral claudication
The sector of the revolutionary left with which we have maintained differences has manifested itself in favor of participation in the electoral process, including the casting of the vote on election day. We, on the other hand, hold the most effective repudiation of the electoral farce. In defining our line, we have kept in mind the obligation of revolutionaries to be in contact and at the head of the fighting masses. We prepare our line, based on the national conditions of our country. We have taken charge of the defeatist and conformist avalanche that the reactionary elements of the opposition imprint on the popular struggle. In view of this, we consider it indispensable to assume a position of intransigence in the face of electoral claudication, the only way to counteract the defeatist offensive.

It is true that it is the obligation of the revolutionaries to conquer the most vast unity of the various forces. What we criticize a certain sector of the left, is that the whole accent of popular mobilization be placed exclusively in unity; putting ultimately, and often giving no place, independent action of the revolutionary movement. Let us keep in mind, dear friends, the characteristics and even the traditions of the political branch of the opposition. If independent revolutionary action does not occupy a high level, we are not unifying the people, but putting the fate of Nicaragua in bad hands. Unity should not degenerate in surrender of the popular struggle to the conservative ruling sector. Unity must be a fighting emulation between the different forces that make up the opposition.

Unity and no delivery
It is clear that we do not close our eyes to the influence that the leaders of the old capitalist parties still exert in a sector of the people. That is why we do not deny the need for unity. But that for us must be exactly that, UNIT and not delivery.

In parallel to the above, we appreciate the weakening of the influence of capitalist leaderships on the broad masses, also giving rise to the phenomenon that in such sectors such influence has disappeared, being replaced by revolutionary consciousness.

After all, what is happening in Nicaragua, comes only to confirm a truth. This refers to the fact that the capitalist and Yankee forces do not represent the popular masses who, exploited and laborious, are the most anxious to arrive at a new era. These experiences are attracting many people in the sense that the flag of victory has the sacred words inscribed on their mantle: Homeland and work.

We wouldn't even stand alone
The Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN, does not want to go alone to the field of the revolutionary struggle, since no Nicaraguan, whatever the opinions that sustain, can be deprived of the right to defend the popular ideal. But we want to tell the people that if we don't find company, it won't be a pretext for us to continue to cross our arms.

The sergeant of West Point
Anastasio Somoza Debayle, sergeant of the Yankee barracks of West Point, can be told that even if he officially invades the Tiscapa Hill, he would make a big mistake if he considered himself victorious. Keep in mind Anastasio Somoza Debayle, thief and murderer, that the people of Nicaragua will charge a high price for their countless crimes.

Every day we convince ourselves more that the action to the taste of the Somoza leguleyos, by virtue of democratizing the country, what it leads to is to embolden the enemies of honest Nicaraguans. We know that the effective revolutionary struggle causes the anger of the Yankee masters. But we also know that a struggle that starts from the copious teachings of our heroic national history can challenge any type of aggression.

Nicaraguan brothers: Let us be worthy descendants of Augusto César Sandino, the greatest popular hero of Latin America, and who victoriously challenged the most aggressive imperialist power: The Yankee boot.

To the fight, Nicaraguan brothers: for the land, for work, for culture.

FREE HOMEWORK OR DIE!

Sandinista National Liberation Front

Carlos Fonseca , Silvio Mayorga, Rigoberto Cruz, Oscar Turcios, Conchita Alday. Managua, November 25, 1966

https://cuadernosandinista.com/2019/08/ ... somoza-no/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 27, 2019 11:03 am

NICARAGUA, NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX August 25, 2019
Counting deaths for dollars: the rise and fall of Nicaragua’s ‘human rights’ organizations

Image

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.
By John Perry

When political conflict results in people being killed – especially at the hands of a government – the deaths are not just personal tragedies, they become fodder for that government’s foes. This dynamic unfolded during last year’s attempted coup in Nicaragua, when the opposition tried and failed to bring down the elected government of President Daniel Ortega through a nationwide campaign of protest and violent sabotage.

When the regime change attempt was finally halted in July 2018, the opposition alleged through a triad of “human rights” NGO’s that the government had killed anywhere from 325 to 500 protesters.

This death toll was repeated in practically every international media report, on the floor of the US Congress, and in the halls of the Organization of American States, all to drum up support for sanctioning the Nicaraguan government.

Image
The Guardian was among papers that reported now-discredited death counts without a shred of skepticism.

But a year later, the ‘human rights’ outfits whose reports generated these numbers have started to fall apart. And as their US funding dries up, their former staffers have begun to reveal the truth about their dubious data.

The Grayzone reported last month on the dramatic break-up of the Nicaragua Association for Human Rights (ANPDH), an opposition NGO whose board of directors confessed to exaggerating the death toll in order to rake in more US government money.

In a press conference this July that was totally ignored by corporate media, ANPDH ex-director Gustavo Bermúdez accused his former boss, Álvaro Leiva, of having “inflated the death toll.” Bermúdez said, “We personally asked him where you got that figure; a friend called me saying to please get his grandmother who died of a heart attack off the list of people who were supposedly victims of the repression.”

But ANPDH group is only one part of a sizable human rights industry in Nicaragua that has functioned as a weapon of regime-change, putting politics over professionalism in order to secure their maximalist goals. And now that the coup they participated in has failed, their network is collapsing and their directors are positioned in a circular firing squad.

The opposition’s propaganda machine
Until recently, three local bodies claimed to monitor human rights, all doing so with foreign funding. Their work complimented regular reports by international bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW), and frequent interventions by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the UN Commission for Human Rights (UNCHR). Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan government operated own human rights office. Though the international bodies have enormous resources, the three small local bodies have had a disproportionate influence on them.

The oldest local NGO, the Permanent Commission on Human Rights (CPDH for its initials in Spanish) dates from before Nicaragua’s 1979 revolution, and receives funding from the US regime-change outfit, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). For its part, the Nicaragua Association for Human Rights (ANPDH) was set up in Miami with $3 million from the Reagan administration in the 1980s, with the aim of whitewashing the violence of the US-backed ‘Contra’ forces that were attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government. The third of these opposition NGO’s is CENIDH, or the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights. This group was set up with European funding in 1990, and is headed by an ex-FSLN member, Vilma Nuñez de Escorcia, who is one of the founders of the opposition MRS party.

