The Irish human rights organization, Front Line Defenders, has named Nicaraguan indigenous anti-canal activist Francisca Ramirez Torres as one of its five finalists for the 2017 Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk. She joins four other finalists from Ukraine, Vietnam, South Africa and Kuwait as a finalist for the award from…
AFGJ’s Report on our February Delegation to Honduras and Nicaragua is now available. Please note, the report is posted in 2 parts; for the full report please view/download both. Delegation Report Part 1: Honduras Delegation Report Part 2: Nicaragua
I want to revisit the issue of the NICA Act this week because I may have been too complacent in dismissing it since it is so irrational. As we in the United States are going through a period of greater than normal irrationality, it behooves us to prepare not just for rational events, but for irrational ones as well. Likely…
This week’s guest blog is by a correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous due to their job in Nicaragua. On March 27, 2017, the headline in La Prensa, one of the major newspapers in Nicaragua, read, “The United States urges Nicaragua to address ‘institutional corruption’ A report on drug trafficking released this month by the US State Department…
Act Now! On April 5, 2017 right-wing members of Congress led by Florida Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, reintroduced an even worse version of the NICA Act (Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act) than the one they introduced last September during both countries’ presidential election season. If the NICA Act were to pass both chambers of the US Congress…
What is significant about the minimum wage? I returned last week from a delegation to Honduras and Nicaragua. Unfortunately, I spent the whole Nicaragua segment of the delegation sick. As a result I missed many of the meetings and activities planned for us by the Association of Rural Workers (ATC) and the Union of Agricultural…
This week’s guest blog is by retired Nicaragua Network National Co-Coordinator Kathy Hoyt. “The simple folk with whom we talked were all agog over Sandino. He had become ubiquitous. He had been seen here; he had been seen there. At night he had gone stalking along a ridge, god of the universe. Later I found the…
This week’s guest blog is by a correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous due to their job in Nicaragua. The first month of the Trump presidency has been marked by so much chaos, mismanagement, and terrible policy that it is almost impossible to pay attention to everything. For example, Rex Tillerson, had no problem being…
An El Nuevo Diario article on Feb. 6 reported that as of Feb. 1, over 1.5 million students were registered for public school as the new school year is about to start. The article estimated there would be 1.7 million students in the public school system by the end of February. I thought back to the state of education in Nicaragua ten…
Last week I received an email from the Sandinista Renovation Movement entitled Nicaragua 2017: Crisis and Opportunity. Wow, did it contain some whoppers! You know, I expect politicians to lie to me, but when the lies come from people I once respected and considered compañer@s, the betrayal seems so much worse. The email didn’t come with a web link, and…