None of these three bodies have made any attempt at political neutrality. Indeed, all were opposed to the Sandinista government well before last year’s coup attempt. But when the overthrow attempt began last April, they became a key part of the opposition’s propaganda machine.

CENIDH and ANPDH, in particular, published regular reports whose bias is made obvious by the language: CENIDH, for example, referred to the Nicaraguan government, elected in 2016, as the ‘dictatorial regime’ of Daniel Ortega and (vice-president) Rosario Murillo. This group’s initial report, issued on May 4, immediately exaggerated the numbers of deaths by recording six fatalities on the first day of the violence (April 19), all but one attributed to the government, when in fact there were only three: a police officer, a Sandinista defending a town hall from attack, and an uninvolved bystander. By late July, CENIDH’s fifth report logged 302 deaths, all attributed to “state terrorism.”

By the same date, ANPDH was reporting no less than 448 deaths in ‘civic protests’, a figure repeated by the BBC, MSN, news sources across the West and the United Nations Human Rights Council. By early September, ANPDH’s death count had reached 481, of which 455 were listed as “homicides.”

ANPDH director Álvaro Leiva categorized the deaths with remarkable confidence and specificity: 152 died in “random executions,” Leiva claimed, while 116 were killed in “planned executions,” 86 in “disproportionate” clashes between government forces and civilians, 57 in “selective executions,” 36 deaths “appear to be planned and executed by hooded and armed paramilitaries,” and only eight were unexplained. By the end of the same month in which there was very little violence, ANPDH’s death toll – all blamed on the government – had reached 512. According to ANPDH, a further 1,300 people had “disappeared.”

By early July last year, the accounts published by the ‘human rights’ bodies had already started to unravel. Enrique Hendrix, a resident of Managua, went systematically through the death counts to produce a report he called Monopolizing death: Or how to frame a government by inflating a list of the dead.

By identifying each victim, he was able to spot double-counting and in most cases, determine the real cause of death. Hendrix found, for example, that CENIDH’s list included a suicide, traffic accidents and various duplications or unexplained deaths. Of the 167 deaths included in their early reports, just 31% (51 people) were actually protesters who had died in the conflict. In the case of ANPDH, which by that stage had logged 285 deaths, only 20% (58) were confirmed as protesters. A report released weeks later by the Nicaraguan National Assembly’s Truth Commission also found a huge gap between ANPDH’s figures and the real number of deaths arising from the conflict.

International “human rights” bodies echo opposition disinformation
Following the publication of Amnesty International’s unbalanced and poorly researched investigations of last year’s violence, a group of local researchers responded with a report called Dismissing the Truth. This paper examined in detail the casualty lists produced by the ‘human rights’ bodies relating to the central zone of Nicaragua, where considerable violence occurred in and around the roadblocks set up by the opposition and guarded by people with weapons.

Through a case-by-case examination, the researchers found that of the 16 reported deaths that were confirmed as conflict-related, 15 were killed as the result of opposition action (the victims consisted of five police officers, six government supporters or workers, and five unaffiliated citizens). For the 16th and final conflict-related death, responsibility was undetermined, and possibly was the result of crossfire.

In addition to these 16 deaths, ANPDH reported another 18 which, on investigation, were clearly not a result of the conflict. Causes of death included fights between armed opposition activists at roadblocks (e.g. over money), robberies, a road accident and two cases where names were duplicated. In other words, more than half the deaths recorded by ANPDH were wrongly attributed to the conflict. Nevertheless, ANPDH gave the impression that all 34 deaths resulted from government violence, when the evidence showed that only one possibly did so.

Shockingly, evidence of malpractice and outright mendacity by by local “human rights” bodies was largely ignored by the international bodies monitoring the casualties from last year’s conflict. The first report by the Organization of American States’ Inter American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) listed 212 deaths, but Hendrix found only 25% of those (52 deaths) were actual protesters. Nor did IACHR identify deaths which were opposition killings, thus giving the same impression as the local bodies that all, or most, of the deaths it counted were attributable to government repression.

By September, Amnesty International had pushed the death toll to 322, claiming that “most [occurred] at the hands of state agents.” It based its allegation on the counts by IACHR and the local bodies. Amnesty’s second report on the conflict absurdly condemned the government for “challenging the information put forward by human rights organizations,” as if they were above criticism and their casualty lists should have been accepted without a hint of skepticism.

Of course, the whole point of examining and challenging the lists was precisely because they were part of the propaganda drive against the Ortega government, referred to in practically every international media report on the crisis and cited as authoritative by international bodies, including detailed references to ANPDH by the UN Commission for Human Rights in its 2018 report on Nicaragua.

As late as last December, when the violence was months in the past, the IACHR’s secretary general Paulo Abrão was still denouncing Nicaragua as a “police state.” In a session attended by all three local opposition bodies (CPDH, CENIDH and ANPDH), he said that “not a day goes by” when the IAHCR fails to receive a report of a human rights abuse from the country, presumably via those organizations.

Yet by February 2019, the Truth Commission was able to issue a final report on the death toll from the attempted coup which, after exhaustive analysis of the different sources, confirmed the total number of conflict-related deaths as 253 – less than half that claimed by ANPDH six months before. Those deaths consisted of 31 known supporters of the opposition, 48 probable or actual Sandinista supporters, 22 police and the remainder (152) of unknown affiliation.

Things fall apart
But 2019 has turned out to be a bad year for the three ‘human rights’ bodies. ANPDH and CENIDH were found by the government to have violated their own statutes and their registration as NGOs was terminated. Some of their functionaries fled to Costa Rica. CPDH continues, but its lawyer, María Oviedo, was arrested recently when, in a visit to a police station in support of a leading opposition member who had been found to have an unregistered firearm, she slapped a police officer. The officials of the other two bodies are fighting among themselves. When CENIDH director Gonzalo Carrión tried to open a new NGO in Costa Rica, he was denied support by ex-colleagues who feared he would pocket the foreign donations and use them for his own purposes.

The fate of the former staff members of ANPDH is most disturbing, however. The former general secretary, Álvaro Leiva, was given asylum in Costa Rica last October, a move welcomed by the IAHCR’s Paulo Abrão, who awarded him “protective measures” this June.

Image
ANPDH board member and anti-Ortega activist Gustavo Bermúdez accused his group’s director, Álvaro Leiva, of embezzlement and fraud on a massive scale

However, as The Grayzone reported, when Leiva attempted to open a new NGO in Costa Rica, his former colleagues angrily accused him of appropriating funds supplied by US bodies such as the NED. More importantly, they revealed that Leiva personally ordered them to inflate ANPDH’s casualty counts last year because he believed padding the death tolls would help secure extra funding from the US. ANPDH director Gustavo Bermúdez, in a press conference ignored by corporate media, said:

“Álvaro Leiva inflated the death toll. We personally asked him where you got that figure; a friend called me saying to please get his grandmother who died of a heart attack off the list of people who were supposedly victims of the repression.”

ANPDH received over $88,000 from the NED, and $348,000 from other US sources last year. CPDH received $180,000 from the NED in 2018 alone, out of NED spending of $1.8 million spent that year to promote Nicaragua’s opposition bodies.

The NED and USAID clearly viewed Nicaraguan organizations working in the human rights field as one of the most crucial elements of Washington’s regime-change agenda. By incentivizing NGO’s to produce anti-government disinformation, the US set the stage for their public collapse of their credibility.

Critics of the Contras transform into soft coup supporters
Allen Weinstein, a founding member of the NED told the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.” It is therefore hardly surprising that among the biggest recipients of NED funding in Latin America have been NGO’s operating in nations that John Bolton has labelled the “troika of tyranny”: Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela.

And while the NED dumped US money into supposedly neutral human rights bodies that functioned as regime-change weapons, the international media provided them with an uncritical platform for disseminating their propaganda without ever mentioning the source of their funding.

It was not always this way, however. Back in 1989, Human Rights Watch slammed ANPDH as “for all intents and purposes a US State Department funded arm of the Nicaraguan Resistance,” referring to the CIA-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government. The left-leaning political magazine Envío was also highly critical of both CPDH and ANPDH in the 1980s. It described Lino Hernández, then director of the CPDH, as coming from a “far right” background. Commenting on the $3 million ANPDH received from the US government, the magazine asked “What kind of human rights watchdogging has the ANPDH done with all this money? Hardly a whimper, much less a bark.”

A NGO prominent at the time, the Catholic Institute for International Relations, pointed out that ANPDH did not even set up a Nicaragua office until after the Sandinistas left power in 1990. In its report on a Contra attack in which women and a baby had its throat slit, ANPDH exonerated the Contra forces involved. Paul Laverty, a Nicaragua-based human rights lawyer, also strongly criticised CPDH for ignoring atrocities by the Contras.

Skepticism was not only reserved for the local “human rights” bodies. Envío was critical of Human Rights Watch and, even more so, of Amnesty International, accusing both of a “lack of thoroughness” and criticizing Amnesty for its “extremely sloppy investigation” and “unquestioning reliance” on reports from biased organizations like CPDH. While working for Scottish Medical Aid for Nicaragua, Laverty published a damning critique of Amnesty’s assessment of human rights under the 1979-1990 Sandinista government, concluding that their accusations of harsh treatment of political prisoners were exaggerated or, at worst, entirely unfounded.

Thirty years later, critical thinking about the real role of Nicaraguan “human rights” NGO’s in stirring up regime-change is practically off limits. When ANPDH and CENIDH lost their NGO registration last year, HRW complained that, “Public officials repeatedly made stigmatizing statements to undermine the credibility of [human rights] defenders.” As noted earlier, Amnesty does not even accept the Nicaraguan government’s right to analyze the death counts produced by human rights bodies. Envío magazine, meanwhile, has become an unflinching critic of the Ortega government and supporter of CENIDH; Paul Laverty, now a screenwriter famous for his work with Ken Loach, has lent support to opposition members touring Europe to promote their anti-Sandinista message.

Raking in millions to advance empire
Meanwhile, human rights has become a lucrative and glitzy business. HRW, for example, has 450 staff members and a budget of over $90 million, while Amnesty’s global budget reaches almost $300 million. While HRW relies heavily on the fortune of anti-communist billionaire George Soros, Amnesty gains much of its budget from small donations, and its need to maintain its profile has brought multiple criticisms of its “toxic” working culture.

Both organizations have been criticized for their alignment with US government policy in Latin America, where their attention focuses particularly on the countries in Bolton’s “troika of tyranny” while downplaying or ignoring the huge damage caused to people in those countries by US intervention. (AI’s most recent, 56-page report on Venezuela, Hunger for Justice, only has the briefest reference to US sanctions).

In the case of Nicaragua, the local ‘human rights’ bodies provided HRW and AI with evidence that fit their own prejudices about the Ortega government. While these local bodies depended on publicity from HRW and AI to maintain credibility, they also needed to demonstrate to US government organizations like the NED that they were useful regime-change weapons.

Thanks to this toxic dynamic, CDPH, ANPDH and CENIDH are in complete disarray, and their former staffers are spilling the beans about the bogus death tolls they spun out to justify US funding. A year after they helped stoke a coup, the only regime that is changing is their own.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/25/deat ... nizations/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 18, 2020 4:09 pm

NicaNotes: Right-wing Nicaraguan opposition boasts of support from US and EU in campaign to oust Sandinista gov’t
February 12, 2020
The US embassy and European Union are meeting with right-wing Nicaraguan opposition leaders and pressuring them to unite against elected leftist President Daniel Ortega in the lead-up to the 2021 election.

By Ben Norton, reprinted from Grayzone Project February 7, 2020

A far-right opposition figure in Nicaragua has boasted that the country’s unpopular opposition forces are meeting with representatives from the US embassy and European Union, who have pledged them support in their bid to oust the ruling leftist Sandinista Front government.

According to this rightist Evangelical leader, the US government and EU are pressuring Nicaragua’s badly divided opposition to unite in the lead-up to the 2021 election, with the goal of unseating the Sandinistas.

This frank admission of foreign meddling in Nicaragua’s democracy comes after a violent coup attempt in 2018, in which right-wing groups funded and supported by the US government failed to overthrow the elected president, Daniel Ortega.

The Donald Trump administration has declared the small nation of Nicaragua to be a supposed “national security threat,” and has imposed several rounds of aggressive sanctions on the country, with the aim of destabilizing its economy.

The violence and economic warfare has failed to weaken the popularity of the ruling FSLN party, however. A survey released this January by a mainstream polling firm found that 63.5 percent of Nicaraguans plan to vote for the Sandinistas in the upcoming election, while the opposition really only has the dedicated support of around 11.5 percent of the population.

‘We met with political advisers from the US embassy and the European Union’

On January 30, right-wing leaders from a group called the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy (ACJD) held a press conference to announce their expansion as part of a process of “fortifying.”

The ACJD is a coalition of opposition groups, several of which are funded by the US government and coordinate closely with Washington. It was formed in 2018 during the coup attempt against the Sandinistas.

In the press conference and a subsequent printed statement, the ACJD announced that it is in the process of creating “a National Coalition, wide, pluralist, and committed to the change that Nicaragua needs.”

Among the opposition figures at the presser was Saturnino Cerrato, the fundamentalist Evangelical leader of the rabidly right-wing Party for Democratic Restoration (PRD).

Cerrato, a minor figure in Nicaraguan politics who is barely known outside far-right circles, said his party is eager to become part of the right-wing National Coalition, arguing “there is a total opening” for the opposition.

He revealed that this demand for opposition unity is not only coming from inside the country, but also from powerful foreign actors.

“First it is a national demand, from the national community, and next it is also a demand from the international community,” Cerrato explained.

“In these days — the day before yesterday and today — we met with political advisers from the US embassy and the European Union,” Cerrato said in the January 30 press conference, which was livestreamed on Facebook.

The US embassy and EU told the opposition leaders, “We are ready to support a large movement that is formed in Nicaragua,” he recalled.

“And one of the advisers said, ‘We are surprised that it has taken so much time to form that unity,’” he added.

Cerrato said the pressure both from within and outside convinced his party to join the National Coalition efforts.

US and EU backing far-right fringe figures in Latin America

Before the US-backed coup attempt against Nicaragua’s elected Sandinista government in 2018, Saturnino Cerrato was virtually unknown in the country. His PRD party received just over 4 percent in the 2016 general elections.

A 2017 poll by major firm showed that more than 85 percent of Nicaraguans did not even know who Cerrato was or had no opinion of him. Of those who did know the right-wing pastor, they had a mostly negative view of him. (For perspective, this same poll found that 80 percent of Nicaraguans had a positive view of the leftist President Daniel Ortega, and just 11 percent had a negative view.)

A Nicaraguan activist told The Grayzone that figures like Cerrato “don’t have much local influence. But he is an Evangelical pastor who have the ability to influence many Evangelical groups.”

“He does not have a lot of people, he has one of the parties with very few votes,” the activist said. “But after the coup attempt they have tried to become more influential.”

The US government has a long history of elevating fringe far-right figures like these in coup efforts targeting independent leftist governments in Latin America.

In the putsch against Bolivia’s democratically elected leftist government in November 2019, for instance, Washington supported the installation of a Christian extremist with a long and documented history of anti-indigenous racism, Jeanine Añez. Her fringe opposition party also reaped just over 4 percent of the vote in the 2019 general elections.

More US-backed opposition groups leading Nicaragua alliance efforts

The opposition is moving towards greater unity while the Trump administration escalates its pressure campaign against Nicaragua’s government.

On January 31, the acting assistant secretary for the US State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Michael G. Kozak, tweeted condemnation of the elected Ortega government and expressed support for the major right-wing newspaper, La Prensa.

Owned by the oligarchic Chamorro family, La Prensa is the traditional mouthpiece for the opposition. It has a long history of receiving funding from the US government through the CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and was indispensable in the US government’s propaganda campaign against Nicaragua during its Contra proxy war in the 1980s.

The January 30 press conference held by Nicaragua’s Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy featured several other prominent right-wing opposition activists who are backed by Washington.

Among the co-sponsors was Juan Sebastián Chamorro of the powerful Chamorro clan, a wealthy family that has controlled Nicaragua for much of its history. His neoliberal think tank, the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUNIDES), has been bankrolled with millions of dollars by the US government’s soft-power arm the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and used as a conduit for funding smaller opposition groups.

Helping to organize the press conference was the group Blue and White National Unity (UNAB). Like the right-wing Civic Alliance, the UNAB was founded in 2018, in the wake of the failed coup attempt. It is an integral part of the US- and EU-backed efforts to form an opposition alliance. UNAB has even changed its photos on social media to call for a “National Coalition.”

Ben Norton

https://afgj.org/nicanotes-right-wing-n ... nista-govt

Ben Norton is to be trusted as far as he can be thrown, his treachery in ME reporting well documented. Nonetheless this piece is 'clean', but will never post his work without serious scrutiny.

********************************************************************

BRIEFS

By Nan McCurdy

New Film on Nicaragua

“Nicaragua – the April Crisis and Beyond”, a film by Dan Kovalik and German Gutierrez

http://www.tortillaconsal.com/tortilla/ ... 455ea1e115

Nicaragua Most Secure Country in Central America
A recent study published by the InSight Crime research center finds Nicaragua has one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to this research, Nicaragua ranks fourth in Latin America with 7.5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, a rate only surpassed by Ecuador, Argentina and Chile. In Central America, Honduras is the nation with the highest homicide rate with 41.2, followed by El Salvador with 36 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, Guatemala has 21.5 and Costa Rica 11 homicides, respectively. Nicaragua surpasses countries like Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Panama, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia and Jamaica, among others. In its annual balance of homicides, InSight Crime analyses the murder rates in each country, as well as the factors that influence these rates. In the case of Nicaragua, after an increase in violence in 2018 due to the attempted coup, the levels recorded in 2019 fell to the levels of 2017 and 2016. (Informe Pastran, 2/5/20)

Criminals Create Climate of Insecurity in Bonanza
The relatives of the four young Mayangnas who were atrociously murdered by a criminal group on January 29 in the municipality of Bonanza, North Caribbean Autonomous Region, filed a formal complaint with the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office on Feb. 5. Mayangna Professor Elías López Sebastián denounced the murder of his son by a criminal group and expressed fear because of the general citizen insecurity generated by such groups that want to take over their territories. “What happened that day was unforeseen; we were working the land. That group arrived at night and murdered my son and then burned the house, so we ask the government to intervene to bring about justice,” Lopez said in his mother tongue. Linda Rosa Gutiérrez said that her son was atrociously murdered by this criminal group and she asked for justice and support. “We are poor, indigenous people. This is so painful as a mother, and I ask for the full weight of the law,” she said. For his part, Melvin Davis, also from the Alal community, denounced the murder of his 22-year-old brother, who was fishing when he was tortured and killed. “We want the government to intervene to get these criminal groups out of the territory. If they are free it can happen again,” he said.

All of the complainants stated that a police post is needed in the communities to guarantee security in the reserve since they are remote territories. They all repeated that these criminal groups are people who dedicate themselves to murdering, raping, and then go into hiding in the large extensions of Mayangna territory. This endangers the native peoples who are the ancestral and legal owners of these lands and who are not armed or prepared to face their criminal acts. “They are criminals who intimidate the Mayangna community with weapons in order to take the properties and sell them,” said Professor Lopez . The complaints were received by Attorney Darling Rios, who stated that there is a comprehensive plan for immediate attention to the affected families and for rebuilding their homes. She said that police investigations continue. (Radiolaprimerisima, 2/6/20)

Man Attacked at UCA Demands Justice
José Leonel Suazo, who works as a gardener in a Managua hospital and was savagely attacked by a group of anti-government delinquents at the Central American University (UCA), demanded justice in that case on Feb. 5 saying his rights were violated. In declarations to Juventud Presidente, Suazo explained that when he went to seek information about studying English at the UCA he had no idea that he would be savagely attacked. “I was there to preregister for English; when I was leaving, I found that the gate was closed and that there was a protest. They were yelling at me but I didn’t think about it because I thought it wasn’t me, but then they jumped me and took my phone, and they began to beat me,” said Suazo. One of the attackers hit him with a belt on his back, while others kicked him, at which time the UCA security guards arrived but the situation got worse. “Suddenly I felt the blow on one part of my hand and that is why it is so swollen. They held me and hit me one after the other,” added Suazo. They demanded to see his documents, which he showed them. When they found a card from the National Police Commissariat they continued beating him. “They said I was a policeman, however the card does not say that I am a policeman; I am a gardener, I make an honest living, I work in a hospital,” he stressed.

Suazo asked the authorities at the Central American University to expel his attackers. “I am asking that my rights be respected; it is regrettable that a human rights organization such as the IACHR has not taken a stand on my case, so I am going to take precautionary measures, I am going to demand my legal rights. Today it happened to me, we don’t know who it will happen to next.” Short documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jd9lG5FYZg (Radiolaprimerisima, 2/6/20)

Workers, Government and Businesses Agree on Increase in Minimum Wage
The National Minimum Wage Roundtable agreed to increase the minimum wage for workers in the country who earn the lowest salary as of March 2020. The president of the Nicaraguan Council of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (CONIMIPYME), Leonardo Torres, said, “In order to fulfill the principle of dialogue and consensus for making key decisions for the economy and the supreme interest of the nation, CONIMIPYME has yielded in its proposal and supports an increase in the minimum wage of 2.63% as of March.” (Informe Pastran, 2/6/20)

Thousands Walk to Support Nicaraguan Women’s Rights
Sandinistas took to the streets around the country Feb. 8 supporting the progress on gender issues being made by the Sandinista Government. With the chant “We dream big in Nicaragua,” Janice Ruiz said that women support the government: “Here we are, the women of Bilwi, reaffirming the determination we have to continue moving forward with this government that has restored the rights of all women, we raise a single cry for the future: “Thank you President Ortega for all the effort and support for the Miskito, Mayangnas, mestizo and Creole women.” (Canal 8, 2/8/20)

Improvements on Granada Highway
Nicaragua Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure (MTI) Oscar Mojica announced that the improvement project on the Granada-Malacatoya highway began today. The US$7.28 million project will benefit 39,927 inhabitants in ten communities of the Department of Granada. Funding for the project comes from the General Budget of the Republic. (Nicaragua News, 2/5/20)

More Support for Small Coffee Producers
The Ministry of the Family Economy (MEFCCA) is allocating US$589,622 to support 400 small coffee growers in the Departments of Nueva Segovia, Estelí, Jinotega, Madriz and Matagalpa. This is part of the Strategy for the Development and Transformation of Coffee Growing that the Government is implementing in support of sustainable development of the sector. (Nicaragua News, 2/5/20)

Major Investment in Sports and Recreation in 2020
In 2020 new baseball and soccer stadiums will be built as well as multipurpose courts. Four new parks similar to the large Luis Alfonso Velázquez Park in Managua will be built. Marlon Torres, executive director of the Nicaraguan Institute of Sports said that during the government of Enrique Bolaños an average of US$800,000 was spent annually, but since President Daniel Ortega took office the sports budget has increased year by year to US$14.5 million that will be invested in 2020, a growth of 639%. “This is good news for Nicaragua, for sports, families and athletes, because we are going to have new sports infrastructure.” (Informe Pastran, 2/5/20)

Nicaragua Highlighted as Great Tourist Destination
The Sun, a British newspaper, has included Nicaragua among its 10 “hottest” destinations for 2020. Travel editor Lisa Scott notes that a “new chapter has opened for the Central American country,” and that it is “not surprising” that Nicaragua is being recognized as a key emerging destination, for its volcanoes, biological diversity and rainforest. “The Sun” is the best-selling newspaper in the UK, reaching 4.2 million readers and 8.5 million unique daily users of its digital platforms.

Also, The Intrepid Travel platform is launching its annual ‘Not Hot List’ which highlights a selection of lesser-discovered destinations that deserve attention and among them have placed Nicaragua as a destination to visit. Intrepid Travel assures that “Nicaragua has seen a resurgence in tourism, which allows the return to the land of lakes and volcanoes, where nature is uninterrupted, the food is delicious and the boarding of a volcano is really a bit scary but exciting.” (Informe Pastran, 2/10/20)

https://afgj.org/nicanotes-right-wing-n ... nista-govt

No fan of Dan Kovalik either(PSL), but www.tortillaconsal.com have been good so benefit of doubt...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 22, 2020 2:15 pm

NicaNotes: NACLA’s Latest on Nicaragua: Another Shameless Apology of U.S. Imperialism
February 19, 2020
By Camilo Mejia

[Link to original blog post: http://www.camiloemejia.com/?p=259]
In line with previous coverage of the 2018 crisis, NACLA’s latest article, The Anti-Sandinista Youth of Nicaragua, once again provides cover and legitimacy to the fascist regime change operation financed by the U.S. via the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and their affiliate agencies, which provided the funding that fueled the crisis. Anyone who finds such an assertion outrageous can read an article by The Global American, whose title says it all: Laying the Groundwork for Insurrection: a closer look at the U.S. role in Nicaragua’s social unrest.

The Global American article provides much insight into the role the U.S. has played in training and financing many of the groups cited by NACLA, financing that dates back to the 1980s, when the Reagan administration first created the NED which, in the words of its first president during a 1991 interview to the Washington Post“… does a lot of the work the CIA used to do 25 years ago.” That work includes the very unrest NACLA praises as activism against what it calls the Ortega dictatorship, but without providing any evidence outside the narratives promoted by NGOs financed by said US agencies.

NACLA portrays Nicaraguan youth as being highly disaffected with the FSLN, claiming they reached a breaking point as a result of the violence in April of 2018. But for the youth to have reached a breaking point, they must have been the targets of state violence leading up to the April 2018 protests, an assertion that cannot be corroborated by any evidence, not by any US-funded NGOs, not by national or international media, or any local or international human rights organizations, or any other group whatsoever. The only claims of assassinations, massacres, widespread oppression, torture, disappearances or any other human rights violations have been propagated exclusively by US-funded entities, both national and international, and they all allegedly took place within the three-month period of unrest, spanning from April through July of 2018.

The article depicts the Sandinista Youth (J.S. for its abbreviation in Spanish) as a political and military front of the FSLN, used to spy on and control the population, a factor that, along with the fallout of the global recession and perennial inequality, explain the flight of youth from the J.S. and the FSLN in general. What the article doesn’t mention, is that while the global economy and perennial inequality were castigating neighboring countries, Nicaragua, up to the 2018 crisis, had enjoyed a steady rate of economic growth of approximately 5% for several years, had cut poverty in half, managed to increase access to electricity to 92% of the population (from 43%), greatly reduce infant and maternal mortality rates, provide universal healthcare and education, and achieve 90% food sovereignty. All throughout that time the Sandinista Youth played -and continues to play- a crucial role in the implementation of the programs behind the Sandinista government’s success; some of their roles include delivering food staples to Nicaragua’s poorest families, participating in healthcare programs to prevent mosquito-borne disease during torrential rains, delivering school supplies, and participating in political education programs.

Citing right-wing critics of the FSLN, including an article by La Prensa, a newspaper owned by one of Nicaragua’s wealthiest families with a history of supporting US intervention going back to the turn of the 20thcentury, NACLA continues its anti-Sandinista attack by pointing out the hand of the FSLN during massive protests following its 1990 electoral defeat. But the article doesn’t mention that the massive protests were in response to the neoliberal reforms implemented by the same US-funded political players behind the 2018 unrest. Such reforms saw the privatization of Nicaragua’s healthcare and education systems, its telephone and communications company, its electrical system, the reversal of the land reform, the massive firing of state employees, and the abandonment of the country’s infrastructure – which all led to an epidemic of hunger and disease, crime, violence, and skyrocketing mortality rates among Nicaragua’s most vulnerable groups, including poor pregnant women, children, and the elderly.

The article continues its tirade accusing the FSLN of issues of gender inequality and authoritarianism, completely leaving out the fact that today’s Nicaragua is one of three nations, along with France and Iceland, about to close the gender gap, according to the World Economic Forum, and that the “authoritarian regime” was elected democratically with 68% voter turnout and 72.5% of the popular vote during the presidential election of 2016.

It is truly sad to see NACLA’s persistent validation of US regime change in Nicaragua, a validation completely reliant upon the one-sided narratives promoted by a small army of USAID- and NED-funded NGO operatives. But rather than continuing to undermine each and every false assertion, I would like to conclude on a more positive note in the form of Nicaragua: the April Crisis and Beyond, with Dan Kovalik, a new documentary that describes the crisis from the perspective of regular Nicaraguans, among them small business owners, peasants, small farmers, government officials, so-called political prisoners, and a small group of internationalists living in Nicaragua who witnessed the crisis first hand and who bear witness to what one of them calls the black hand of the U.S. in the country’s unrest.

https://afgj.org/nicanotes-naclas-lates ... mperialism
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 27, 2020 1:46 pm

US Imperialism in Nicaragua and the Making of Sandino0Comentarios+
Nicaragua’s twentieth-century history cannot be told without placing the United States government as the main antagonist. It is their active interventions that have shaped the Central American country’s political, economic and social systems, but it is also the opposing forces to this imperialist aggression that has served as a counterbalance to writing the story of the Nicaraguan people.

Know as the ‘General of Free Men’, Augusto Cesar Sandino’s life and murder on Feb. 21, 1934, would shape the Central American republic.

Image

From military invasions to economic blockades, the U.S. has set to extinguish every attempt to a left-wing alternative against the imposed 'Banana Republic' model, that U.S. transnational interests have exerted in the country ever since the 19th century.

Yet it is out of U.S. imperialism, that a figure rose in Nicaragua to become a symbol of rebellion and hope for past, current and future generations. Know as the ‘General of Free Men’, Augusto Cesar Sandino’s life and murder on Feb. 21, 1934, would shape the Central American republic.

But to understand the emergence and death of Sandino one must see that U.S. imperialism is at the heart of Nicaragua's composition as a nation.

US' “Good Men” in Nicaragua
By the nineteenth century, the U.S. was prepping itself to become the new dominant empire in the world. A newfound power that was especially felt in Latin America, a region the North Americans consider theirs by belief in the manifest destiny, which in turn was materialized in the Monroe Doctrine (1823). This way the U.S. assumed their role of self-declared caretakers of the American continent. But it wasn’t until President Theodore Roosevelt (1901 - 1909) that the reach of U.S. imperialism, in Central America specifically, would take its most modern configuration.

With the new imperialist sense, the U.S. reaffirmed its foreign policy through Roosevelt’s 1904 Corollary, which was was an addition and interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine presented after the European naval blockade to Venezuela in 1902–1903. The corollary states that the U.S. will intervene in Latin American if the rights or property of U.S. citizens or businesses are threatened or endangered.

"Chronic wrongdoing . . . may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation," Roosevelt said in his 1904 state of the union, adding that "in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power."

Consistent with Roosevelt's foreign policy it legitimized the use of force as a means to defend the interests - in the broadest sense - of the U.S. The result was the so-called 'Banana Wars', a series of U.S. military interventions in several Latin American countries from 1898 to 1934 of which Nicaragua was one of the main victims, as the U.S. wanted to “teach” the country how to choose “good men” as leaders.

A Nation Under US Tutelage
Under the liberal government of Jose Santos Zelaya (1893 - 1909), Nicaragua would transition into a modern state. As part of his modernization program, the country made concessions to Germany and Japan for a transisthmian canal across Nicaragua. Since the U.S. had its plans set in Panama, a competing venture financed by foreign interests, was not of their liking.

As relations with the U.S. deteriorated, civil war erupted in October 1909 when anti-government liberals joined with a group of conservatives under Juan Estrada to overthrow Zelaya. The U.S. then saw an opportunity to invade after two U.S. mercenaries serving with the rebels were captured and executed by government forces. Soon thereafter, 400 U.S. Marines landed on the Caribbean eastern city of Bluefields.

Rebel leader Juan Estrada's forces seized Managua, Nicaragua's capital and the conservative leader assumed power. U.S. Secretary of State Philander C. Knox agreed to recognize the new government, provided that U.S. demands were met. A conservative-liberal regime, headed by Estrada, was recognized by the U.S. on Jan. 1, 1911. However, Estrada’s hold on power was weak at best, sensing instability in Nicaragua once again, Knox sent Thomas C. Dawson as a “special agent” to Nicaragua. Dawson had previously overseen the U.S. invasion in the Dominican Republic.

Debt and Lackeys Shackle Nicaragua to the US' Will
The U.S. agent assessed the political situation and reported that if elections were held, Zelaya's liberals would certainly win. To avoid an unwanted liberal victory, the U.S. pushed Estrada to agree on a constituent assembly to get himself elected, approve a first short-term U.S. loan, among other concessions. As political rivalries within the conservative-liberal coalition surfaced, the Minister of War General Luis Mena forced Estrada to resign, replacing him with his vice president, Adolfo Diaz.

Nicaraguan and U.S. representatives then signed a treaty on June 6, 1911, which included U.S. Government and private bank approval for the post of customs collector. In a second, short-term loan agreement, the collector general was nominated by a consortium of private banks and approved by Knox. As part of the deal, the newly appointed president Diaz handed control of the Nicaraguan national rail company and the central banking system to U.S. private firms. Although the treaty was rejected three times by the U.S. Senate as many legislations opposed the William Taft Administration's connections with large corporations, Nicaragua’s government proceeded to comply with the stipulations.

As history would have it, only US$1.5 million was obtained by Nicaragua from the US$15 million due to the non-ratification of the treaty, but truly only US$100,000 reached Nicaragua and to the pockets of private bankers to form the National Bank. The rest of the money stayed in New York's banking system while the collateral for the loans came from Nicaragua’s customs revenues, railways, and shipping industry.

Image
The main purpose of the 1912 occupation was to impede the construction of an inter-oceanic canal, though their stated objective was to promote democracy in this country.

By mid-1912, Minister of War Luis Mena persuaded the constituent assembly to name him successor to Diaz when the president’s term expired in 1913. Diaz then asked the U.S. government to intervene to “secure” the property of U.S. citizens. When the U.S. refused to recognize the decision, Mena began a revolt to seize power.

In August 1912, a force of around 2,700 United States marines once again landed at the ports of Corinto and Bluefields; Mena fled the country. This gave way to the U.S. occupation which lasted almost continually until 1933. Although reduced to 100 in 1913, the contingent stayed as a reminder of the willingness of the U.S. to use force and quickly intervene to preserve its interests in the country. With U.S. tutelage, conservative governments ruled until 1925 without any major mishaps, especially as the country assumed a quasi-protectorate status under the 1916 Bryan–Chamorro Treaty. This was a revised version of the 1914 Castillo-Knox Treaty, which gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Nicaragua to protect its interests.

The modified version omitted the intervention clause but gave the U.S. exclusive rights to build an interoceanic canal across Nicaragua. As the Panama Canal was inaugurated in 1913, the Nicaraguan agreement served to impede any potential foreign countries, mainly Germany or Japan, to building another canal in Central America. Also for 99 years, Nicaragua leased the Corn Islands to the U.S. and gave them the right to establish, operate and maintain a naval base anywhere in the Gulf of Fonseca; both concessions would be subject exclusively to the laws and U.S. sovereignty.

The Occupation Doesn't End, Just Changes
By 1924, a moderate conservative, Carlos Solorzano was elected president presenting a coalition ticket with liberal Juan Bautista Sacasa as his vice president, although he ended up purging all liberals from his government. Solorzano then requested that the U.S. stay to build a national military force, which would be the National Guard. After deciding it was “safe” to leave the Central American nation, the remaining Marines were withdrawn after a thirteen-year occupation on Aug. 3, 1925.

Not even a month after the occupation forces left, former conservative president (1917 -1921) General Emiliano Chamorro launched a coup d'état, forcing Solorzano and Sacasa to flee the country, and proclaimed himself president on January 1926. The political situation broke into a civil war by May, as exiled liberal forces landed in the Caribbean port of Bluefields.

Fearing the new round of conservative-liberal violence and mainly worrying that the infighting in Nicaragua might result in a liberal victory as it happened a few years earlier in Mexico, the U.S. invaded Nicaragua once again. A peace was brokered by the U.S. between liberal and conservative factions in October 1926. Chamorro resigned and the Nicaraguan Congress elected former president (1911- 1916) Alfonso Diaz to serve as head of state once again.

Yet due to Chamorro’s resignation, his vice president liberal Sacasa returned from exile from Guatemala and declared himself Constitutional President of Nicaragua from Puerto Cabezas on Dec. 1, 1926, only recognized by Mexico who was providing weapons to the liberal army.

Thousands of liberal soldiers made their way towards Managua led by General Jose Maria Moncada, winning key battles along the way. In January 1927, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge lifted the arms embargo on the Nicaraguan government, allowing his country to legally provide military aid to the conservatives. Coolidge then sent politician Henry Stimson to negotiate an end to the war. On May 20, 1927, both factions agreed to sign the truce known as the Pact of Espino Negro, under the conditions that Diaz would remain president until a new, U.S.-supervised election in 1928, both sides would disarm ending the Constitutionalist War, and a new National Guard would be established.

Sacasa left the country since he refused to sign, as did another liberal leader, Augusto Cesar Sandino.

The ‘General of Free Men’ Rises
The illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner of Spanish descent and an Indigenous servant of the Sandino family, young Sandino was the definition of the mestizo identity in Latin America. From an early age, he saw and lived the disparities between the wealthy elites and the working-class people of his country.

Although he lived with his mother until nine years old, his father then took into his home and arranged his education and well being. As a young adult, Sandino witnessed the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua in 1912 and the power struggle between the conservative elites. But it was at the age of 26 in 1921 that his life took a turn, as he tried to kill the son of a rich conservative townsman who had insulted his mother. Afterward, he had to flee and went to Honduras, Guatemala and eventually settled in Mexico. Influenced by the ideals of the Mexican Revolution, during his three-year stay in Tampico, Mexico, Sandino acquired a strong sense of Nicaraguan nationalism, strongly embraced his Indigenous heritage and took on an anti-imperialist stance.

In 1926, his father urged him to come back, Sandino returned and settled in the northern department of Nueva Segovia. He took a job at the San Albino gold mine owned by a U.S. firm, where he organized the mine workers and taught them about social inequalities and the need to change the political system and soon after the civil war erupted. Parallel to Moncada’s liberal army, Sandino organized a rebel force consisting mostly of peasants and workers to fight against the conservative regime of Chamorro for the liberals. After the U.S. intervention ended the war with the Pact of Espino Negro, Sandino refused to order his followers to surrender their weapons and returned with them to the Segovia Mountains.

Sandino, called Moncada a traitor vendepatria (nation-seller) and denounced the foreign intervention, reorganized his forces as the Army for the Defense of Nicaraguan Sovereignty (Ejercito Defensor de la Soberanía de Nicaragua-EDSN) and led a new counter-offensive against the ruling elite and the U.S. empire that backed them. He declared war on the U.S., which he called the "the enemy of our race," referring to the Latin Americans.

"I will not abandon my resistance until the...pirate invaders...assassins of weak peoples ...are expelled from my country...I will make them realize that their crimes will cost them, dear...There will be bloody combat...Nicaragua shall not be the patrimony of Imperialists," Sandino said in 1928.

Image
Venezuelan Communist Leader Gustavo Machado with the flag of the U.S. invaders that was taken by the Sandinistas in the heroic combat of El Zapote on May 14, 1928.

As the general and his forces gained international notoriety, the U.S. grew more annoyed by the fact that they couldn’t capture him. On Jan. 20 1928 Rear Admiral David F. Sellers, Commander of the U.S. Special Service Squadron operating against the forces of Sandino in Nicaragua, wrote to the general demanding his surrender, arrogantly ordering him to stop the fighting in the Nueva Segovia department, especially against U.S. forces and mining companies from the U.S., alluding to the Espino Negro accords and the fact the U.S. would intervene in Nicaragua based on the agreements.

“The only way to put an end to this struggle is the immediate withdrawal of the forces invading our country, at the same time replacing the current President with a Nicaraguan citizen who is not among the candidates for the Presidency and that representatives from Latin America supervise the elections instead of North American marines,” Sandino proudly responded.

With the popular and rural support, Sandino’s forces grew both in number and strength, inflicting important losses to the U.S. Marines who never captured the ‘General of Free Men’. But most importantly showing the world that a group of peasants could face the "Colossus of the North," as he referred to them. After a year-long exile in 1929 in Mexico, where he desperately looked for foreign support, he returned to Nicaragua to continue his fighting to face an internal enemy as well.

As the support within the U.S. for the Nicaragua occupation faded and the Great Depression (1929) made overseas military expeditions too costly for the U.S in January 1931 Henry Stimson, then-Secretary of State announced that all U.S. soldiers in Nicaragua would leave following general elections and that newly created and U.S.-commanded Nicaraguan National Guard would take over responsibility for the fighting. In the 1932 elections liberal and former vice president, Juan Bautista Sacasa won and was installed as head of state on Jan. 2, 1933.

As the U.S. withdrawal loomed close, the U.S. Ambassador Matthew Hanna and General Moncada had their trusted ally Anastasio Somoza Garcia named as director of the National Guard, the most important power in Nicaragua’s political scene. Somoza Garcia was born in Nicaragua’s elite, being the son of a rich coffee landowner. He attended school in Philadelphia and was trained by U.S. Marines, thus developing strong ties with the military, economic, and political figures of the U.S.

With US Invaders Gone, A Dictator is Placed
U.S. troops left Nicaragua in January 1933 as Franklin D Roosevelt invoked his new Good Neighbor policy ending 40 years of direct military intervention in the region. The Marines passed control of the 4,000 enlisted National Guard troops to Somoza Garcia. With the occupying forces gone Sandino agreed to talk with Sacasa’s government. In February 1934, negotiations began. During their meetings, the liberal administration offered Sandino a general amnesty as well as land and safeguards for him and his guerrilla forces to stop the fighting still raging between the guerrilla forces and the National Guard.

Sandino, who regarded the Somoza’s forces as unconstitutional because of its ties to the U.S. military, insisted on the guard's dissolution, yet he pledged his support for the president and agreed to order his forces to surrender their weapons within three months.

Somoza saw in Sandino a strong force that could affect his hunger for power later on. So on Feb. 21, 1934, as the General of Free Men left the presidential palace after having dinner with Sacasa, Somoza Garcia gave orders to kill Sandino, without the president’s approval.

Sandino, his brother and two of his most trusted generals were arrested by National Guard officers, they were then taken to the airfield, executed, and buried in unmarked graves in Larreynaga. The Nicaraguan president, despite his disapproval, was too weak to contain the National Guard director. After Sandino's murder, the National Guard launched a ruthless campaign against the EDSN, and in about a month, Sandino's army was destroyed.

As Sacasa’s popularity and power diminished, Somoza Garcia took advantage of pushing the president to resign by June 6, 1936, an interim president was elected by Congress until elections were held. In December, Somoza was elected president by a margin of 107,201 votes to 108, “an implausibly high margin that could have been obtained only through massive fraud.”

On Jan. 1, 1937, he took office and also the role of director of the National Guard, combining the roles of president and chief of the military. The military dictatorship was established and a U.S.-backed dynasty under the Somoza family that would last four decades.

by teleSUR / Martin Pastor

https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis ... -0029.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply