Abigail Hernández (left) appears at a press conference with journalist Wendy Quintero, a member of Independent Journalists and Communicators of Nicaragua at the headquarters of the Nicaragua Nunca Más Rights Collective. CREDIT: José Mendieta / IPS

By José Mendieta
MANAGUA, Mar 5 2024 (IPS)

Almost six years after the outbreak of the April 2018 protests, there are no signs left in Nicaragua of the violence that reigned in those days. There is no graffiti on walls or banners with demands or opinions against the leftist regime that has ruled the country since 2007.

Nor are there newspapers or opinion programs or debates on radio and television, let alone press conferences or public rallies."The Ortega and Murillo regime's repressive mechanisms have escalated to dramatic and unimaginable levels. A simple opinion issued on social networks or a criticism of the regime could land you in jail or exile." -- Martha Irene Sánchez

The city of Managua, the capital, is always bustling and active, with markets and shopping malls open at all hours; traffic is usually disorderly and police patrols roam the streets and avenues at all times.

At noon every day, on all radio and television stations, the tired, quiet voice of Vice President Rosario Murillo is heard giving the government’s news, social achievements and propaganda messages such as phrases of love and praise to God.

The program, which has no specific name, is broadcast from Channel 4, the historical property of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the ruling party, to which the other state media are linked. The private media outlets controlled by the presidential family are also connected, together with dozens of radio stations and portals on social networks.

It first emerged in 2007 as “a message from comrade Rosario, from the Communication and Citizenship Council of the People’s President.”

“Here we are, on Valentine’s Day, with love, friendship, and for us, love and peace, because it is with love and in peace that we can walk ahead, move forward, building the future of all, a fraternal future,” she said on Feb. 13.

Murillo has been Nicaragua’s vice president since she was appointed in 2016 by her husband, President Daniel Ortega, the veteran former guerrilla who has been in office since November 2006.

Murillo is also the regime’s spokesperson and the only authorized voice, among the population of 6.7 million inhabitants of this Central American country, who can speak publicly and freely about anything. No one else can do so.

Freedom of expression in Nicaragua is one of the most repressed and abused rights, said journalist Abigail Hernández, director of the Galería News platform.

Journalist and former political prisoner Lucía Pineda Úbau, together with Martha Sánchez, take part in a protest by Nicaraguan journalists exiled in Costa Rica. CREDIT: José Mendieta / IPS

Her opinion, tellingly sent via an encrypted messaging application, is based on experience: three years’ exile.

“The media and journalists are a good thermometer for measuring the quality of freedom of expression,” Hernández told IPS.

“When we have less and less access to sources of information, when they limit us from reporting from the streets, when we can’t take photos or videos freely, when we can’t do our work inside the country, it reveals that there is no freedom of expression,” she said.

She is part of a generation of 242 journalists who have had to go into exile since the 2018 protests, which began against Social Security reforms and ended in a bloodbath provoked by military and police forces, with more than 355 civilian deaths, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

Journalist Martha Irene Sánchez, director of the República 18 platform, holds similar views, also expressed from exile.

“The scenarios for exercising freedom of the press and freedom of expression in Nicaragua have not improved since 2018; on the contrary, we are encountering more and more hostility,” she told IPS.

She is also a member of Independent Journalists and Communicators of Nicaragua (PCIN), a union organization that emerged after the protests and all of whose members went into exile.

“The Ortega and Murillo regime’s repressive mechanisms have escalated to dramatic and unimaginable levels. A simple opinion issued on social networks or a criticism of the regime could land you in jail or exile,” Sánchez said.

A forum for the presentation of the report on freedom of expression and press freedom in Nicaragua, released in September 2023 in San José, Costa Rica. The panel included journalists from Nicaragua from the Connectas platform, including FLED director Guillermo Medrano, (second-right). CREDIT: José Mendieta / IPS

She cited the example of Victor Ticay, a local journalist in Nandaime, a municipality in the northwestern department of Granada, who went out one day to cover a procession during the Catholic Holy Week of 2023.

The event had not been authorized by the police, whose agents interrupted the religious ceremony and Ticay filmed the parishioners running away from the patrol cars through the streets of the town.

He was arrested, charged with treason and spreading false news and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Guillermo Medrano, director of the Foundation for Freedom of Expression and Democracy (FLED), explained to IPS that between 2020 and 2021, the Nicaraguan regime passed a series of laws criminalizing the practice of journalism and freedom of expression.

A study that FLED released in September 2023 in San José, Costa Rica, a country bordering Nicaragua and the center of the country’s exile community, documented 1329 press freedom violations, mostly perpetrated by state agents in the 2018-2023 five-year period.

The actions were taken against 338 Nicaraguan journalists and 78 media outlets, between April 2018 and April 2023.

They included the police intervention of several media outlets such as 100% Noticias, Confidencial, Trinchera de la Noticia, Radio Darío and La Prensa, the last newspaper circulating in Nicaragua until August 2022.

According to Medrano, the Special Law on Cybercrime, passed in October 2020, provides for prison sentences for the use of information “which in normal democracies should be freely accessible to citizens and the public.”

In theory, the main objective of this legislation is the prevention, investigation, prosecution and punishment of crimes committed by means of information and communication technologies to the detriment of natural or legal persons.

The press freedom advocate also pointed out that the Ortega-Murillo administration, which controls all state institutions and branches of power, as well as the security forces, established the Law for the Defense of the Rights of the People to Independence, Sovereignty and Self-Determination for Peace, effective since Dec. 22, 2020.

This law gives discretion to judges and prosecutors in terms of the crime of “treason”, which orders the banishment and denationalization of the accused, as well as life imprisonment through a reform of the penal system.

More than 180 people have already been prosecuted under these laws and at least 22 journalists were stripped of their citizenship and banished in 2023.

“Under these laws, freedom of speech and the press has become a high-risk constitutional right for those who exercise it within Nicaragua,” Medrano denounced.

A report by the regional organization Voces del Sur says that Nicaragua ended 2023 with new forms of repression and threats to press freedom applied through banishment, confiscations, illegal detentions and harassment and surveillance of the families of journalists working in exile.

The outlook, the report warns, is of greater silence about social issues.

Nicaraguan journalists conduct interviews under risk of persecution or criminalization, denounced several reporters in San José, Costa Rica, in August 2023. CREDIT: José Mendieta / IPS

According to the report, between 2018 and the end of 2022, 54 media outlets disappeared, including 31 radio stations, 15 television channels and eight print media outlets. Of that total, 16 media outlets were confiscated, including La Prensa, the country’s main daily newspaper.

“Sources, even under conditions of anonymity, are harder and harder to find, and the saddest thing is that the State, through its officials, continues to be the main victimizer of citizens’ rights of expression and journalists’ press rights,” Medrano complained.

The non-governmental Human Rights Collective Nicaragua Nunca Más, made up of human rights defenders and activists in exile, states that the Ortega-Murillo administration “has carried out an unprecedented attack on freedom of expression in this country.”

The organization reports that of 28 resolutions of precautionary measures for journalists in Latin America, which have been issued since 2018 by the IACHR on freedom of expression, 15 have been issued for Nicaragua.

However, it says that “none of the precautionary measures” have been complied with by the State and, on the contrary, harassment against the targets has increased.

“And that reveals to us the seriousness of the problem of a small country with disproportionate and unacceptable restrictions on fundamental freedoms,” said one of the agency’s advocates, on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

These complaints find no responses within Nicaragua, because with the exception of Murillo, no one is authorized to answer, but can simply repeat the official discourse: “Nicaragua lives in peace and security.”

Farmer Gustavo Panameño stands in the middle of what is left of his cornfield, hit hard by drought and windstorms, near Santa María Ostuma, in central El Salvador. Many Salvadoran small farmers are feeling the impact of El Niño, as are many others in Central America and the rest of the world. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SANTA MARÍA OSTUMA, El Salvador , Oct 10 2023 (IPS)

The effects of El Niño on agriculture in Central America are once again putting pressure on thousands of small farmer families who are feeling more vulnerable economically and in terms of food, as they lose their crops, due to climate change.

But that is not all. In addition to the obvious fact that poor harvests lead to higher food prices and food insecurity, they also generate a lack of employment in the countryside, further driving migration flows, said several experts interviewed by IPS."I lost practically all the corn, and the beans too, they couldn't be used, they started to grow but were stunted." -- Héctor Panameño

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) weather phenomenon had not been felt in the area since 2016. But now it has reappeared with stronger impacts. Meteorologists define ENSO as having three phases, and the one whose consequences are currently being felt on the ground is the third, the strongest.

Impact on the families

“The lack of water made us plant later, in June, when a drought hit us and ruined our corn and beans,” Gustavo Panameño, 46, told IPS as he looked disconsolately at the few plants still standing in his cornfield.

The plot Gustavo leases to farm, less than one hectare in size, is located in Lomas de Apancinte, a hill in the vicinity of Santa María Ostuma, in the central Salvadoran department of La Paz.

“The beans were completely lost, I expected to harvest about 300 pounds,” he said.

The corn and bean harvest “was for the consumption of the family, close relatives, and from time to time to sell,” said Gustavo.

A large part of Héctor Panameño’s corn crop in central El Salvador was destroyed by strong winds during a period when rain was scarce as a result of the El Niño phenomenon. The small farmer also lost his bean crop, making it a challenge to feed his family of nine. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Nearby is the plot leased by Héctor Panameño, who almost completely lost his corn crop and the few beans he had planted.

Corn and beans form the basis of the diet of the Salvadoran population of 6.7 million people and of the rest of the Central American countries, which have a total combined population of just over 48 million.

This subtropical region has two seasons: the wet season, from November to April, and the dry season the rest of the year. Agriculture contributes seven percent of GDP and accounts for 20 percent of employment, according to data from the Central American Integration System (SICA).

“I lost practically all the corn, and the beans too, they couldn’t be used, they started to grow but were stunted,” said Héctor, 66, a distant relative of Gustavo.

At this stage, the stalks of the corn plants have already been “bent”, a small-farming practice that helps dry the cobs, the final stage of the process before harvesting.

And what should be a cornfield full of dried plants, lined up in furrows, now holds barely a handful here and there, sadly for Héctor.

Both farmers said that in addition to the droughts, the crops were also hit by several storms that brought with them violent gusts of wind, which ended up knocking down the corn plants.

“The plants were already big, 45 days old, about to flower, but a windstorm came and knocked them down,” recalled Héctor, sadly.

“After that, there were a few plants left standing, and when the cobs were beginning to fill up with kernels another strong wind came and finished knocking down the entire crop.”

A few weeks ago both Gustavo and Héctor replanted corn and beans, trying to recover some of their losses. Now their hopes are on the “postrera”, as the second planting cycle is called in Central America, which starts in late August and ends with the harvest in November.

The windstorms mentioned by both farmers are apparently part of the extreme climate variability brought by climate change and El Niño.

The photo shows a parched ear of corn in a small cornfield that was destroyed in central El Salvador. It is estimated that losses of the staple crops corn and beans in the country, as a result of the impacts of extreme weather events, such as El Niño and the historical shortage of rainfall, on local production, will lead to a grain deficit of about 6.8 million quintals (100-kg). CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

El Niño 2.0

“It’s part of the same process, the warming of the water surface generates those winds,” said Pablo Sigüenza, an environmentalist with the National Network for the Defense of Food Sovereignty of Guatemala (REDSAG).

Guatemala is also experiencing what experts have noted in the rest of the region: because El Niño has arrived in the “strong phase”, in which climate variability is even more pronounced, there are periods of longer droughts as well as more intense rains.

That puts the “postrera” harvest in danger, said the experts interviewed.

This means that whereas El Niño would bring drought in the first few months of the agricultural cycle, now it is hitting harder during the second period, in August, when the postrera planting is in full swing.

“For the farmers it was clear since April that it was raining less, compared to other years,” Sigüenza told IPS from Guatemala City.

“Then, in August, we had the first warnings from the highlands and the southern coast that the plants were not growing well, that they were suffering from water stress,” he said.

The most affected region, he said, is the Dry Corridor, which in Guatemala includes the departments of Jalapa, Chiquimula, Zacapa, El Progreso, part of Chimaltenango and Alta Verapaz, in the central part of the country.

The Dry Corridor is a 1,600 kilometer-long strip of land that runs north-south through portions of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

It is an area highly vulnerable to extreme weather events, where long periods of drought are followed by heavy rains that have a major effect on the livelihoods and food security of local populations, as described by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Sigüenza said that food security due to lack of basic grains is expected to affect some 4.6 million people in Guatemala, a country of 17.4 million.

Even the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “predicted that August, September and October would be the months with the greatest presence of El Niño,” said Luis Treminio, president of the Salvadoran Chamber of Small and Medium Agricultural Producers.

Treminio said that 75 percent of bean production is currently planted, and because it is less resistant to drought and rain than corn and sorghum, there is a greater possibility of losses.

“So the risk now is to the postrera, because if this scenario is fulfilled, we will have a very low postrera production,” he said.

Treminio’s estimate is that El Salvador will have a basic grains deficit of 6.8 million quintals, which the country will have to cover, as always, with imports.

This bean plant growing on a Salvadoran farm may or may not make it to harvest. The El Niño phenomenon has begun to hit hard the “postrera” or second harvest in Central America, in which farmers hope to recover some of the losses suffered in the first harvest, in May and June. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Nicaragua, hardest hit

Nicaragua, population 6.8 million, is the Central American country hardest hit by El Niño, Brazilian Adoniram Sanches, FAO’s subregional coordinator for Mesoamerica, told IPS.

As in other countries in the region, Nicaraguan farmers suffered losses in the first planting, in May, and again in the second, the postrera, “and all of this leads to a strong imbalance in the small farmer economy,” the FAO official said from Panama City.

Sanches said that El Niño will be felt in 93 percent of the region until March 2024 and, in addition, 71 percent is in the “strong phase”.

He added that in the Dry Corridor 64 percent of the farms are less than two hectares in size. In other words, there are many families involved in subsistence agriculture, and with fewer harvests, they would face unemployment and would look for escape valves, such as migration.

“All this would then trigger an explosion of migration,” said Sanches.

With regard to the impacts in Nicaragua, researcher Abdel Garcia, an expert in climate, environment and disasters, said that, in effect, the country is receiving “the negative backlash” of El Niño, that is, less rain in the months that should have more copious rainfall, such as September.

García said that the effects of the climate are not only being felt in agriculture, and therefore in the economy, but also in the environment.

“The ecosystem is already suffering: we see dried up rivers and surface water sources, and also the reservoirs, which are at their lowest levels right now,” García told IPS from Managua.

García said that some farmers in the department of Estelí, in northwestern Nicaragua, are already talking about a plan B, that is, to engage in other economic activities outside of agriculture, given the harsh situation in farming.

In late August, FAO announced the launch of a humanitarian aid plan aimed at mobilizing some 37 million dollars to assist vulnerable communities in Latin America in the face of the impact of the El Niño phenomenon.

Specifically, the objective was to support 1.1 million people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

Even more ambitious is an initiative in which FAO will participate as a liaison between the governments of 30 countries around the world and investors, multilateral development banks, the private sector and international donors, so that these nations can access and allocate resources to agriculture.

At the meeting, which will take place Oct. 7-20 in Rome, FAO’s world headquarters, governments will present projects totaling 268 million dollars to investors.

Among the nations submitting proposals are 10 from Latin America and the Caribbean, including Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Meanwhile, despite the gloomy forecasts for farming families, who are taking a direct hit from El Niño, both Gustavo and Héctor remain hopeful that it is worth a second try now that the postrera harvest is underway.

“We have no choice but to keep working, we can’t just sit back and do nothing,” said Héctor, with a smile that was more encouraging than resigned.

Reporters and photojournalists cover an Aug. 11 press conference at the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in San Salvador. Independent media outlets in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua suffer constant persecution and harassment by state entities and government officials in an attempt to silence them and discredit investigations into corruption and mismanagement of public funds. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 15 2022 (IPS)

Practicing journalism in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador is becoming increasingly difficult in the face of the persecution of independent media outlets by neo-populist rulers of different stripes, intolerant of criticism.

The most recent high-profile case was the Jul. 29 arrest of José Rubén Zamora, founder and director of elPeriódico, one of the Guatemalan media outlets that has been most critical of the government of right-wing President Alejandro Giammattei, who has been in office since January 2020.

The union of Guatemalan journalists and the reporter’s family say the arrest is a clear example of political persecution as a result of the investigations into corruption and mismanagement in the Giammattei administration published by the newspaper, which was founded in 1996."The last bastions of the independent press (in Nicaragua) are under siege and the vast majority of independent journalists, threatened by abusive legal actions, have had to flee the country" -- Reporters Without Borders

“I definitely believe it is a case of political persecution and harassment, and of violence against free expression and the expression of thought,” Ramón Zamora, son of the editor of elPeriódico who has been imprisoned since his arrest, told IPS from Guatemala City.

A case out of the blue

The 66-year-old journalist is one of the most recognized in Guatemala and in the Central American region, and has been awarded several times for elPeriódico’s investigative reporting.

Zamora is being charged with money laundering, influence peddling and racketeering, although the evidence shown at the initial hearing by prosecutors “are poor quality voice messages that show nothing,” according to Ramón.

The preliminary hearing ended on Aug. 9 with the judge’s decision to continue with the case and keep Zamora in pre-trial detention. Prosecutors now have three months to present more robust evidence before taking him to trial, while the defense will seek to gather evidence in order to secure his release.

“We are going to clearly demonstrate as many times as necessary that this case was staged, that the evidence, or rather the evidence they have, cannot be stretched as far as they are stretching it,” said Ramón, 32, an anthropologist by profession.

He added that from the beginning President Giammattei showed signs of intolerance towards criticism of his administration.

“We knew he was an angry person, authoritarian in the way he acted, but we never thought he would go this far,” he said.

Since the arrest, Ramón said that his father is in good spirits, upbeat, although he has had problems sleeping, while the newspaper continues to be published in the midst of serious difficulties due to the temporary seizure of its bank accounts and liquidity problems to pay the staff and other costs.

On Friday Aug. 12, elPeriódico gave key coverage to a decree approved by the Guatemalan legislature that gives life to a Cybercrime Law, which could become another governmental tool to silence critics.

The newspaper quoted the organization Acción Ciudadana, according to which article 9 of this law “contravenes free access to sources of information – a right stipulated in the constitution; furthermore, it violates the Law of Broadcasting of Thought, restricting freedom of information.”

Zamora Jr. regretted that in Central America journalistic work is restricted and persecuted by governments and other de facto powers, as is happening in Guatemala with Giammattei, in El Salvador with the government of Nayib Bukele, and in Nicaragua, with that of Daniel Ortega.

“Ortega, in Nicaragua, is a mirror that we all have in front of us in the region, it is worrisome,” he said.

Journalist José Rubén Zamora, editor of elPériódico, one of the newspapers most critical of the government of Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, leaves the courtroom on Aug. 9 after a judge ordered pretrial detention, on accusations of money laundering. But his family, the journalists’ union and civil society organizations maintain that the case is part of political persecution promoted by the government. CREDIT: Courtesy of elPériódico

Press freedom in free fall

In these three countries there is an openly hostile policy against the independent media, whose journalists suffer harassment, persecution, blackmail, intimidation and restrictions of all kinds in the line of duty.

Central America, a region of 38 million people, faces serious economic and social challenges after leaving behind decades of political strife and civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s, specifically in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Further progress towards democracy is undermined by attacks on or harassment of media outlets that criticize corrupt governments, according to reports by national and international organizations.

In this regard, the World Press Freedom Index 2022 report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) points out the decline suffered by Nicaragua, which dropped 39 positions in the ranking to 160th place out of 180, and El Salvador, which lost 30 positions, dropping to 112th place.

“For the second year in a row El Salvador had one of the steepest falls in Latin America,” the report states.

And it adds that since he took office in 2019, Bukele, described as a “millennial” leader with a vague ideology and an “authoritarian tendency…is exerting particularly strong pressure on journalists and is using the extremely dangerous tactic of portraying the media as the enemy of the people.”

According to the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (Apes), from January to July 2022, 51 incidents have been reported against the press, related to digital attacks and obstruction of journalistic work by state institutions, officials and even supporters of the ruling party.

Bukele himself, in press conferences, often accuses the media and even specific journalists, who he names, of being part of an opposition plan to discredit the work of the government.

A number of reporters have left the country to avoid problems.

Of those who have left the country, at least three have done so almost obligatorily because government agencies or officials have pressured them to reveal their sources of information, Apes Freedom of Expression Rapporteur Serafín Valencia told IPS.

“Bukele decided to undertake a wave of attacks against the press, although not against the entire press, but against those media outlets and journalists who have a critical editorial line and try to do their work in an independent fashion,” said Valencia.

With regard to Ortega in Nicaragua, the RSF report states: “Nicaragua (160th) recorded the biggest drop in rankings (- 39 places) and entered the Index’s red zone.”

It adds: ” A farcical election in November 2021 that carried Daniel Ortega into a fourth consecutive term as president was accompanied by a ferocious crackdown on dissenting voices.

“The last bastions of the independent press came under fire, and the vast majority of independent journalists, threatened with abusive prosecution, were forced to leave the country,” says the report.

“You can’t kill the truth by killing journalists” reads a banner set out by press workers following the death of a colleague in Nicaragua, where the government of Daniel Ortega has shut down critical media outlets and forced many independent reporters into exile. CREDIT: Jader Flores/IPS

Guerrilla leader accused of being a dictator

One of the reporters who had to leave Nicaragua was Sergio Marín, who for more than 12 years hosted a radio program called La Mesa Redonda.

“There were very strong indications that my arrest was imminent,” Marín told IPS from San José, the capital of Costa Rica, the country he fled to on Jun. 21, 2021.

Marín said that the situation in Nicaragua was, and continues to be, untenable for independent media outlets and reporters since Ortega returned to power in January 2007, after a first stint as president between 1985 and 1990.

Ortega was a leader of the leftist guerrilla Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) that in July 1979 overthrew the Somoza dynasty’s dictatorship, which directly or through puppet rulers had been in power since the 1930s.

But the FSLN’s progressive ideas of justice and freedom were soon buried by Ortega’s new power dynamics: he forged obscure pacts with the country’s political and economic elites to set himself up as Nicaragua’s strongman, with actions typical of a dictator.

“With Ortega’s return to power in 2007, he began a process of isolation of journalists who ask questions that question power,” said Marín, 60.

Then, according to Marín, the government threw up a “financial wall”: denying state advertising to media outlets that were critical, or even advertising from private businesses allied with the Ortega administration.

That is when the first media closures began to be seen, he said.

The situation worsened with the popular uprising against the government in April 2018, massive protests that were stopped with bullets by the police, military and pro-Ortega paramilitary forces.

Around 300 people died in the repression unleashed by Ortega, said Marín.

These events were a turning point for journalism because, in the face of the crackdown, the media in general, except for pro-government outlets, came together in a united front.

“So the regime identified us as a key enemy, which must be silenced,” Marin added.

Since then, the Ortega government has maneuvered to close down independent media outlets and critical news spaces, such as those directed by veteran journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, who is now also in exile in Costa Rica.

“Now, the newspaper El Nuevo Diario is closed, and La Prensa was taken over by the government and the entire editorial staff is in exile, and in total there are more than 70 journalists who have left the country,” he added.

In the first week of August Ortega stepped up harassment against dissenting voices, and began targeting Catholic priests. Since Aug. 4 police forces have been holding Bishop Rolando Alvarez, of the Diocese of Matagalpa, in the north of the country, in the Episcopal Palace.

Salvadoran fisherman Nicolás Ayala, 63, walks to his boat at the San Luis La Herradura pier, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador, to begin a 24-hour fishing stint offshore. He said that due to the lack of a breakwater at the mouth, where the sea meets the estuary, boats have capsized and some of his colleagues have drowned, leaving their families unprotected because they have no kind of insurance. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador , Jun 17 2022 (IPS)

At the pier, Salvadoran fisherman Nicolás Ayala checked the pocket of his pants to make sure he was carrying the hypertension pills he must take when he is at sea on a 24-hour shift. He smiled because he hadn’t forgotten them.

At the age of 63, “we are just aches and pains now,” he told IPS, while showing other pills he carried with him to relieve a toothache and other ailments.

Ayala lives in San Luis La Herradura, a small town located on the coastal strip of the department of La Paz, in south-central El Salvador, on the banks of the Estero de Jaltepeque estuary, which leads to the Pacific Ocean.

Waves of vulnerability

“I am worried that I will suffer a health mishap and I won’t be able to continue working and I will be left on the street, ruined,” he added, noting that, as an artisanal fisherman, he does not have any type of coverage for illness or work-related accidents.

This should not be the case, and they should be covered, as it is one of the highest risk jobs in the world, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

But that is the reality of the thousands of people dedicated to small-scale fishing in El Salvador and the rest of Central America on the two coasts of the isthmus, an activity that is vital for the food security of a large part of the 43 million inhabitants of this region, many of whom suffer serious social deprivation.

Like other sectors of the population, artisanal fishers work in almost absolute vulnerability, without any social measures to protect them or provide adequate coverage from the accidents or illnesses they face on a daily basis, and with only precarious health systems to rely on.

Ayala said that since there is no breakwater at the mouth, the point where the estuary lined by mangroves meets the sea, the waves become dangerous and sometimes overturn small motorboats.

And even if the fishermen know how to swim, they can drown anyway, because their boats fall on them or they get entangled in the nets. Two or three people a year die this way, he added.

“We have nothing, no accident insurance or anything, here only God can bless us, if we drown. If they find our bodies, that’s good, if not, well, the crabs can eat us,” he said, only half jokingly.

According to a FAO report from January 2021, in El Salvador in 2018 the fishing sector employed about 30,730 people, with a total fleet of 13,764 boats, 55 of which were used by the industrial sector and the rest by artisanal fishers, 50 percent of whose boats were motorized.

Fishers weigh part of the day’s catch, after fishing near the Estero de Jaltepeque estuary, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador. Most small-scale fishers in Central America do not earn enough and have to work harder and harder to support their families. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Social security for all

FAO urged the countries of Central America to begin efforts to incorporate artisanal fisheries into national social security policies, during the Mesoamerican Forum on Social Protection in Artisanal Fisheries and Small-scale Aquaculture, held in May in Panama City.

The UN agency pointed out that worldwide, small-scale fishers account for half of the world’s fisheries production and employ 90 percent of the sector’s workforce, half of whom are women.

More than 50 million families in the world depend on small-scale fishing, according to FAO data.

In the case of Central America, the regional director of the Organization of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector of the Central American Isthmus (OSPESCA), José Infante, commented that all of the countries have been developing social protection systems for their populations, but that not all sectors have the same access to them, which increases inequality and vulnerability for those who are excluded.

“The artisanal fishing sector is the perfect example of this,” said the OSPESCA director.

These workers, like so many others without coverage, worry about reaching old age and no longer having the energy to go to sea on a daily basis, or suffering a work-related accident that leaves them unable to work.

A Salvadoran fisherman shows some of the shrimp and other kinds of seafood he caught off the Pacific coast of El Salvador. FAO urges governments in Central America to promote social protection for small-scale fishing workers, given their vulnerability and the important role they play in food security in the region. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The uncertain future

“It will be a very difficult situation; If we don’t have a pension tomorrow we’re going to have a tough time,” Nicaraguan fisherwoman Arelis Flores, 23, mother of one, told IPS.

She is president of the Abraham Moreno cooperative in the Venecia Community, a village of fishers and farmers where 400 families live, located in the municipality of El Viejo, on the Pacific coast of the department of Chinandega in western Nicaragua.

“Around here only teachers retire (with pensions),” Flores said in a telephone interview, adding that her community is made up of poor families with very low levels of schooling.

Fishing in their village consists mainly of breeding red snapper (Lutjanus guttatus) in aquatic cages made with nets in the mangroves.

For his part, Salvadoran fisherman José Santos Martínez, also a resident of San Luis La Herradura, told IPS that artisanal fishers are about to finalize a proposal to present to the country’s authorities, demanding social coverage, in order to reduce their vulnerability.

Martínez is the president of the Salvadoran Confederation of Small-Scale Fishing, Aquaculture and Small-Scale Livestock Farming, the first of its kind in the country, which brings together three federations with a total membership of 3,500 men and women.

“If we are sick we can go to a national hospital, like every citizen, but we have no injury or sick leave coverage for the days we have to stay at home recovering,” said Martínez, 57.

By contrast, those who have a formal sector job, working for a private or state-owned company, are covered by the Salvadoran Social Security Institute (ISSS).

The ISSS, although it has many needs, is considered to provide better service than the national public hospital network, which covers everyone in this country of 6.7 million inhabitants.

Martínez said that achieving something similar for the artisanal sector would be a great step forward, given the accidents and illnesses suffered by fishers in their line of work.

Salvadoran fishers can join the ISSS as self-employed workers, but those interviewed told IPS that they could not afford the 40 dollars a month that the coverage costs.

Martínez said that, in his case, he suffers from intense back pain because of the impact from the constant bouncing of the boat over the waves.

“Because of that, I hardly go out fishing anymore,” he said.

He added: “Illnesses become more complicated, and in the end we die, we have no pension, no decent insurance, our families are completely unprotected.”

Martínez said the government should create a mechanism that offers coverage, but the problem is how to pay for it.

However, different proposals can be analyzed, he said. As an example, he pointed out that for decades artisanal fishers have paid a road tax charged to motorists of 0.20 cents of a dollar per gallon of fuel purchased, even though they are clearly not using the fuel to drive on the country’s roads.

“We have paid millions of dollars to the State, without receiving anything in return. Well, part of that money could be returned to us in the medical coverage we need,” he argued.

This charge of 0.20 cents per gallon of gasoline was recently eliminated, since it made no sense to charge small-scale fishers for using the roads.

Gregorio Torres, president of the La Paz Federation of Fishing Production and Services Cooperatives, which brings together 900 fishers from this department in central El Salvador, complained that small-scale fishers are unprotected against illnesses and accidents at work, and need government support to obtain this type of coverage. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Decent work

His colleague, Gregorio Torres, said that the artisanal fishing sector is key, as it provides fresh products to the country’s markets and helps boost food security, but workers have been unprotected, without pensions or accident insurance.

“We don’t have any of that, and it would be a good idea to push that FAO idea forward,” he commented, referring to the proposal to include them in the social security system.

Torres is president of the La Paz Federation of Fishing Production and Services Cooperatives, which brings together 900 fishers.

Public policy expert Nayda Acevedo told IPS that social security strategies are government tools to minimize the impact of inequalities on vulnerable populations.

In the case of Salvadoran artisanal fishers, the government should focus on promoting “decent work” in that sector, so that the seasonality and irregularity of their incomes can be overcome, she said.

And within the range of social security policies, the State could focus on the most urgent ones, such as medical coverage, she added.

In the meantime, fisherman Nicolás Ayala, at the San Luis La Herradura pier, climbed into his boat, revved up his 60-horsepower engine and headed out to sea, through the estuary.

“As long as I don’t die today, that’s good enough,” he said with his characteristic dark humor and a wry smile, as he motored off in his boat.

A year since Nicaragua spiralled into a socio-political crisis, human rights leaders have called on the country to refrain from violence and uphold the human rights of its citizens. Credit: Eddy López/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 17 2019 (IPS)

A year since Nicaragua spiralled into a socio-political crisis, human rights leaders have called on the country to refrain from violence and uphold the human rights of its citizens.

In light of blatant, persistent human rights violations, United Nations agencies and human rights groups have urged the Nicaraguan government to halt its brutal crackdown on its citizens.

“Throughout the last year, the government of President Ortega has brutally and repeatedly repressed anyone who dares to stand up to his administration. The Nicaraguan authorities continue to violate the rights to justice, truth and reparation of hundreds of victims, while also preventing civil society organisations and international human rights monitors from working freely in the country,” said Amnesty International’s Americas Director Erika Guevara-Rosas.

“This has got to stop,” she added.

“Violations…coupled with the lack of accountability for unlawful excesses by members of the security forces, have stoked rather than reduced the tensions in the country,” said High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet.

After thousands took to the streets to protest controversial social security reforms in April 2018, demonstrations were quickly met with violence by state security forces and pro-pro-government armed groups.

According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, over 300 people have been killed, more than 2,000 injured, and 2,000 arrested.

The Central American country has also since banned all protest and censored media in order to prevent any government criticism.

In December, Nicaraguan police raided TV station 100% Noticias and arrested station director Miguel Mora and news director Lucia Pineda Ubau, both of whom are being held on charges of “inciting hate and violence.”

At least 300 others, including human rights defenders, face charges of terrorism.

The High Commissioner particularly expressed concern over reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees, including recent reports of authorities beating and using dogs and tear gas on detained protestors in La Modelo prison.

Government police and shock troops besiege a protest by medical students trying to organise on Sept. 12 in the city of León, 90 km west of Managua. Credit: Eddy López/IPS

As major protests are expected to mark the anniversary of the start of the crisis later this week, many fear another violent reaction.

The targeting of dissidents and protestors have prompted a massive exodus as an estimated 60,000 people have fled to neighbouring countries, including Costa Rica.

Among those seeking asylum are students, opposition figures, journalists, doctors, human rights defenders and farmers.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), many families are taking extreme measures to cross the border after being persecuted or receiving threats making it “overwhelmingly a refugee flow.”

After several attempted attacks and being informed that he was wanted “dead or alive,” Manuel left his banana plantations and fled to Costa Rica with his pregnant wife Andrea and their two children.

“We lived with the anxiety of not knowing when they would break into the house to get us…I’m sure if I go home they will hurt me,” Manuel told UNHCR.

Taking great lengths to avoid police, Manuel took a small boat along the Pacific Coast while Andrea walked through a back route of muddy fields with the children.

While they are now safe in the neighbouring country, Manuel and Andrea’s children are still haunted by their last days in Nicaragua where they were hunted by gun-carrying men in uniform.

“My youngest son hugs me every time he sees the Costa Rican police because they look like the officials who attacked us. He hugs me and says that he takes care of his daddy,” Manuel said.

While the Nicaraguan government and the opposition Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy negotiated two pacts, including one on the release of detained protestors, the agreements have still yet to be implemented in its entirety and further negotiations have stalled.

“The fact that the negotiations have come to a standstill and the Government is not honouring the agreements reached so far, is undermining the possibility of establishing a genuine inclusive dialogue to solve the serious social, political and human rights crisis facing the country,” Bachelet said.

“A solution to the crisis must address the institutional flaws and strengthen the rule of law…it is of paramount importance that a thorough and transparent accountability process is established to ensure justice, truth and reparations, as well as a clear guarantee of non-repetition,” she added, highlighting the need to put victims of human rights violations at the heart of negotiations.

Guevara-Rosas urged the government to respect the public’s rights including the right to assembly, stating: “The Nicaraguan government must put an immediate end to its strategy of repression and release all the students, activists and journalists detained solely for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly….the brave people of Nicaragua will not be silenced.”

Presentation of the Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Prize for Excellence in Journalism by the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation on Jan. 9 in Managua, where a report was also launched on the harsh repression of journalism in 2018. Pedro Joaquín Chamorro (1924-1978) gave birth to a journalistic dynasty in Nicaragua. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jan 15 2019 (IPS)

Eight months of social and political crisis in Nicaragua have hit the exercise of independent journalism in the country, with 712 cases of violations of the free exercise of journalism, one murdered reporter, two in prison and dozens fleeing into exile, in addition to several media outlets assaulted by the security forces.

A report by the non-governmental Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, called “2018 Year of Repression against Press Freedom in Nicaragua”, published on Jan. 9, states that between April and December there were 712 violations of press freedom and the exercise of journalism.

Guillermo Medrano, author of the report, told IPS that the study reflects that journalism has become a high-risk profession in Nicaragua, “to the extent that journalism has been officially criminalised by charging two journalists who criticised the government with terrorism.”

Medrano refers to journalists Lucía Pineda and Miguel Mora, press director and owner of the television news channel 100% News, respectively.

They were arrested on Dec. 21 at the station’s headquarters and later charged with “provocation” and “conspiracy to commit terrorist acts”.

Before they were arrested and were incomunicados for several days, sympathisers of Daniel Ortega’s government filed a report against Pineda, Mora and other journalists from the channel at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, accusing them of “promoting hatred” because of their critical editorial line.

Their families and lawyers have not been able to see the journalists, who are to be tried later this month. The TV station was shut down, its signal taken off the air and its accounts and assets seized by the authorities.

The arrests of the two journalists triggered protests by international human rights and press freedom groups.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued a statement backed by 300 leading journalists from around the world condemning the arrests and demanding their prompt release.

The document also includes a strong condemnation of the Nicaraguan government for the assault and seizure of the newsrooms of the Confidencial magazine, the Niú website and the television programmes Esta Semana and Esta Noche.

The magazine and TV programmes belong to journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro and the Dec. 14 seizure marked the beginning of Ortega’s last, radical offensive against independent journalism.

Apart from the criminalisation of the two journalists, the report details that a reporter was killed in April, at least 54 have been exiled because of threats and political persecution, and 93 were beaten and injured.

In addition, 102 media outlets and journalists were censored, 21 suffered judicial harassment or investigative processes and 171 have faced different forms of intimidation.

A policeman guards the closed building of the Confidencial magazine and other digital and television media owned by Carlos Fernando Chamorro, which was seized by the Nicaraguan police on Dec. 14. Credit: Jader Flores/IPS

“It’s a situation we haven’t seen since the years of the Somoza (dictatorship), not even during the contra war against the United States. It’s terrifying,” writer Gioconda Belli, president of the Nicaraguan chapter of PEN-International, told IPS.

According to the writer, the regime of Ortega, a former Sandinistaguerrilla, “has surpassed the horrors of the dictatorships of the past that Latin America remembers” by targeting peasant farmers, students, feminists, religious sectors and, finally, journalists and the media.

“He has committed the atrocity of accusing journalism of terrorism; he has kidnapped and prosecuted two journalists, Miguel Mora and Lucía Pineda, as criminals; he has assaulted newsrooms and confiscated private media outlets, such as the Confidential,” she denounced.

In addition, “now he wants to strangle La Prensa by denying it paper,” Belli warned.

The newspapers with the largest circulation in Nicaragua, La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario, both opposition papers, have reported that their paper reserves will be exhausted in a few months and that the customs authorities are blocking imports of raw material.

A small newspaper, Q´hubo, published by ND Medios, closed down in December due to a lack of paper.

The building where the Confidencial magazine operated was taken over by the National Police, after the legislature eliminated the legal status of several non-governmental organisations.

The government links the media to the Centro de Investigaciones de la Comunicación, one of the nongovernmental organisations whose legal status was repealed along with eight others on charges of “fomenting terrorism.”

However, Chamorro stated that both the office building and the censored media outlets belong to the company Invermedia and Promedia and have no relation whatsoever with the NGO that was shut down.

Carlos Fernando Chamorro (C), in the middle of a group of fellow journalists, filed a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic of Nicaragua on Dec. 19 regarding the seizure of Confidencial and other media facilities and equipment by the police five days earlier. Credit: Jader Flores/IPS

The raid and the confiscation of their equipment and facilities were, he denounced, “a direct attack against journalism and private enterprise.”

Arlen Cerda, editor-in-chief of Confidencial, who was granted precautionary protection measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), said the publication is the victim of an “unprecedented” escalation of repression against modern-day Nicaraguan journalism, while he said its journalists planned to continue reporting, “even with their fingernails.”

“In the raid, the equipment, files and databases were taken away, we didn’t have a roof over our heads in order to work,” he said. “But also from the beginning we have maintained the firm conviction that we will not be silenced, and that we will do everything possible to continue to provide quality material to our public.”

In crisis since April

Ortega, 74, ruled the country between 1985 and 1990 as leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which defeated dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. After the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, he was also a member of the government junta.

The current crisis in this Central American country of 6.4 million people began in April 2018, triggered by a controversial social security reform that was later withdrawn, revealing broad discontent with the government.

The protests, led by university students, lasted until July, and according to the IACHR, 325 people were killed during the unrest, mainly at the hands of police and irregular forces organised by the government.

The government puts the number of casualties at 199, and blames “terrorist groups attempting to mount a coup d’état.”

Voices in exile

Luis Galeano, director of the program Café con Voz, which was broadcast on the 100% Noticias channel, left the country in December after the government issued an arrest warrant against him for “fomenting terrorism.”

“The accusations are absurd, they seek to silence critical voices, but they won’t succeed, because we as journalists are going to continue reporting from anywhere, from exile, from prison, from social networks, from clandestinity, from everywhere,” he told IPS from Miami.

Journalist Jeniffer Ortiz, director of the digital platform Nicaragua Investiga, told IPS that she left the country because of direct threats against her for her journalistic work.

“I have been away from Nicaragua for a couple of months. I left because of the constant threats and sieges of our house. They were also sending us messages through the social networks,” she said from San José, Costa Rica.

She said that due to the increasing repression, many of her sources stopped talking to her media outlet which, added to the economic crisis and threats, forced her to continue her work from outside Nicaragua.

“We are now in exile aware that our colleagues there are finding it increasingly difficult to do their work because of threats. The sources are afraid, and from here we can continue our work and contribute to the daily flow of information that people are asking for,” she told IPS.

Credit: Jader Flores/IPS

By Edwin Huizing
Jul 24 2018 (IPS)

Just 40 years after the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship, a severe crisis grips Nicaragua. Most Nicaraguans want nothing more than to see President Daniel Ortega, who has been in office now for eleven years, disappear from the political scene.  Hivos, headquartered in The Hague, believes the Netherlands should use its membership in the UN Security Council to prevent a civil war and bring about a peaceful transition.

Since the protests against President Ortega started in April this year, at least 273 people have died and 2,000 have been injured, according to the human rights arm of the Organization of American States (OAS). And the number of victims grows every day.

Edwin Huizing, Executive Director at Hivos

The opposition to Ortega comes from many corners: students, workers, pensioners, the Catholic Church and not least, women’s groups fighting for a more just society. The government’s heavy-handed repression of the protesters also affects journalists and human rights defenders supported by the Netherlands and Hivos. For example, employees of the human rights organization CPDH were arrested. Journalists from the online magazine Confidencial have been mistreated, threatened and robbed of their cameras and telephones.

In the weekend of July 13, Ortega’s supporters – a mix of government officials and militias – besieged a Catholic church where some 200 students had sought refuge after the protests at their university turned violent. Thanks to fifteen hours of mediation by high-ranking clergy, the students were given safe conduct to leave. But by then, there were already two dead and ten wounded.

According to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (CIDH), abuse, torture, kidnapping and murder are the order of the day. In its unusually harsh report, the Commission clearly points to the state as partly responsible. If the protests against Ortega continue to spiral out of control, a civil war could break out.

A global trend of government oppression

Nicaragua exemplifies the current trend of governments that are increasingly suppressing activist citizens, critical journalists, human rights defenders and NGOs.

Dutch foreign policy, with its emphasis on “the ring of instability around Europe,” migration and economic commitment is far too limited in this light. Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok’s recent letter about strengthening the Netherlands’ diplomatic network does not even mention the words “human rights”. Its emphasis on economic diplomacy and cuts in spending on diplomatic posts comes at the expense of promoting human rights.

But foreign policy must be about more than migration from Africa and growth opportunities for the Netherlands. The Dutch government’s Coalition Agreement has allocated 40 million euros for strengthening our diplomatic network. Part of this should be directly destined for Nicaragua, and for Central America, which is threatening to become a forgotten region.

Credit: Jorge Mejía Peralta

There must be an end to the violence and impunity

Together with Sweden, currently chairman of the UN Security Council, the Netherlands can bring these human rights violations in Central America to the attention of the UN Security Council, starting with the crisis in Nicaragua. There must be an end to the violence and impunity, for which disarmament of paramilitary forces is crucial. There needs to be an independent international investigation into the killings and other crimes that will bring those responsible to justice. International delegations (e.g. EU parliamentarians) should visit Nicaragua to act as the eyes and ears of the international community and thus increase the pressure on the government to cease its repression and start a transition to free elections, under international supervision.

Riding a wave of hope back in the 1980s, many Dutch people – including NGOs – supported the Sandinista movement. Let them now declare in no uncertain terms that Ortega has not proven to be any better than his illustrious right-wing predecessors.

International political action is urgently needed as the crisis in Nicaragua rapidly escalates, possibly into civil war.

This opinion was originally published here

Excerpt:

With a Nicaraguan flag in the background, passports from Nicaragua, with the silhouette of Central America on its cover, are held up. The country’s southern border with Costa Rica is closed by a "containment wall" policy that keeps out migrants travelling from South America towards the United States. Credit: José Adán Silva / IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Feb 15 2018 (IPS)

Nicaragua’s “containment wall”, aimed at bolstering internal security, has been successful with regard to the fight against transnational crime. But its victims are migrants who are relentlessly blocked from passing through the country en route to their destination: the United States.

A situation that also represents a paradox, given that Nicaragua is the Central American country with the largest number of nationals living abroad, second only to El Salvador.

Roberto Orozco, a former social researcher at the Managua-based think tank Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policies, and current independent consultant on security issues, reminded IPS that the origin of Nicaragua’s current migration policy lies in the crisis unleashed in the region in November 2015."It is an issue that often exceeds the capacity of a State more used to being a country that generates large numbers of migrants, than a country of transit or temporary stay of migrants." -- Ricardo de León Borges

At that time, a wave of migrants seeking to reach the United States before that country stiffened its immigration policy generated a crisis to which several Central American countries, as well as Colombia and Mexico, sought a solution.

But the government in Managua, headed since 2007 by the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s (FSLN) Daniel Ortega, refused to participate in joint actions to facilitate the mobility of the 3,000 Cubans who had been stranded in Costa Rica, on the border with Nicaragua.

This country deployed police and military troops, as well as border guards, to block access by the migrants, and created an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the region, which was only solved with measures from other governments to allow migrants to continue their journey without passing through Nicaragua.

Ortega and Nicaragua’s military and police brass have explained that the containment wall consists of the coordinated use of the armed forces and the State institutions involved in the fight against organised crime: drug trafficking, terrorism, human trafficking, smuggling of undocumented migrants, and other threats to national security.

Orozco argued that the closure of Nicaragua’s southern border, blocking the passage of people – not of Cubans today, but of Africans, South Americans, and Haitians among others – has since late 2015 benefited Mexico, antechamber to the migrants’ target: the United States. It also benefited the U.S., Nicaragua’s main trade and aid partner.

But he questioned the effectiveness of the containment wall in reducing the flow of migrants through the continent, as well as the activity of the “coyotes” or human traffickers, and noted that there is a lack of official information on the matter, from government agencies, the police and the army, as IPS confirmed.

The only hard data was provided in September 2017 by the Nicaraguan army’s commander-in-chief, General Julio César Avilés, at a ceremony in Managua celebrating the anniversary of the armed forces.

“In the fight against illegal migration, 4,579 migrants were detained, the vast majority of whom came from countries in Africa and the Middle East, and were trying to reach the United States,” he said at the time.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) states that some 800,000 citizens of Nicaragua live abroad and 40,000 migrate every year. The main reason for Nicaraguan emigration is poverty, which according to the latest World Bank figures affects 29.6 percent of the population. Credit: José Adán Silva / IPS

Ricardo de León Borge, dean of the Faculty of Legal Sciences and Humanities at the American College, told IPS that “indeed, Nicaragua’s immigration policy responds in the first place to safeguarding the interests of the Nicaraguan population, safeguarding their security and integrity within the national territory.”

In his opinion, the containment wall policy aims to “ensure that undocumented migrants move through our country in an orderly manner, so that they are not part of the sad statistics of people swindled by the ‘coyotes’ involved in a dangerous network of traffickers and organised crime.”

But De León Borge said that irregular migration is controlled not only with laws or hard-line policies. “It is an issue that often exceeds the capacity of a State more used to being a country that generates large numbers of migrants, than a country of transit or temporary stay of migrants,” he said.

Achievements beyond migration

But the academic stressed that the “iron fist” policy, beyond the issue of migration, has provided the desired effects in terms of security.

Nicaragua is now proud to have the highest safety rates in Central America: a homicide rate of six per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017, the lowest in the last 15 years, according to the National Police.

“Both Nicaragua, as well as its neighbours in Central America, Mexico and the United States, benefit from a containment wall that provides tangible results, based on the laws that govern the issue of migration against non-traditional threats to the security of States and people, such as drug trafficking, gangs, trafficking in persons or organs, and human smuggling,” De León Borge said.

Collateral damage: human rights

However, behind the containment wall policy, abuses and violations of human rights are reported, according to the non-governmental Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights.

Gonzalo Carrión, a lawyer with the NGO, told IPS that the Nicaraguan state has criminalised illegal migration and has made it more dangerous for travelers seeking to cross the country en route to the United States.

To illustrate, he mentioned three cases: the forced expulsion of thousands of Cubans and Africans at the end of 2015, the death by drowning of 12 African migrants in 2016, who sought to circumvent the controls through Lake Nicaragua, and the trial of a Cameroonian woman who was arrested in December 2017.

Marie Frinwie Atanga is originally from Cameroon and a resident of Belgium, from where she traveled to Nicaragua in 2017 to claim the body of her 20-year-old migrant son, who was shot dead in southern Nicaragua in an alleged clash between a border patrol and a group of “coyotes”, who were transporting migrants from Costa Rica to Honduras.

She was detained and accused of belonging to an international migrant smuggling ring, and could face up to 12 years in prison, which Carrión considers to be “a legal and moral barbarism of Nicaragua against migrants.”

In addition, under the containment wall policy, the authorities have prohibited local residents from helping migrants in transit and have even brought criminal charges – of collaboration with human trafficking – against people who have provided food, water or clothing to migrants who were abandoned by the coyotes and were in a risky situation.

For Carrión, the heavy-handed approach on migration runs counter to the history of Nicaragua, a country with a population of 6.3 million people, since 11 percent of its inhabitants live and work abroad, mainly in the United States, Costa Rica, Panama and Spain.

That, according to a 2017 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), makes it the second source of migrants from Central America, only behind El Salvador, which has 24 percent of its citizens abroad, while Honduras is third, with seven percent, followed by Guatemala (6.5 percent), Panama (four percent) and Costa Rica (3.5 percent).

Nicaragua has a poverty rate of 29.6 percent, according to the latest figures from the World Bank, which places it as one of the three poorest countries in the Americas. This year, this nation expects to receive 1.424 billion dollars in migrant remittances, 3.5 percent more than in 2017, according to data from the country’s Central Bank.

In April 2017, three years after this road was created to mark the official start of the construction of the Great Nicaraguan Interoceanic Canal in Brito, on the country’s Pacific ocean western coast, it remains unpaved, and is only used by horses from nearby farms. Credit: José Adán Silva/ IPS

By José Adán Silva
PUNTA GORDA/BRITO, Nicaragua, Apr 25 2017 (IPS)

Less than three years from the projected completion in Nicaragua of a canal running from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean, there is no trace of progress on the mega-project.

IPS traveled to both ends of the routet: Bluefields, on the Caribbean coast in eastern Nicaragua, 383 km from Managua, and Brito, on the Pacific coast in the southern department of Rivas, 112 km from the capital.

In the South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, IPS traveled by boat from Bluefields, the regional capital, to the town of Punta Gorda to the south.“About two years ago, foreigners used to come and travel around by helicopter and boat from the mouth of the Punta Gorda River all the way upstream. They were escorted by the army and would not talk with anyone, but they have not returned." -- Anonymous indigenous leader

There are 365 small scattered indigenous settlements along the banks of the rivers, in a region divided into two sectors: the Southern Triangle, facing the sea, and the Daniel Guido Development Pole, along the banks of the Punta Gorda River – the Caribbean extreme of the projected canal.

According to the plans of the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development (HKND) group, in charge of the project to build the Great Nicaraguan Interoceanic Canal, in this sparsely populated jungle area bordering the territory of the Rama indigenous people, a deep-water harbour must be built, as well as the first locks on the Caribbean end for the ships that cross to or from the Atlantic Ocean.

The entire Great Canal project, according to HKND, is to include six sub-projects: the canal, the locks, two harbours, a free trade zone, tourist centres, an international airport, and several roads.

Other connected works are a hydroelectric power plant, a cement factory, and other related industrial facilities to ensure the supply of materials and the successful completion of the canal in five years, counting from 2014, when the project officially got underway.

But in Punta Gorda there are no infrastructure works, no HKND offices, and among the local population nobody is willing to openly talk about the subject.

“The silence is a matter of caution, people think you might be a government agent,” a local indigenous leader of the Rama and Kriol Territorial Government (GTR-K), an autonomous organisation of indigenous communities that own the lands that will be affected by the canal, told IPS on condition of anonymity.

In the days prior to IPS’ visit to the region, army troops and the police carried out operations against drug trafficking, and there was an overall sense of apprehension.

The members of the GTR-K are divided between supporting and opposing the project, but negotiations with the government representatives have been tense and conflict-ridden, to the extent that complaints by the local indigenous people demanding respect for their ancestral lands have reached the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“About two years ago, foreigners used to come and travel around by helicopter and boat from the mouth of the Punta Gorda River all the way upstream. They were escorted by the army and would not talk with anyone, but they have not returned,” said the indigenous leader of this remote territory that can only be accessed by boat or helicopter.

Silence on the subject is not just found among the locals. There is no talk anymore at a government level about what was once a highly touted project.

Fishermen and stevedores on one of the docks on the Punta Gorda River, near where it runs into the Caribbean Sea, the projected Caribbean extreme of the interoceanic canal, where local residents have not seen any visible sign of progress on the works officially launched more than two years ago. Credit: José Adán Silva/ IPS

However, Vice President Rosario Murillo, the chief spokesperson of the government of her husband Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua since 2007, announced this month that with Taiwan’s support, a deep-water harbour, not connected to the plan for the canal, would be built in the same area with an investment that has not yet been revealed.

María Luisa Acosta, coordinator of the Legal Aid Centre for Indigenous Peoples, told IPS that the Special Law for the Development of Infrastructure and Transportation in Nicaragua Relating to the Canal, Free-Trade Areas and Associated Infrastructure, known as Law 840, was passed in June 2013 without consulting local indigenous and black communities.

A year later, on July 7, 2014, HKND and the Nicaraguan government announced the route that had been chosen for the canal, running from the Rivas Isthmus across Lake Cocibolca, also known as Lake Nicaragua, to Punta Gorda.

The route would negatively affect the indigenous communities of Salinas de Nahualapa, Nancimí, Veracruz del Zapotal, Urbaite de las Pilas and San Jorge Nicaraocalí, along the Pacific, while in the Caribbean region it would impact the Creole communities of Monkey Point and Punta Gorda, as well as the Rama people of Wiring Kay, Punta de Águila and Bangkukuk Tai, home to the last speakers of the Rama language.

According to leaders of different indigenous communities, government representatives began to pressure them to give their consent over their lands to allow the canal to be built, giving rise to a still lingering conflict.

The canal is to be 278 km in length – including a 105-km stretch across Lake Cocibolca – 520 metres wide and up to 30 metres deep.

It was to be built by the end of 2019, at a cost of over 50 billion dollars – more than four times the GDP of this Central American country of 6.2 million people, 40 per cent of whom live in poverty.

The construction of a harbour, the western locks and a tourist complex is projected in Brito, a town on the Pacific coast in the municipality of Tola.

The town is named after the Brito River, a natural tributary of Lake Cocibolca, which winds through the isthmus until flowing into the Pacific Ocean. The works were officially inaugurated in Brito in December 2014.

The president of HKND, Wang Jing, together with Nicaraguan government officials, appeared in the media next to the construction equipment to inaugurate the work on a 13-km highway, which would be used to bring in the heavy machinery to build the initial infrastructure.

It was the last time Wang was seen in public in Nicaragua.

There is no new paved highway, just a dirt road which in winter is difficult to travel because it turns into a muddy track.

No heavy machinery is in sight, or vehicular traffic, workers or engineering staff.

Here, as in Punta Gorda, people avoid talking about the canal, and if they do it is on condition of anonymity and in a low voice.

“In Rivas we drove out the Chinese with stones when they tried to come to measure the houses, and after that, the police harassed us. They disguised themselves as civilians – as doctors, vendors and even priests, to see if we were participating in the protests,” said one local resident in Brito, who was referring to the 87 protest demonstrations held against the canal in Nicaragua.

In Managua, Telémaco Talavera, the spokesman for the state Commission of the Great Nicaraguan Interoceanic Canal, said briefly to a small group of journalists, including IPS, that studies on the canal continue and that “the project is moving ahead as planned.”

However, Vice President Murillo announced in January that a 138-km coastal highway would be built along the Rivas Isthmus, to cater to the tourism industry and improve transportation, at a cost of 120 million dollars – with no mention of the canal.

One month later, government machinery was moved to Rivas to begin building the road where the canal was supposed to go.

A dock in the coastal community of Laguna de Perlas, in the municipality of Bluefields, which owes its name to its location along the longest coastal lagoon in Nicaragua, 40 km north of the city. Coexistence with maritime, river or lake water is part of life in the South Caribbean Region, but climate change is compelling the local population to make changes. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

By José Adán Silva
BLUEFIELDS, Nicaragua , Apr 22 2017 (IPS)

The effects of climate change have hit Nicaragua’s Caribbean coastal regions hard in the last decade and have forced the authorities and local residents to take protection and adaptation measures to address the phenomenon that has gradually undermined their safety and changed their way of life.

Bluefields, the capital city of Nicaragua’s South Caribbean Autonomous Region, has endured a series of hurricanes, floods due to heavy rains or storm surges, droughts, environmental pollution and general changes in temperatures, which have caused economic damages to the local population.

The latest catastrophic event along Nicaragua’s eastern Caribbean coast was Hurricane Otto, which was a category 2 storm on the five-point Saffir-Simpson scale when it hit in October 2016.

The structural damages and heavy flooding were the same as always, but something changed for the better: there were no fatalities, wounded or missing people in Nicaragua.“The population in this area has suffered a lot due to climate change, not only because of the hurricanes and flooding from the sea and rivers, but due to the climate variability. They have lost crops because of droughts or too much rain. They used to know how to interpret the signs of rain, but not anymore.” -- Guillaume Craig

The 10,143 people from the 69 coastal communities directly affected in the South Caribbean Region survived with no injuries, having taken refuge in shelters set up by the governmental National Agency for Disaster Management and Prevention (SINAPRED).

This was due to the gradual development of social awareness in the face of climatic events, according to Ericka Aldana, coordinator of the non-governmental international organisation Global Communities’ climate change project: “Citizens Prepared for Climate Change”.

“Historically, Nicaragua’s South and North Caribbean regions have been hit by natural disasters due to their coastal location and environment surrounded by jungles and big rivers which have served as means of transport. But with climate change the vulnerability increased, and it was necessary to make an effort to change the mindset of the population,” Aldana told IPS.

Her organisation, together with the civil and military authorities, have organised conferences, discussion forums and environmental awareness campaigns, in addition to prevention and coastal community rescue plans in the entire South Caribbean Region.

The two autonomous Caribbean coastal regions represent 52 per cent of the territory of Nicaragua and are home to 15 per cent of the country’s 6.2 million people, including a majority of the indigenous and black populations.

Aldana said that in the coastal communities, especially Corn Island and Little Corn Island, located in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Bluefields, the waves changed due to the intensity and instability in wind patterns.
This makes it difficult to maneuver fishing boats, alters fishing cycles, drives away the fish, and erodes the coasts of the two small islands.

On Little Corn Island, local resident Vilma Gómez talked to IPS about the threats posed and damages caused by the change in ocean currents, winds and waves.

As an example, she said that she has seen almost four km of coastline submerged due to the erosion caused by waves over the last 30 years.

The municipality of Corn Island, comprised of the two islands separated by 15 km, with a total area of 13.1 square kilometres, is one of the most populated areas in Nicaragua’s South Caribbean Autonomous Region, with about 598 people per square kilometre.

Part of the central region of the city of Bluefields, in Nicaragua’s South Caribbean Autonomous Region, from the access pier to Bluefields lagoon, with buildings at the water’s edge. The municipalities’ urban and rural residents learned to raise their houses on pilings, among other measures to face the increasingly frequent floods. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

Gómez said that on her island, infrastructures such as seawalls was built with government funds, to contain the coastal erosion, the damage in wetlands, the shrinking of the beaches and the impact on tourism, which together with fishing make up 90 per cent of the municipality’s economic activity.

But in her opinion, they are futile efforts in the face of the strength of the sea. “I believe that if this continues this way, in a few years the island will become uninhabitable, because the sea could swallow it entirely after contaminating the water sources and arable lands,” lamented Gómez.

Other communities located near Bluefields Bay and its tributaries suffer ever more frequent storm surges and sudden floods, that have destroyed and contaminated the wetlands.

But once the shock and fear were overcome, the population started to try to strengthen their capacities to build resilience in the face of climate change, said Aldana.

Guillaume Craig, director of the environmentalist organisation blueEnergy in Nicaragua, is involved in the project “Citizens Prepared for Climate Change”, in which authorities, civil society and academia together in Bluefields carry out campaigns to strengthen the Caribbean communities’ response capacity to the impacts of climate change.

“The population in this area has suffered a lot due to climate change, not only because of the hurricanes and flooding from the sea and rivers, but due to the climate variability. They have lost crops because of droughts or too much rain. They used to know how to interpret the signs of rain, but not anymore,” Craig told IPS.

As a result, he noted that “the wells dry out in January, when that used to happen in April, the rains in May sometimes fall in March, or do not occur until July. It is crazy, and the local people did not know how to handle it.”

After years of training and campaigns, the locals learned to apply techniques and methods to save water, plant crops resistant to the changes, and techniques for building in coastal areas, which started to suddenly flood due to storm surges or heavy rains.

Climate change has already cost the communities a great deal: a fall in the production of basic grains, a loss of biological diversity and forest resources, water shortages, degradation of soils, salinization of wells, floods in low-lying coastal areas and landslides, among other phenomena.

“The rise in temperatures is affecting people’s health and producing cardiac problems, increasing the populations of vectors that carry diseases, erosion by sea waves and loss of soil, and increasing energy consumption and the risk of fires. The rise in the water level is driving up the risks,” said Craig.
Bluefields, originally a pirate base of operations, is 383 km from the capital city, Managua, and can only be reached by air or by boat along the Escondido River from the El Rama port, located on the mainland 292 km from the capital.

The population of just over 60,000 people is multi-ethnic: Creoles, mestizos (mixed-race), Rama and Garifuna peoples, and descendants of English, French or Asian immigrants.

It faces a bay that serves as a barrier to the sea’s direct waves, and is surrounded by rivers and lakes that connect the region with the Pacific Ocean and the North Caribbean. The elevation above sea level is barely 20 metres, which makes it especially vulnerable.

Marlene Hodgson, who lives in the impoverished coastal neighborhood of El Canal, on the outskirts of the city, told IPS that she and her family have been suffering from the bay’s swells for years.

“Sometimes we did not expect it and all of a sudden we had water up to the waist. Now we have raised the house’s pilings with concrete and dug canals and built dikes to protect it. But we have also become aware of when they come and that allows us to survive without damages,” said the woman of Creole ethnic origin.

After the storms, many houses in the area were abandoned by their occupants, who moved to higher and less vulnerable lands.

The phenomenon also disrupted the economy and the way of life of the traditional fishers, said Alberto Down.

“Just 20 years ago, I would throw the net and in two hours I would get 100 fish,” he told IPS. “Now I have to spend more in fuel to go farther out to sea and I have to wait up to eight hours to get half of that. And on some occasions I don’t catch anything,” said the fisherman from the 19 de Julio neighbourhood, one of the most vulnerable in this area forever threatened by the climate.

The offices of La Prensa, the oldest newspaper in Nicaragua and the leading media outlet critical of the Daniel Ortega administration, has suffered negative economic consequences as a result, as have other opposition outlets. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Mar 30 2017 (IPS)

During the 161st session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an empty chair across from the OAS Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Edison Lanzas, sums up the Nicaraguan government’s relationship with this issue in the country: absence.

At the Mar. 15-22 meeting of the IACHR, an independent Organisation of American States (OAS) body, only Cuba, the United States and Nicaragua were absent from the debate in the review and complaints session, which in the case of Nicaragua dealt with freedom of expression.

It was the third time this Central American country abstained from participating, which according to experts on freedom of expression and journalism conveys a “disregard” by the government towards the media and journalists, ever since leftist President Daniel Ortega returned to power in 2007, after governing the country in the 1980s.

Adrián Uriarte, the dean of the social sciences department in the University of Commercial Sciences, said “freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and goes beyond the media.”

The academic explained to IPS a set of indicators he created to determine the degree of freedom of expression in a country.

The first “refers to the exercise of this right in different social areas: home, community, media, school, church, and now social networks,” while the second “has to do with the exercise of this right in public spaces: protests, demonstrations, marches,” he said.

The third involves “a citizen’s right to demand accountability from the government and the powers-that-be, including the media.”"This can be measured by the lack of access to information, zero interviews, zero advertising from the state, control over tax exemptions, and control of social and labour institutions to exert administrative pressure on owners of media outlets.” -- Adrián Uriarte

The fourth relates to “the right to seek and access public information; and the fifth indicator has to do with the exercise of this right in writing, by radio or television, which of course is directly linked to freedom of the press.”

This country “has good grades in the first indicators, in terms of freedom of expression, mostly because in Nicaragua internet use is not yet regulated, and as a result, social networks have become the main new public spaces where citizens exercise their right to freedom of expression,” said Uriarte.

“But journalists and the media are ironically the group that exercises freedom of expression the least in Nicaragua. I would say actually that this is the area where self-censorship is practiced the most,” said the academic.

In Uriarte’s view, the government of Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, who became vice president in January, “has a sectarian vision of freedom of the press.”

“There are public policies aimed at promoting technological development and access to information and advertising for public and private media outlets, but which have ties, according to investigative reporting, to the current administration,” he said.

“On balance, we can say that in Nicaragua those who suffer a lack of freedom of expression are private media outlets not influenced by the state,” said Uriarte.

“The most visible form has been denial of this right,” he said.

This “can be measured by the lack of access to information, zero interviews, zero advertising from the state, control over tax exemptions, and control of social and labour institutions to exert administrative pressure on owners of media outlets.”

“It is also seen in the cancelation of private spaces in local newscasts, removal of technical equipment from local radio stations, which has naturally led to the closure of private spaces of opinion due to a lack of economic sustainability for many journalists.”

Newspaper and radio reporter Juan Rodríguez has experienced firsthand the consequences of being considered an “opposition journalist”.

“In 2007 I was communications and press officer for the Executive Secretariat of the National System for Disaster Prevention and Care, when the Sandinista government came into power and they cancelled my contract with no legal justification. They fired me because they suspected that I belonged to the right-wing media,” he told IPS.

Since then, Rodríguez has got around a series of barriers and a lack of institutional support to make radio programmes, while complaining about political harassment for having headed the independent Association of Journalists of Nicaragua.

Journalist Luis Galeano, director of the local radio and television programme Café con Voz, put it like this: “As a journalist I always work thinking whether tomorrow we are going to be able to go on the air.” His programme, broadcast by a local TV station and a network of community radios, is not yet considered “opposition”, but Galeano is worried that any day now the authorities will apply pressure to remove it from the air.

“I don’t know whether the government will all of a sudden get annoyed with what I say or do in my programme and order its closure, or whether business people are going to request that my programme be shut down, or whether they will pressure the few business people that support the media to stop backing us. The truth is that I live in constant worry about whether or not I will remain on the air,” he said.

Dozens of journalists have complained about the same sense of uncertainty, to Nicaraguan human rights lawyer Juan Carlos Arce with the non-governmental Nicaraguan Human Rights Centre.

Freedom of expression, according to the United Nations, is based on “the freedom to seek, receive and impart information.” In the current situation this right is not guaranteed for individual citizens, collectives or independent journalists, due to a secretive government policy,” Arce told IPS.

According to the activist, the 2007 policy is based on the strict control of public information and manifests itself as a gag order for civil servants.

For Arce, the problem of freedom of expression is exacerbated by government control of the media. This, in his opinion, “runs counter to the government’s obligation to promote pluralism and independence in the media.”

In this Central American nation of 6.2 million people, in 2007 there was only one TV channel and one radio station in the hands of the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) , another state-owned station and two other pro-government stations, as well as several others close to the government.

In 2017, according to Arce, more than 80 per cent of the radio stations, TV channels, print media and on-line programmes are under the control of the FSLN, controlled by family members, political operators and like-minded journalists, although some occasionally declare themselves publicly as independent.

“As an advocate, the biggest problem is the lack of information of the institutions and the fact that that many people avoid speaking out because they fear retaliation from the government,” he said.

Arce said the absence of the government in the continental forums to debate on freedom of expression is shown not only by the empty chairs during the 161st session of the IACHR, but also in the countless pronouncements of international bodies on violations of human rights and other universal rights.

To illustrate, Arce mentioned U.N. criticisms in its Universal Periodic Review on Nicaragua in 2014, and other reports issued since 2008 by the U.S. State Department, the European Parliament, the OAS, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, the Inter American Press Association, Freedom House, and Amnesty International, among others.

Francisca Ramírez, the head of the peasant movement that is leading the fight against the construction of an inter-oceanic canal in Nicaragua, which has made her a victim of harassment by the administration of Daniel Ortega. Credit: Luis Martínez/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Feb 24 2017 (IPS)

The unequal battle that small farmer Francisca Ramírez is waging against the Nicaraguan government of Daniel Ortega has become so well-known that people are calling for her security and her rights from the political heart of Europe.

Who is she and why did the European Parliament order Nicaragua on Feb. 16 to protect her life and rights, as well as those of thousands of peasant farmers in the centre-south of this impoverished Central American country?

Ramírez is a 40-year-old indigenous farmer who has lived all her life in the agricultural municipality of Nueva Guinea, in the Autonomous Region of Caribe Sur, 280 km from the capital.

She told IPS in an interview that her family has always lived in that rural area, which was the scene of bloody fighting during the 1980s civil war.

When she was eight, her father abandoned them and her mother had to work as a day labourer, while Ramírez took care of her five younger siblings.

Having survived the U.S.-financed war against the government of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (1979-1990), Ramírez learned agricultural work, got married at 18, had five children, and with the effort of the whole family, they acquired some land and improved their living conditions.

Ortega, who governed the country in that period, after overthrowing the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, returned to power in 2007. In January, he started a third consecutive term of office, after winning widely questioned elections where the opposition was excluded, supported by a civil-military alliance which controls all the branches of the state.

Ramírez was happy with her life until 2013. “They told us over the radio that they were going to build a canal and I thought that it was a very important thing because they said that we were no longer going to be poor,” she said.

Then, gradually, the news started to change her perception of the project to build the Great Nicaraguan Canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, granted in concession to the Chinese group HKND in 2013, and she started to ask questions that nobody answered.

One day, bad luck knocked on her door: delegations of public officials who her community had never seen before, accompanied by members of the police and the military, escorted delegations of people from China who made measurements and calculations about the properties of the farmers.

“The route of the canal runs through your property and all of you will be resettled,” they told her.

Law 840, passed in 2013 to give life to the over 50-billion-dollar mega-project, which she was barely able to understand with her three years of formal schooling, was very clear: they would be paid for their lands a price which the state considered “appropriate”.

So the resistance began. “At first everybody was happy, we thought that at last progress was coming, but when overbearing soldiers and police officers started to show up, guarding the Chinese, the whole community refused to let them in their homes and we started to protest,” she said.

Since then, she said the official response has not varied: repression, harassment and threats to farmers who refuse to give up their land.

Ramírez said that she became an activist in the National Council in Defence of Our Land, Lake and Sovereignty, a civil society initiative to organise the peasant movement to defend their lands and rights.

She started marching behind the rural leaders who led the first demonstrations against the canal.

One of the many demonstrations by small farmers who came to Managua from the southern Caribbean coastal region to protest the construction of an inter-oceanic canal that would displace thousands of rural families and cause severe environmental damage. Credit: Carlos Herrera/IPS

Later on, the leaders were arrested, threatened, intimidated and repressed by the police and military, and Ramírez unexpectedly found herself leading the demonstrations in 2014.

Her leadership caught the attention of the national and international media, human rights organisations and civil society.

Soon, the peasant marches against the canal became a symbol of resistance and more people joined, turning the movement into the most important social force to confront Ortega since he took office again 10 years ago.

The peasant movement against the canal “is the strongest social organisation that exists today in Nicaragua. Within any movement, an authentic and genuine leadership emerges, and that is what Mrs. Ramírez represents,” sociologist Oscar René Vargas told IPS.

The president “is aware that the movement is the most important social force that his government is facing,” he said.

The admiration that Ramírez arouses, with her ability to organise and lead more than 90 demonstrations in the country, has irritated the authorities.

More than 200 peasant farmers have been arrested, about 100 have been beaten or wounded by gunfire, and the government has basically imposed a military state of siege in the area, where it refuses to finance social projects, according to the movement.

Police checkpoints along the entire route to Nueva Guinea and military barricades in the area give the impression of a war zone.

Ramírez has not escaped the violence and harassment: her house has been raided without a court order, her children and family persecuted and threatened by intelligence agents and police officers, her belongings and goods that she sells, such as food, confiscated and damaged, and she has been accused of terrorist activities.

One of the latest episodes occurred in December 2016, during a visit to Nicaragua by Organisation of American States (OAS) Secretary-General Luis Almagro, to discuss with Ortega the allegations of attacks on democracy.

To keep Ramírez and other leaders of the movement from meeting with Almagro, police convoys besieged the community and repressed members of the movement, she said.

They partially destroyed the main bridge out of the area, and suspected members of the movement’s Council were held at military checkpoints.

They even confiscated Ramírez’s work vehicles, used them to transport troops and later damaged them, according to Gonzalo Carrión, from the Nicaraguan Human Rights Centre.

“Ortega’s government has visciously mistreated Francisca Ramírez and the farmers who follow her. Her rights have been violated, from the right to protest to the right to freedom of movement, and we fear that they will violate her most sacred right: to life,” Carrión told IPS.

Walking along footpaths in the dark and crossing a deep river, where she almost drowned, Ramírez got around the military cordon and travelled, disguised and hidden in a truck, to Managua, where she was able to meet with Almagro on Dec. 1, 2016 and tell him of the abuses to which her community had been subjected for refusing to give up their lands.

On Feb. 16, the European Parliament issued a resolution condemning the lack of protection for human rights activists in Nicaragua, putting a special emphasis on the case of Ramírez, and lamenting the deterioration of the rule of law and democracy in this country.

The members of the European Parliament urged “the national and local police forces to refrain from harassing and using acts of reprisal against Francisca Ramirez for carrying out her legitimate work as a human rights defender.”

“Francisca Ramirez is a victim of abuses by the police in the country aiming at risking human rights defenders’ security and livelihood,” the European Parliament denounced.

“Ramírez, coordinator for the Defense of the Land, the Lake and Sovereignty, was in Managua to file a formal complaint over acts of repression, violations of the right to free circulation, and aggression experienced by several communities from Nueva Guinea on their way to the capital city for a peaceful protest against the construction of an inter-oceanic canal, projects which will displace local farmers activities and indigenous people from the premises of the construction,” the resolution states.

While the government remained silent about the resolution, social activist Mónica López believes that it represented a victory for the rural movement.

“Without a doubt, the resolution is a social and political victory for the peasant movement against the canal, a condemnation of Nicaragua, and a global warning about what is happening against indigenous peasant movements in Nicaragua,” López told IPS.

The government asserts that the canal project is moving ahead, although a year has passed with no visible progress, and it maintains that it will eradicate the poverty that affects more than 40 per cent of the 6.2 million people in this Central American country.

Members of a cooperative of women farmers in Nicaragua build a greenhouse for thousands of seedlings of fruit and lumber trees aimed at helping to fight the effects of climate change in a village in the department of Madriz. Credit: Femuprocan

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Dec 5 2016 (IPS)

A group of women farmers who organised to fight a centuries-old monopoly over land ownership by men are seeking plots of land to farm in order to contribute to the food security of their families and of the population at large.

Matilde Rocha, vice president of the Federation of Nicaraguan Women Farmers Cooperatives (Femuprocan), told IPS that since the late 1980s, when women trained in the Sandinista revolution organised to form cooperatives, access to land has been one of the movement’s main demands.

According to Rocha, as of 1997, the organisation has worked in a coordinated manner to fight for recognition of the rights of women farmers not only with regard to agriculture, but also to economic, political and social rights.

Femuprocan, together with 14 other associations, successfully pushed for the 2010 approval of the Fund for the Purchase of Land with Gender Equity for Rural Women Law, known as Law 717.

They also contributed to the incorporation of a gender equity focus in the General Law on Cooperatives and to the participation of women in the Municipal Commissions on Food Security and Sovereignty.

For Rocha, this advocacy has allowed rural women to update the mapping of actors in the main productive areas in the country, strengthen the skills of women farmers and train them in social communication and as promoters of women’s human rights, to tap into resources and take decisions without the pressure of their male partners.

“For rural women, land is life, it is vital for the family; land ownership and inputs to make it productive are closely linked to women’s economic empowerment, to decision-making about food production, to the preservation of our environment, and to ensuring food security and protecting our native seeds to avoid dependence on genetically modified seeds,” said Rocha.

Josefina Rodríguez, one of the 18 per cent of women farmers in Nicaragua who own the land that they work. The fund created six years ago to promote the purchase of land by rural women still lacks the required resources to meet its goals. Credit: Ismael López/IPS

Femuprocan is the only federation in the country solely made up of women farmers: more than 4,200 members organised in 73 cooperatives in six of the country’s departments: Madriz, Managua, Granada, Región Autónoma del Caribe Norte, Matagalpa and Jinotega.

Rocha believes the progress made has been more qualitative than quantitative.

In 2010, when they pushed through Law 717, an estimated 1.1 million women lived in rural areas, and most of them owned neither land nor other assets.

The law was aimed at giving rural women access to physical possession and legal ownership of land, improving their economic conditions, boosting gender equity, ensuring food security and fighting poverty in the country, estimated at the time at 47 per cent.

Nicaragua currently has a population of 6.2 million, 51 per cent of whom are women, and 41 per cent of whom live in rural areas, according to World Bank figures.

Data from the Household Survey to Measure Poverty in Nicaragua, published in June by the International Foundation for Global Economic Challenge, indicates that 39 per cent of the population was poor in 2015.

The poverty rate in urban areas was 22.1 per cent, compared to 58.8 per cent in rural areas.

According to the international humanitarian organisation Oxfam, only 18 per cent of the rural women who work on farms in Nicaragua own land, while the rest have to lease it and pay before planting.

“Access to land ownership is a pending demand for 40 percent of the members of Femuprocan, which represents a total of 1,680 women without land,” said Rocha.

The struggle for access to land is an uphill battle, but the organisation is not giving up.

“In 17 municipalities covered by our federation, 620 women are active in the process of searching for lands for our members. Not only women who have no land, but also women who do are engaged in the process of identifying lands to make them productive, as are other governmental and non-governmental organisations,” she said.

One of the members of the organisation told IPS that there has been no political will or economic financing from the state to enforce the law on access to land.

The more than 4,000 members of the Federation of Nicaraguan Women Farmers Cooperatives sell their products, many of which are organic, directly to consumers in fairs and markets. Credit: Femuprocan

“How many doors have we knocked on, how many offices have we visited to lobby, how many meetings have we held…and the law is still not enforced,” said the farmer, who asked to be identified only as Maria, during a trip to Managua.

“The problem is that the entire legal, economic and productive system is still dominated by men, and they see us as threats, more than competition, to their traditional business activities,” she said.

Other women’s organisations have come from rural areas to the cities to protest that the law on access to land is not being enforced.

In May, María Teresa Fernández, who heads the Coordinator of Rural Women, complained in Managua that “women who do not own land have to pay up to 200 dollars to rent one hectare during the growing season.”

In addition to having to lease land, the women who belong to the organisation have in recent years faced environmental problems such as drought, dust storms, volcanic ash and pests without receiving the benefit of public policies that make bank loans available to deal with these problems.

“Six years ago, Law 717 was passed, ordering the creation of a gender equity fund for the purchase of land by rural women. But this fund has not yet been included in the general budget in order for women to access mortgage credits administered by the state bank, to get their own land,” Fernández complained in May.

The Nicaraguan financial system does not grant loans to women farmers who have no legal title to land, a problem that the government has tried to mitigate with social welfare programmes such as Zero Hunger, Zero Usury, Roof Plan, Healthy Yards and the Christian Solidarity Programme for food distribution, among others.

However, sociologist Cirilo Otero, director of the non-governmental Centre of Initiatives for Environmental Policies, said there is not enough government support, and stressed to IPS that women’s lack of access to land is one of the most serious problems of gender inequality in Nicaragua.

“It is still an outstanding debt by the state towards women farmers,” he said.

Nevertheless, data from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) indicates that Nicaragua was one of 17 Latin American countries that met the targets for hunger reduction and improvement in food security in the first 15 years of the century, as part of the Millennium Development Goals.

According to the U.N. agency, between 1990 and 2015, the country reduced the proportion of undernourished people from 54.4 per cent to 16.6 per cent.

Nicaragua's new canal is meant to rival the Panama canal but has also sparked protests as it will displace tens of thousands of people. Credit: Carlos Herrera/IPS

By Erika Guevara-Rosas
MEXICO CITY, Nov 4 2016 (IPS)

Next week, millions of people around the world will be glued to their TV screens and social media feeds, watching as the USA decides who will lead the most powerful country on earth.

Around 3,000 kilometers away, in a much smaller nation in the middle of Central America, another election will take place just a couple of days earlier. Although Nicaragua’s presidential election lacks the fame of the Clinton-Trump race, it is every bit as controversial.

President Daniel Ortega, leader of the ruling Sandinista Front for National Liberation, will run for office for the third consecutive time. His wife, Rosario Murillo, is his running mate.

Both have been accused of leading a campaign to stamp out any form of opposition.

For the six million people living in resource-rich Nicaragua, political scandals are nothing new. They are symptoms of the deteriorating human rights situation facing one of the most invisible countries in the Americas – where basic natural resources such as land and water mark the front lines of a battle between the powerful few and the marginalized majorities.

Here are four things you should know are taking place in the backdrop to Nicaragua’s elections:

One: Development, for some
In 2013, the National Assembly of Nicaragua passed a new law to pave the way for construction of a new interoceanic canal to rival Panama’s. If finished, it will connect the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea and, it is argued, inject millions of dollars into the country’s economy, including by generating tens of thousands of jobs.

The canal, however, will likely also force tens of thousands of people, including many Indigenous communities, off their lands and affect their livelihoods and vital natural resources such as water with and impact for generations to come, which would effectively outweigh any possible economic benefits of the project.

Erika Guevara-Rosas

Two: Women, second class citizens
Women living in poverty across Nicaragua are still the main victims of maternal mortality, and the country has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy of the Continent, with 28% of women giving birth before the age 18. In spite of this, women are also subjected to some of the harshest abortion laws on earth. Abortion is banned in all circumstances, even if it is vital to save the woman’s life.

In a context in which impunity for gender-based crimes remains, local organizations working on women’s rights face constant threats. In June, a shelter run by the Civil Foundation for Support to Women Victims of Violence was raided. The authorities have not opened an investigation into the incident. And this is unfortunately one case among many others.

Three: Indigenous Peoples’ rights trampled
Indigenous Peoples across Nicaragua are also treated as second-class citizens, their rights constantly trampled on and their voices unheard as their demands often conflict with powerful economic interests.

Last year, in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) –home to the mythical “Mosquitia” – a violent struggle over territory erupted. Indigenous Miskito communities were subjected to threats, attacks, assassinations, sexual assault and forced displacement by non-Indigenous settlers. The state has utterly failed to offer them effective protection. In that context, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures in favour of some Miskito communities, calling on Nicaragua to protect them.

In May 2016, leaders of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities Rama-Kriol said that an agreement for the construction of the Grand Canal of Nicaragua had been signed without an effective consultation process, in violation of their rights to free prior and informed consent.

Four: The ‘crime’ of defending human rights
Activists working to defend basic human rights and access to natural resources have been subjected to systematic harassment and attacks aimed at silencing their demands. These attacks are very rarely investigated.

The grant of precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called for measures to protect human rights defenders from the Center for Justice and Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, who had received death threats due to their work on Indigenous rights.

Additionally, the Coordinator of the National Council for Defense of the Land, Lake and National Sovereignty, recently reported intimidation and harassment against her and her family. She has been actively denouncing the possible impacts of the Grand Interoceanic Canal in Nicaraguan peasant farmers´ communities.

Nicaragua is very quickly and dangerously slipping back into some of the darkest times the country has seen in decades, with the government turning a blind eye to violations of the human rights they have promised to uphold and punishing anyone who “steps out of line”.

This strategy is both dangerously misguided and illegal.

By failing to protect basic human rights, guarantee access to natural resources essential for life and respect those defending them, the Nicaraguan authorities are condemning millions to a future of inequality and suffering.

But there is another way. Whoever is elected to lead this Central American nation for the next five years must take a hard look at the country’s human rights discourse and the reality for millions of people, particularly the most marginalized – and ensure the government’s future priorities are properly aligned.

The alternative could simply force the country into a free fall that will be impossibly challenging to recover from.

Excerpt:

The FSLN’s election campaign in Nicaragua has consisted of placing giant billboards displaying images of its candidates, President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo. Credit: Oscar Navarrete/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Nov 3 2016 (IPS)

In the midst of unusual political tension and apathy, Nicaraguans will go to the polls on Sunday Nov. 6 to vote in elections marked by the absence of the main opposition force and international election observers.

The governing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) dominates the country’s public institutions, in alliance with the main economic powers and backed by the police and military.

The leftist FSLN is the lone major party in the elections. And this is the party’s seventh consecutive nomination of 70-year-old former Sandinista guerrilla leader President Daniel Ortega, and his third run since he won the 2006 elections with 38 percent of the vote.“There is no election spirit, people are not talking about the process, there was no debate among candidates, there are no proposals for solving the most pressing problems that the country faces, the electoral authorities have had no credibility since 2008.” -- José Dávila

The opposition argue that the modification of the constitution by the judicial and electoral authorities to allow indefinite presidential re-election was illegal.

If Ortega wins, as projected by the polls, he will govern until 2021, completing 15 consecutive years in power since taking office in 2007.

He had already governed the country between 1979 and 1990, after the FSLN revolution overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza, the last of the Somoza dynasty. In the 1980s the country was rocked by the war waged against the government by the U.S.-armed and -financed “Contras”.

Political scientist José Antonio Peraza told IPS “we have not experienced a political situation as serious as this one” since the FSLN and Ortega lost their political and military power in the 1990 elections, following a decade of civil war.

In his view, this electoral process is not only unusual due to the electorate’s lack of interest, but also “because the political system has been structured for the elections in such a way that the only options left are the governing party and five or six small parties authorised by the electoral tribunal in view of their slim chances of winning.”

“The FSLN made sure to remove any real political options, disqualifying the chief opposition party and replacing it with a pro-government group, with unknown candidates and no proposals for change,” said Peraza.

In August, the electoral tribunal banned the Independent Liberal Party (ILP) – the main opposition party that heads a coalition against the FSLN – from participating in the elections. It also dismissed 28 liberal deputies from Nicaragua’s congress, who acted as a counterweight to the Sandinista majority.

In addition, in a move that has caused much concern that the country will end up under another dictatorship and governing dynasty, Ortega named his wife, Rosario Murillo, as his vice presidential running-mate, and placed his children in strategic public posts.

“Many adversaries to the party are calling the process an electoral farce and I honestly cannot disagree with them in disregarding this situation as illegitimate. The FSLN vetoed outside monitors from overseeing the elections and removed the main opposition parties,” said the political analyst.

Recently Ortega partially reversed its ban on outside monitors, accepting a team of observers from the Organisation of American States (OAS).

The administration also “controls the electoral structures accused of election fraud since 2008 and uses the power of the public institutions to campaign with state resources,” said Peraza.

IPS sought an opinion within the FSLN’s campaign team, but received no response to the request for an interview in over a week.

José Dávila, a political analyst and election monitoring expert, told IPS that in the more than 100 elections that he has observed and studied in different countries around the world in the last 20 years, he has not seen an election like this one.

“There is no election spirit, people are not talking about the process, there was no debate among candidates, there are no proposals for solving the most pressing problems that the country faces, the electoral authorities have had no credibility since 2008,” when the opposition and observers denounced fraud in the municipal elections.

“The campaign has only been seen in government media outlets and there has not been a single formal communication to the people about how the election is going.”

Dávila said that if he “had to compare it with other electoral processes, I would say that this election looks more like the grey processes carried out in Eastern Europe during the Cold War or the polls in Cuba, where there is no real opposition to the government party.”

International pressure

According to Dávila, there are other elements that turn the process into a “pressure cooker” similar to the atmosphere seen during the 1980s crisis.

“The United States has denounced political irregularities committed by Ortega’s government in Nicaragua and is threatening to pass a law to cut loans to the country if the aspects that Washington questions are not resolved,” said Dávila.

He was referring to the threat posed by the Nicaragua Investment Conditionality Act (NICA), which was passed unanimously Sep. 21 by the U.S. House of Representatives, and now has to make it through the Senate before being signed into law by President Barack Obama.

The initiative aims for Washington to veto any loan programme or grant for projects in this Central American country, alleging that the government in Managua violates the human and political rights of Nicaraguans.

Nicaragua, a country of 6.1 million people, 47 percent of whom are poor, depends on international aid and soft loans to sustain its economy.

A U.S. blockade would cost Nicaragua 250 million dollars annually in loans according to the World Bank, at a time when its main ally, Venezuela, is in crisis.

For similar reasons, the OAS requested a dialogue with Nicaragua to address complaints by human rights organisations, political parties and civil society institutions.

The government has accepted the proposal and an OAS commission will participate in a dialogue with government authorities, political parties, media and civil society organizations, planned for the day before elections.

“In a political maneuver, the government is attempting to legitimate its electoral process, while its adversaries will take advantage of the opportunity to show all the anomalies and institutional abuses by President Ortega’s government, and I can’t see the OAS’ current authorities endorsing a dubious electoral process like the one that is taking place in Nicaragua,” said Dávila.

Unlike other elections when political parties campaigned in public squares and toured through the main cities, this year there were just small rallies held by groups that support the government and demonstrations by the opposition to protest what they call an “electoral farce.”

Against this backdrop, six national political parties and one regional will be running in the elections for president, vice president, national deputies and representatives to the Central American Parliament, with the government urging people to participate and the opposition calling on voters to abstain, in order to make a statement on the illegitimacy of the elections.

In the polls, the FSLN has 60 percent support.

The party first emerged as a political-military movement in July 1961, to overthrow the Somoza family that governed Nicaragua since the 1930s. It seized power in 1979, following a bloody civil war that then continued until 1990.

President Daniel Ortega (standing a right) at the Sixth National Sandinista Congress, held June 4, which unanimously proclaimed him the Sandinista Party candidate for president of Nicaragua for the seventh time in a row. On the high rise building, Nicaraguan revolutionary hero Augusto César Sandino (1895-1934) is depicted in silhouette. Credit: La Voz del Sandinismo

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jun 23 2016 (IPS)

The seventh consecutive nomination of Daniel Ortega as the governing party’s candidate to the presidency in Nicaragua, and the withdrawal from the race of a large part of the opposition, alleging lack of guarantees for genuine elections, has brought about the country’s worst political crisis since the end of the civil war in 1990.

President Ortega, a 72-year-old former guerrilla fighter, has been the elected head of this Central American since 2007, and is seeking reelection in the general elections scheduled for November 6. If he wins his term of office will be extended to 2021, by which time he will have served a record breaking 19 years, longer even than that of former dictator Anastasio Somoza García whoruled the country for over 16 years.

He is standing again this year in spite of already having served two consecutive terms as president, thanks to a ruling by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)-controlled Supreme Court (CSJ).

The CSJ determined in 2011 that an article in the constitution banning indefinite reelection was a violation of Ortega’s right to be a candidate. Thus the highest court in the land struck down the constitutional ban against immediate reelection of serving presidents who have served out their term of office.The future situation “will depend on the opposition’s power to create instability in the electoral system, after announcing its official withdrawal from the contest.” - Humberto Meza

Ortega’s electoral hopes were further boosted on June 15, when the opposition National Coalition for Democracy (CND) was elbowed out of the race: their most promising leader, Luis Callejas, was dropped as a presidential candidate.

Earlier the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) cancelled the legal status of the leadership of the Independent Liberation Party (PLI), the largest member of the Coalition, and handed over PLI representation instead to a political faction supportive of the FSLN.

In the view of the opposition and other domestic movements, these measures have undermined the country’s democratic institutions and cast a shadow of doubt over the validity of the elections themselves.

Social scientist Nicolás López Maltez, a member of Nicaragua’s Academy of Geography and History, said that the way Ortega has pursued his presidential aspirations is unparalleled in Central America in the past 150 years.

“He has been a candidate in seven consecutive elections since 1984. He lost in 1990, 1996 and 2001; then he won the elections in 2006, 2011 and is now an official candidate for 2016,” López Maltez told IPS.

Ortega first came to power in 1979 when FSLN guerrillas ousted the last member of the Somoza dynasty of dictators who ruled the country with an iron fist for 43 years.

He was the coordinator of the Junta of National Reconstruction, the provisional government (1979-1984) installed by the Sandinista rebels following their victory against Anastasio Somoza Junior. Ortega stood for president for the first time in 1984 in the first elections called by the Sandinistas and was elected for the five-year term 1985-1990.

He lost the 1990 elections which marked the climax of a civil war in which armed opposition to the Sandinista revolution received political and military pressure from the United States.

According to López Maltez and other analysts, Ortega has taken control of all government branches, and is therefore practically assured of victory at the ballot boxes in November.

If this happens, then by 2018 Ortega will become the longest serving president of Nicaragua, outlasting the terms in office of liberal former general José Santos Zelaya (1893-1909) and Anastasio Somoza García (1937-1947 and 1950-1956) who each served for 16 years and a few months.

The Somoza dynasty wielded absolute power in Nicaragua from 1937 to 1979. Three members of two generations of this family – or their puppet allies – perpetuated their oppressive and corrupt dictatorship for 43 years.

Pollsters agree that President Ortega enjoys wide social support and the confidence of by groups such as private business and the police and military corps.

In May, M&R Consultores published survey results indicating that 77.6 percent of respondents backed Ortega, and 63.7 percent of voters said they would cast their ballots for his socialist FSLN party.

“Over the last 15 years several Latin American presidents have overturned the myth, previously regarded as incontrovertible by political scientists, that the region’s presidents enjoy high approval levels when they enter office, but high disapproval levels when they leave,” the head of the M&R consultancy, Raúl Obregon, told IPS.

In his view, there are several reasons why Ortega is one of the exceptions to the rule.

In the first place, he said, Ortega’s prospects are enhanced by the fading of popular fears that the FSLN would cause another war if they were returned to power, a fear much played upon by the opposition in the 1990, 1996 and 2001 election campaigns.

Secondly, he said, Ortega has followed sound macroeconomic policies and this is recognised by both domestic and international organisations.

The rolling out of social projects for poverty reduction has benefited the most vulnerable members of society.

Rightwing parties governed the country between 1990 and 2007, but they have now been torn apart owing to internal conflicts, and they have lost influence among the electorate.

“They are out of touch with the problems and needs of the people. They talk politics while the population wants to hear proposals to solve their main problems, namely unemployment and lack of access to basic necessities,” Obregón emphasised.

Thirty-eight percent of Nicaragua’s 6.2 million people live in poverty, according to international organisations. The 2012 electoral register identifies 4.5 million registered voters.

Despite the picture painted by the polls, opposition politicians accuse Ortega of manipulating the laws and institutions in his favour to ensure the outcome of the election and secure his continued grasp on power.

Opposition sectors claim the results of municipal elections in 2008 and of the 2011 general elections were fraudulent. Observers from the U.S. Carter Center and from the European Union observers/ said they lacked transparency.

This year a number of civil society organisations and other institutions, including the private sector and the Roman Catholic Church, have asked Ortega for greater political openness and for international observers to monitor the elections to guarantee fair play.

But in May Ortega decided not to invite international or local electoral observers, whom he referred to as “shameless scoundrels.”

After that came the move against the PLI leadership, followed in June by the engineering of the disqualification of the candidate nominated by the CND coalition, an umbrella group for the main opposition forces.

CND leaders said they were abandoning the contest in order to avoid being involved in an “electoral farce.”

These events rang alarm bells at international organisations as well as for the secretary general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, a native of Uruguay.

Humberto Meza, who holds a doctorate in social sciences, said that Ortega’s stratagems to perpetuate himself in power “will drastically affect the legitimacy of the elections,” no matter how high his popularity rating.

The Supreme Court “is condemning a vast number of voters to non participation in the electoral process,” he told IPS.

The aftermath, in Meza’s view, “will depend on the opposition’s power to create instability in the electoral system, after announcing its official withdrawal from the contest.”

“Nicaragua is polarised. Many people are critical of but remain silence for fear of official reprisals,” he said.

Democratic institutions are fragile now to an extent not seen since 1990, Meza said.

However, “democracy has plenty of other options for self-nurture apart from the voting mechanism,” he said. “Apparently a large sector of the opposition is placing its hopes in these alternatives.”

Meza said the concern expressed by the OAS secretary general and any pressure exerted by the international community, led by the United States, were unlikely to have “much impact” on Nicaragua’s  domestic crisis.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez. Translated by Valerie Dee

Boats stranded on the dry bed of Moyúa lake in northern Nicaragua, which has lost 60 percent of its water due to the severe drought plaguing the country since 2014. Credit: Courtesy of Rezayé Álvarez

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Apr 5 2016 (IPS)

A three-year drought, added to massive deforestation in the past few decades, has dried up most of Nicaragua’s water sources and has led to an increasingly severe water supply crisis.

Since January, photos and videos showing dried-up streams, rivers and lakes have been all over the social networks, local news media, blogs and online bulletins of environmental organisations.

Jaime Incer, a former minister of the environment and natural resources and the president of the Nicaraguan Foundation for Sustainable Development (Fundenic-SOS), is one of the loudest voices warning about the accelerated environmental deterioration in the country.

Incer told IPS that by late March the country had lost 60 percent of its surface water sources and up to 50 percent of its underground sources, which either dried up or have been polluted.

To illustrate, he cited the disappearance of at least 100 rivers and their tributaries in Nicaragua, and the contamination of Tiscapa and Nejapa lakes near Managua, as well as lake Venecia in the western coastal department of Masaya and lake Moyúa in the northern department of Matagalpa.

The scientist said the country’s largest bodies of water are also in danger: the 680-km Coco river, the longest in Central America, which forms the northern border with Honduras, is now completely dry for several stretches of up to eight km in length.

The water level in the river is at a record low, to the extent that it can be crossed by foot, with the water only ankle-deep.

And because of the low water level in the country’s other big river, the San Juan, along the southern border with Costa Rica, large sand banks now block the passage of boats, despite the dredging operations carried out in the last few years.

In addition, the 8,624-sq-km Lake Nicaragua or Cocibolca, the biggest freshwater reserve in Central America has suffered from serious water losses since 2012, which means docks and piers have been left high and dry, said Incer.

The same thing is happening in the country’s other large lake, Xolotlán, in Managua.

Although clean-up operations in the lake were launched in 2009, the results of these efforts have not been announced. But what is clearly visible is that since the drought began in 2014, the shoreline has receded up to 200 metres in some areas, according to reports by Fundenic-SOS.

This is what Lake Moyúa in northern Nicaragua looked like before it lost 60 percent of its water due to the effects of the El Niño climate phenomenon, which in this Central American country has spelled drought. Credit: Matagalpa.org

The environmental organisation does not only blame the crisis on the impact of climate change that has been felt in Nicaragua since 2014 due to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) – a cyclical climate phenomenon that affects weather patterns around the world – but also the lack of public policies to curb the rampant deforestation.

The big forest reserves in the south of the country have shrunk up to 40 percent, according to a study by the British consultancy Environmental Resources Management (ERM), hired by the Chinese consortium HKND Group to carry out feasibility studies for the canal it is to build that will link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans across Nicaragua.

The environmental deterioration of the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve and the Cerro Silva and Punta Gorda nature reserves in southeast Nicaragua was worse in the period 2009-2011 than in the previous 26 years, the ERM reported in 2015.

The study says that between 1983 and 2011, “nearly 40 percent of the natural land cover in southeast Nicaragua was lost.”

The non-governmental Humboldt Centre also reported 40 percent loss of forest cover in Bosawas, the largest forest reserve in Central America, declared a biosphere reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1997.

Food security, a major victim

The impact of the drought has been felt in the economy and the food security of a large part of this country’s population of 6.2 million people, 2.5 million of whom live on less than two dollars a day and 20 percent of whom are undernourished, according to statistics from international bodies.

Organisations of farmers, stockbreeders and tourism businesses have complained about economic damages caused by water shortages.

For example, the National Livestock Commission of Nicaragua (CONAGAN) confirmed in February that the sector is extremely concerned about the scarcity of water in the parts of Nicaragua that account for at least 30 percent of the country’s livestock.

What worries them the most is that according to international and national weather reports, the drought caused by El Niño could last through August, when the first rainfall in 2016 is forecast.

And this month, the Union of Agricultural Producers in Nicaragua (UPANIC) estimated losses caused by the drought at 200 million dollars in 2015.

Nicaragua’s Central Bank, meanwhile, reported that in 2015, the drought affected hydropower production – the least costly energy in terms of production costs.

Sociologist Cirilo Otero, the director of the Centre of Environmental Policy Initiatives, said the part of the country hit hardest by water shortages is the so-called “dry corridor” – a long, arid stretch of dry forest where 35 of the country’s 153 municipalities are located.

According to Otero’s studies, the impact of the drought and the lack of water in that region, which stretches from northern to south-central Nicaragua, has been so heavy that 100 percent of the crops have been lost and 90 percent of the water sources have dried up.

“The measures adopted by the government are ‘asistencialistas’ (band-aid or short-term in nature) – water and food are distributed on certain days – but there are no public policies to curb deforestation in the pine forests in the mountains of Dipilto and Jalapa, and that is one of the main causes of the disappearance of rivers and wells,” Otero told IPS.

He said children and the elderly are suffering the worst food insecurity in the dry corridor.

“There are entire families who have nothing but corn and salt to eat. The situation is very serious,” said Otero.

The government, which has been the target of complaints for failing to declare a national emergency for the drought, has continued to assist families in the area, providing them with medicine, food and water.

Ervin Barreda, president of ENACAL, Nicaragua’s water and sanitation utility, said they send some 65 tanker trucks a day to the most critical areas, supplying some 2,000 families every day.

According to official data, in February 2016 there were 51,527 families in 34 localities who depended on highly vulnerable aquifers for their water supply.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

On the first day of the 2015 Climate Conference, Nicaragua became the first country openly refusing to comply with the United Nations mandate to submit a climate pledge.

Lead Envoy Paul Oquist leads the Nicaraguan delegation and announced its country won’t submit an INDC for the climate deal. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

Interviewed by IPS, Oquist said this process is doomed to fail since it missed the goal of 2 degrees of global temperature increase set by countries – although some like Nicaragua push for a 1.5 degree goal. Rather, the minister advocates dropping the INDC process and building an agreement based solely on historical emissions.

As a small developing country, Nicaragua contributes barely 0.03% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Reviews of the INDCs show their implementation would result in expected warming ranging from 2.7 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, an improvement after the expected 4.5 increase but still insufficient to hit the safe mark.

Oquist spoke with IPS in Paris:

IPS: As a region, Latin America and Central America have similar issues related to climate change, yet the countries move at different paces and groups. Has the region lost its chance to lead as a whole?

First, we need to see where we stand. One of the major themes of this COP21 Conference is the concept of universal responsibility versus historical responsibility. The universal responsibility posits that we’re all responsible, that everyone must participate in solving the problem and that if you don’t solve the problem everyone is equally guilty of not solving the problem.

These nationally determined contributions (INDC) will not work. The first evidence is that on the first round they couldn’t get to the 1.5 – 2 degrees Celsius temperature increase goal, they came to 3 degrees. That’s serious business. Three degrees in the developing countries is 4 degrees. The INDCs will take us there.

There is a proposal on how to fix this, the proposal in the Paris Agreements, by doing another INDC exercise every five years. But in five years we’ll be further away from the 1.5 degree target than we are now. Nicaragua does not agree with an accord that will condemn the world to 3 degrees.

IPS: The first rounds of INDC, depending of the way you measure it, will get us to 2.7 to 3.5 degrees. It could improve in a second round as technologies get cheaper and overall ambition increases. Why drop it?

Twenty-five per cent are dependent on financing. There is no financing for those, and I would be very surprised to see the developed countries taking the hard policy decision on the model of production, consumption, finance and lifestyle that is necessary to bring us back to the 1.5 to 2 degree range.

We have an alternative, which is objective, scientific, measurable, verifiable and transparent: the historical responsibility instead of universal responsibility.

We should measure, since 1750, what is the contribution of each country to climate change. You can also measure what their current contributions are and establish and index that takes into account the historic and current contribution. Then assign mandatory quotas to each country based on this historical contribution.

These countries have profited from this: from cheap energy, from polluting the environment, for their development. So they can be held responsible for replacing the CO2 and trying to drive down the temperature rise. Also, historical responsibility can be applied to losses and damage through indemnification, which should go in a direct and unconditional form to the countries suffering from climate change.

IPS: When did Nicaragua take the decision that they wouldn’t submit the INDC and that the process was a failure as you have said?

So we know from the end of October that this was a failure. Nicaragua has decided a long time ago not to do the INDC because universal responsibility doesn’t work and it’s not the way to go.

The top three emitters release 49.49 per cent of emissions (that’s China, the United States and the EU) and the top 10 comes out to 72 per cent, while the bottom 100 countries represent 3 per cent. The only way to come back to the 1.5 – 2 is to draw out of the top 10 pool. The only way to do this is through large emitters who are also those who are historically responsible.

IPS: This would imply top 10 emitters like India, China, Brazil also have reduce their emissions significantly, more that they have pledged.

It would be everyone in that group. United States, Europe, those you mention, everyone. The question is not which countries, but how to solve this problem. This is a problem of humanity and Mother Earth and all of us. So are we serious about solving this or are we about making political games in here? This is not a negotiation over coffee or cocoa quotas; this is the Earth’s climate.

More than 180 countries are complying with the INDC process, including most of your partners in the Like Minded Developing Group. Are they wrong by trusting the process?

I would say the position we consider correct is the historical responsibility emissions and we hope more and more countries would realize that their INDC are going to fail.

When they started this process, we didn’t know it was going to be a failure. We thought it was going to be a failure because voluntary responsibility doesn’t work. Since it didn’t work, are you going to continue barging ahead?

IPS: Conditions can change, technology can be cheaper (as they are now) and political and economic conditions can change.

Wonderful, then let’s make the changes when they occur, let’s not make the changes based on hypotheticals. Let’s work on the basis on facts, on the ground in 2015. That’s what we have to do.

You know, you ask about the question of the 180 countries. There was a time when France was isolated and under enormous pressure because there was a fever to go to war. France said no as it was a war of aggression that would lead to disastrous consequences.

Now we look back at that and the people who supported the Iraq War, some of them feel quite embarrassed about it and those who opposed it used it as political credentials that they are better at understanding a complex process and the French position looks very good. I would hate to think that the Paris Accord would be remembered in the future as the accord that condemned us to 3 – 4 degrees and the consequences of that.

I know Nicaragua, as any other country here, wants an agreement to come out of Paris. Is this a realistic way to get an agreement? Following INDCs, we went from 4.5 degrees before pledges to 2.7 degrees afterwards.

A process that misses its target by 100 per cent or 50 per cent is not a success. To try to say it’s a success because if could have been worse is kind of an “alegrón de burro” (a fool’s wish). We set the target. The developed countries set the 2 degree target, that wasn’t met by 100 per cent. We are in 3 degrees, so it’s not a success. If we go up to 3.5 degrees and 4 degrees and it floats upwards, then we will not be a success but an absolute disaster.

What if they take the current emissions of historically responsible countries and they don’t add up to solve this? Developing countries are currently emitting more than developed.

You’re in a different logic. Whoever is responsible should contribute to the reduction and to the indemnification. We can get objective figure based on science. Right now we have nothing. 2020? Who said climate change starts in 2020? Whoever said that $100 billion is the figure? It’s based on nothing. So let’s start working on the base of foreseeable goals.

Just one final thing: if this INDC process goes on, will Nicaragua block the negotiations?

We’re going to see what happens. We’ll hopeful that not a lot of countries would want to get back home and tell their farmers, their media and their politician: sorry, the best we can do in Paris was 3 degrees.

Hundreds of small farmers came to Managua from the Caribbean coastal region in southern Nicaragua on Oct. 27 to take part in the 55th protest against the construction of the interoceanic canal, which is set to displace thousands of rural families. Credit: Carlos Herrera/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Nov 3 2015 (IPS)

The international scientific community’s fears about the damage that will be caused by Nicaragua’s future interoceanic canal have been reinforced by the environmental impact assessment, which warns of serious environmental threats posed by the megaproject.

The report “Canal de Nicaragua: Executive Summary of Environmental and Social Impact Assessment” was carried out by the British consulting firm Environmental Resources Management (ERM) and commissioned by the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development (HKDN Group), the Chinese company that won the bid to build the canal.

The 113-page executive summary sums up the study, whose unabridged version has not been made publicly available by the government, ERM or HKND.

In the study, ERM says the megaproject could be of great benefit to the country as long as best international practices on the environmental, economic and social fronts are incorporated at the design, construction and operational stages, for which it makes a number of recommendations.

But it spells out specific risks and threats to the environment in this impoverished Central American country of 6.1 million people with a territory of 129,429 square kilometers.

The canal will go across the 8,624-sq-km Lake Cocibolca, also known as Lake Nicaragua – the second largest lake in Latin America after Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. The route will be nearly four times longer than its rival, the Panama Canal.

The 276-km canal will link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; of that length, 105 km will cross Lake Cocibolca.

Salvador Montenegro, former executive director of the Aquatic Resources Research Centre of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (CIRA/UNAN), stressed that the executive summary suggests additional studies on Lake Cocibolca, to fully assess the risks to the environment and to recommend actions to mitigate them.

“These are the same observations that I have been making, which were never taken into account,” Montenegro told IPS. “On the contrary, they accused me of being a traitor to the government and of being in the opposition, when the only thing I was doing was trying to preserve the health of Lake Cocibolca.”

The scientific researcher was dismissed from his post in the university allegedly due to pressure from the government of left-wing President Daniel Ortega, in office since 2007, who backs the canal project driven by the government investment promotion agency, Pro-Nicaragua, headed by his son Laureano Ortega.

Now Montenegro forms part of the Grupo Cocibolca, a group made up of scientists, academics, environmentalists and activists openly opposed to the future canal.

Ometepe Island within Lake Cocibolca in western Nicaragua. Scientists, environmentalists, political opponents, academics, social organisations and people whose lives will be affected have come together against construction of the interoceanic canal and in defence of the lake. Credit: Karin Paladino/IPS

Mónica López, an activist who belongs to the group, summed up for IPS the main findings in the ERM study which she believes make it clear that the project would open the doors to an unprecedented environmental catastrophe for Latin America.

She said ERM concluded that neither HKND nor the government have the experience to carry out a project of this magnitude.

The report says “the government would be wise to consider engaging with international development agencies such as the World Bank or the Inter-American Development Bank,” to avoid damage in sensitive areas like the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve, the San Juan River, Lake Cocibolca and surrounding nature reserves.

“The study says that in normal situations, these areas would generally be considered untouchable due to their social and ecological fragility,” López noted.

ERM says that if further studies are not conducted and “mitigation and offset measures” are not successfully implemented, “biodiversity impacts would be significantly worse than described.”

It recommended further studies to identify seismic risks posed by construction of the canal; gauge the impact of dredging in the lake; identify the threats from the introduction of saltwater into the lake; and assess the risk of a reduction of the outflow of water from the lake to the San Juan River.

It also concludes that without the implementation by HKND and the government of the environmental and social mitigation measures recommended in the report, not even Route 4 – the one that was selected and the only one considered viable – would have the positive net impact for the environment that could justify construction of the canal.

Based on the ERM executive summary and the considerations of local and international scientists and other experts, the Grupo Cocibolca sent a letter to the president on Oct. 26 asking for the repeal of the law that made the canal project possible.

Ortega has not responded. But HKND, through its officials outside of Nicaragua, announced further studies with a view to moving ahead on the project that will have a projected cost of 50 billion dollars – the largest megaproject that the world has seen in the last few years.

HKND’s chief project adviser, Bill Wild, told the local media that the company had made some “optimisations, with a higher cost to the project, to avoid and reduce environmental and social impacts and keep the risks to a minimum.”

According to Wild, the studies that began to be carried out in 2013 will continue until 2016 and will be complemented by additional topographic and hydrological research, to be conducted by the Australian consultancy CSA Global.

Map of southern Nicaragua with the six projected canal routes. The fourth, in green, was the one that was selected. Credit: ERM

The executive vice president of HKND Group, Kwok Wai Pang, told the local newspaper El Nuevo Diario that now that the ERM study has been presented, “more in-depth studies will be carried out along the route.

“During the feasibility study we conducted topographical, seismic, hydrological and archaeological research and we collected a large volume of seismic information and data on water levels, salinity intrusion and other questions, to draft a conceptual design.”

Telémaco Talavera, spokesman for the president’s Great Interoceanic Canal of Nicaragua Commission, downplayed the concerns expressed by ERM and environmentalists.

Speaking with IPS and three other journalists, he expressed confidence in HKND’s capacity “to work out, with great wisdom, any inconvenience that may emerge, and which are normal in projects of such magnitude.”

Not just environmental problems

But despite the government’s and HKDN’s upbeat attitude about the project, it is overshadowed by factors other than environmental issues.

On one hand, specialised media outlets reported in September that because of China’s current financial crisis, HKND magnate Wang Jing had lost as much as 84 percent of his fortune, previously estimated at more than 10 billion dollars, which has shrunk to some 1.2 billion dollars.

On the other hand, growing resistance by peasant farmers along the projected canal route has hurt the international business climate for the company, according to López, the activist.

So far, 55 demonstrations against the project have been held in Nicaragua. The latest, held Oct. 27 in Managua by rural residents from different parts of the country along with other protesters, made the international headlines because of the violent clashes between the demonstrators and supporters of the megaproject.

In its executive summary, ERM says the social opposition affects the project’s viability.

“The land expropriation and involuntary resettlement process to date has not met international standards,” the ERM report states. “The Project risks losing its social license to operate and may jeopardize the viability of the Project by not following international standards.”

So far, the government has given HKND permission to expropriate 2,909 square kilometres of land along the projected route.

The canal law was approved in 2013. But small-scale work on the project along the Pacific Ocean did not officially get underway until December 2014.

HKDN projected that the work would take five years, and the canal would be operating in 2019. But ERM predicts that it will not meet that deadline.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Women from the community of Balgüe working with waste materials donated to the Association of Women Recyclers of Altagracia on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua. Credit: Karin Paladino/IPS

By José Adán Silva
ALTAGRACIA, Nicaragua, Sep 7 2015 (IPS)

A group of poor women from Ometepe, a beautiful tropical island in the centre of Lake Nicaragua, decided to dedicate themselves to recycling garbage as part of an initiative that did not bring the hoped-for economic results but inspired the entire community to keep this biosphere reserve clean.

It all began in 2007. María del Rosario Gutiérrez remembers her initial interest was piqued when she saw people who scavenged for waste in Managua’s garbage dumps fighting over the contents of bags full of plastic bottles, glass and metal.

How much could garbage be worth for people to actually hurt each other over it? she wondered. She was living in extreme poverty, raising her two children on her own with what she grew on a small piece of communal land in the municipality of Altagracia, and the little she earned doing casual work.

Gutiérrez talked to a neighbour, who told her that in Moyogalpa, the other town on the island, there was an office that bought scrap metal, glass and plastic bottles.

The two women checked around and found in their community a person who bought waste material from local hotels, washed it and sold it to Managua for recycling.

So Gutiérrez, who is now 30 years old, got involved in her new activity: every day she walked long distances with a bag over her shoulder, picking up recyclable waste around the island.

Her neighbour and other poor, unemployed women started to go with her. Then they began to go out on bicycles to pick up garbage along the roads tossed out by tourists, selling the materials to a middleman.

“It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to put food on our tables. And since we didn’t have jobs, it didn’t matter to us how much time it took, although the work was really exhausting at first,” Gutiérrez told IPS.

María del Rosario Gutiérrez (centre), with her daughter María and another member of the Association of Women Recyclers of Altagracia, Francis Socorro Hernández, rest after a day collecting and processing garbage on the island of Ometepe, in Nicaragua. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

Women filling enormous bags with scraps of trash have now become a common sight along the streets on the island.

Seeds of change

Miriam Potoy, with the Fundación entre Volcanes, said her non-governmental organisation decided to support women who were scavenging for a living, starting with a group in Moyogalpa.

“We initially helped them with safety and hygiene equipment, then with training on waste handling and treatment and the diversified use of garbage, so they could sell it as well as learn how to make crafts using the materials collected, to sell them to tourists and earn an extra income,” she told IPS.

Impressed by the women’s efforts, other institutions decided to support them as well.

The Altagracia city government gave them a place to collect, classify and sort the waste, tourism businesses that previously separated their garbage to sell recyclable materials decided to donate them to the women, and food and services companies provided equipment and assistance.

Solidarity and cooperation with the group grew to the point that the city government obtained funds to pay the women nearly two dollars a day for a time, and provide them with free transportation to take their materials to the wharf, where they were shipped to the city of Rivas. From there, the shipments go by road to Managua, 120 km away.

“The community appreciates the women’s work not only because they help keep the island clean, which has clearly improved its image for tourists, but also because they have showed a strong desire to improve their own lives and their families’ incomes,” said Potoy.

And they have done this “by means of a non-traditional activity, which broke down the stereotype of the role women have traditionally played in these remote rural communities,” she said.

Francis Socorro Hernández, another woman from the first batch of recyclers, told IPS that at the start “it was embarrassing for people to see us picking up garbage.”

But she said that after taking workshops on gender issues, administration of micro-businesses, and the environment, “I realised I was doing something important, and that it was worse to live in a polluted environment, resigned to my poverty – and I stopped feeling ashamed.”

The Concepción volcano, one of the two that are found on the island of Ometepe in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, seen from the port of San Jorge in the western department or province of Rivas. Credit: Karin Paladino/IPS

Their work also inspired other initiatives. For example, Karen Paladino, originally from Germany but now a Nicaraguan national, is the director of the community organisation Environmental Education Ometepe, which works with children and young people on the island in environmental awareness-raising campaigns.

When Paladino learned about the work of the recyclers, she got students and teachers in local schools to support their cause, organising clean-up days to collect waste which is donated to the women’s garbage collection and classification centre.

Ometepe is a 276-sq-km natural island paradise in the middle of the 8,624-km Lake Nicaragua or Cocibolca, in the west of this Central American nation of 6.1 million people.

Not everything is peaches and cream

Of the 10 women who started the collective – now the Association of Women Recyclers of Altagracia – six are left.

They continue to scavenge for recyclable waste material, removing it from the island and shipping it to Managua, where it is sold. They make enough for their families to scrape by.

Gutiérrez said the mission has been difficult because of the high cost of transport, the job insecurity, and the scant financing they have found.

“We have always had support, thank God; the city government supported us, some hotels have too, people from the European Union gave us funds for improving the conditions of the landfill,” she said.

“But we need more funds, to be able to collect and transport the material, process it, and remove it from the island,” she added.

Students and mothers from a school in the city of Altagracia make wastepaper bins using disposable bottles. It is one of the numerous recycling initiatives that have emerged on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua, inspired by a group of women who organised to collect and process garbage. Credit: Karin Paladino/IPS

With backing from the EU, the city government of Moyogalpa was able to improve the garbage dumps of the island’s two municipalities. Now there are large sheds in both dumps, where organic material is treated, as well as containers for producing organic compost using worms, and rainwater collection tanks.

The two municipalities also gave the recyclers plots of land for growing their own vegetables and grains for their families.

But the efforts and the solidarity were not sufficient to keep some of the women from dropping out.

As global oil prices plunged, the value of waste products also dropped, and profits did the same, which discouraged some of the women who went back to what they used to do: combining farm work with domestic service.

“I was really committed to the work of collecting garbage, but all of a sudden I felt that the project wasn’t doing well and I needed to feed my family, so I went with my husband to plant beans and vegetables to earn a better income,” María, one of the former members, told IPS.

“But I still collect waste products anyway, and although I’m not participating anymore, I donate them to my former mates in the collective,” said María, who did not give her last name.

But while some of the women dropped out, others joined. “The waste keeps pouring in, and support for our work is going to grow. Our families back us and we are enthusiastic,” one of the new women, Eveling Urtecho, told IPS.

With Gutiérrez’s leadership, backing from the city government, and renewed assistance from the EU, the women are confident that their incomes and working conditions will soon improve.

Ometepe – which means ‘two mountains’ in the Nahuatl tongue – is visited by an average of 50,000 tourists a year, and at least 10 million tons of plastic enter the island annually, according to figures from local environmental groups.

The association of Altagracia gathers between 1,000 and 1,200 kg of plastic a month, and their counterparts in Moyogalpa collect a similar amount.

Until the women launched their revolution, most of the waste in Ometepe ended up strewn about on the streets, in rivers and in backyards, or was burnt in huge piles. When it rained, the water would wash the refuse into the lake.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

María Elena Dávila, national coordinator of the Nicaraguan Sex Workers Network, participating in a workshop on the Regulation of Sex Work in this Central American nation. Credit: Courtesy of RedTraSex

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jun 13 2015 (IPS)

After living in the shadows, thousands of Nicaraguan sex workers have broken their silence, won support from state institutions and gained new respect for their rights.

María Elena Dávila, national coordinator of the Nicaraguan Sex Workers Network (TraSex), explained to IPS that after 15 years of quietly organising, women who provide sexual services for money have managed to become “judicial facilitators” – a kind of conflict resolution mediator – in the Supreme Court and Health Ministry promoters of sexual and reproductive health.

They have also been incorporated into the Defensoría de Derechos Humanos or ombudsman’s office, and they now have a special prosecutor protecting their rights.

In addition, they were recently invited to receive training in political rights and to work as temporary employees for the Supreme Electoral Council in the 2016 general elections.

“This invitation to receive training on electoral matters empowers us to defend our rights vis-à-vis political parties and candidates,” Dávila told IPS.

TraSex represents Nicaragua in the Latin American and Caribbean Female Sex Workers Network, also made up of organisations from Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru.

The Nicaraguan branch of the network was founded in Managua in November 2007 with the support of local non-governmental organisations and social assistance funds from aid agencies.

The seed of the organisation was the Sunflowers Sex Workers Association, which initially brought together 125 women who starting in 1997 went to informal trainings and lectures on health and sex education.

In 2009 the government’s Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman (PDDH) signed an agreement for cooperation and assistance with the organisation, which began to gain visibility, influence and respect.

The organisation now has a registry of 14,486 sex workers between the ages of 18 and 60, 2,360 of whom have joined the network.

“The other women, the ones outside the network, are still wary of the organisation or are unfamiliar with our aim to provide support,” said Dávila. “But we’re working to train them in defence of their rights as women and sex workers.”

Pajarita from Nandaime (not her real name) is one of the sex workers who reject any kind of organisation among her colleagues.

“I take care of myself and I don’t trust groups or associations,” the 27-year-old told IPS. “Those women get involved in that for money, to get dollars, and then they forget about you. This life has taught me that among prostitutes there is no friendship, only competition.”

She arranges daytime appointments over the phone, working in Managua motels, and is studying tourism in the evenings. On the weekends she goes back to Nandaime, her hometown in the eastern department (province) of Granada, 67 km from the capital.

Sex workers in Nicaragua taking part in activities to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS, like this health fair organised by the Nicaraguan AIDS Commission. Credit: Courtesy of RedTraSex

But the organisation is making headway in public institutions. The national legislature is now an ally, listening to their input when designing laws that relate to labour and social conditions of sex workers.

Carlos Emilio López, a national lawmaker who is vice president of the legislative Commission on Women, Children, Youth and Family Affairs, is one of the public officials who support the network.

“They are brave women putting up a struggle,” López told IPS. “They have historically been stigmatised and discriminated against, and now they are demanding the attention they have never been given. The state is in their debt, and it’s time they were given something back.”

In April, the vice president of the Supreme Court, magistrate Marvin Aguilar, presided over a ceremony where a pilot group, made up of 18 members of the network, received their credentials as judicial facilitators.

He explained at the time that the women were given technical and legal training to help manage conflicts through dialogue, as mediators.

“We’re the only country in the world that makes sex workers judicial facilitators,” said Aguilar. “The only country in the world that doesn’t try to arrest them and where their activity isn’t criminalised. We don’t throw them in prison for doing sex work.”

In May, the national police named a special chief to directly address the demands for safety voiced by the TraSex network and issued an institutional guideline for their complaints of domestic abuse and general violence to be addressed with the full force of the Integral Law Against Violence towards Women.

In the past, sex workers constantly complained about abuse of authority, harassment, discrimination and persecution by the police.

Their new relationship with the different branches of government enabled the TraSex network to have a say in the design of Nicaragua’s new Law Against Trafficking in Persons, which went into effect in April.

The original draft of the law linked prostitution and procuring with the crime of trafficking, while stressing that women, including prostitutes, were the main victims.

According to Dávila, associating sex workers with trafficking as both victims and victimisers did them harm. As a result, the network recommended modifying the text, the proposed change was accepted, and the connection between sex work and trafficking was removed from the law.

Reflecting their empowerment in Nicaraguan society, on Jun. 2 the network publicly celebrated for the first time International Sex Workers’ Day, annually acknowledged by sex worker networks and activists across the globe since 1976 in commemoration of a protest by prostitutes a year earlier in Lyon, France against the discrimination and police harassment they suffered.

In 2014, in a public ceremony covered by the media, the network presented the book “Ni putas ni prostitutas, somos trabajadoras sexuales” (Neither whores nor prostitutes, we are sex workers), containing first-hand accounts of four women talking about what it is like to be a sex worker and discussing their hopes for a better life.

In addition, since 2014 sex workers have held a voting seat on the Nicaraguan HIV/AIDS Commission, and have participated, also with both voice and vote, in the national HIV/AIDS coordinating committee, where official institutions, social organisations and international bodies design anti-HIV/AIDS actions.

Despite the progress they celebrate, Dávila acknowledged to IPS that social discrimination is still a problem and that there are “many battles to fight” in this impoverished Central American nation.

One of them is to establish lines of communication with the Education Ministry, to teach sex workers to read and write or help them finish school, and to protect their children from bullying by teachers and students, which is frequent when their mothers’ profession is discovered.

Another battle, said Dávila, is to engage in dialogue with the legal system authorities so the new Family Code, in force since April, is not used by judges to remove the children of sex workers from their mothers because of the work they do.

“Right now we have several cases of mothers who are sex workers, where the authorities want to take their daughters away because someone reported the work they do,” she said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The people who live in the village of Santa Isabel in the western Nicaraguan department or province of Boaco have to walk long distances to fetch water from streams and wells, because nearby water sources dried up this year during the unusually long dry season. Credit: Courtesy of Jorge Torres/La Prensa de Nicaragua

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jun 4 2015 (IPS)

Nicaragua, the Central American country with the most abundant water sources, and where water – “agua” in Spanish – is even part of its name, is suffering one of its worst water crises in half a century, fuelled by climate change, deforestation and erosion.

María Esther González is one of many residents of the Nicaraguan capital whose daily lives are affected by the water shortages. She lives in a poor neighbourhood in Managua’s District One, where piped water is now available for less than two hours a day.

González, the head of her household, hasn’t slept well for the past four years, because she has to be alert and ready when the water starts to run, any time between 11 PM and 3 AM.

She then has two hours or less to fill up a number of containers, wash clothes and clean her small home, before the pipes run dry again.

“For four years I’ve had to keep a vigil late at night to collect the water for our daily needs,” González told IPS.

But sometimes three days go by before the water runs, and Nicaragua’s water and sanitation utility, the Empresa Nicaragüense Acueductos y Alcantarillados (Enacal), has to distribute water in tanker trucks to many neighourhoods in the capital.“People now have to walk long distances to find water, and those who can afford it buy water from farmers who have wells on their properties. The problem is that not everyone can afford to buy both water and food.” -- Arístides Álvarez

In Managua – whose name also contains the word “agua” -, a city of 1.6 million people, the problem is more visible due to media coverage of the frequent protests by entire neighbourhoods taking to the streets.

But the shortage is a nationwide problem, and threatens the living conditions of the country’s 6.1 million inhabitants, and especially the rural population.

Arístides Álvarez, a member of the non-governmental network of Potable Water and Sanitation Committees, told IPS that in rural areas in central and western Nicaragua thousands of families used to depend on wells and rivers that have dried up.

The community organiser said, for example, that in some communities in the department or province of Chinandega, 140 km northwest of Managua, three rivers that supplied at least 1,300 rural families now run dry during the November to May dry season.

“Today people have to walk long distances to find water, and those who can afford it buy water from farmers who have wells on their properties,” Álvarez said. “The problem is that not everyone can afford to buy both water and food.”

According to Álvarez, rural families were desperately waiting for the rains that should fall in the May to October rainy season. But this May the rain was scant and sporadic.

Ruth Selma Herrera, the former executive president of the Enacal water facility, told IPS that another problem affecting water supplies is the lack of investment in the water system and poor water management.

“At least 150 million dollars are needed to upgrade the water distribution network, because the pipes are old and the losses due to leaks are enormous,” she said.

But no short-term solution is in sight.

El Niño poses a threat

According to forecasts from mid-May by the U.S. National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, there is a 90 percent chance that the El Niño climate phenomenon will continue to affect Central America through the Northern Hemisphere summer and an 80 percent chance that it will last through the year.

El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a cyclical phenomenon in which the surface temperatures of the equatorial Pacific rise and have repercussions on weather around the world as the currents flow west to east.

In response to warnings of a new drought, the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development sounded the alert about food and nutritional problems for the people living in the so-called “dry corridor” – an arid region in the northeast and centre of Nicaragua encompassing 33 of the country’s 153 municipalities, characterised by low rainfall and high poverty levels.

The concern, expressed in a report on the country’s economic situation for 2015 presented in April, is that in the dry corridor, home to over one million people, food production and consumption could decline again due to the drought-related loss of grains and livestock, similar to what happened last year.

In 2014 the central government sent emergency aid – food, water and medicine – to that area affected by the drought caused by El Niño, which periodically leads to drought on the western Pacific seaboard and the centre of the country, with a major drop in precipitation during the rainy season, according to the Centro Humboldt, a local environmental organisation.

The organisation’s concern was shared by the local World Bank delegation.

World Bank representative in Nicaragua Luis Constantino told the La Prensa newspaper that the Bank and the government were currently discussing a strategic plan for the dry corridor.

“We are focusing on water management programmes,” he told the paper. “We are proposing a conference (with experts) to discuss options for the dry corridor, mainly to ensure that local governments have enough water to supply the population, but also to discuss maximising irrigation possibilities for agriculture and livestock.”

Jaime Incer Barquero, a Nicaraguan scientist and adviser to the president on environmental issues, told IPS that climate change has been expressed in Nicaragua through the El Niño and La Niña effects, associated with drought and flooding, respectively.

This country has Central America’s two biggest lakes: the 1,052-sq-km Lake Xolotlán and the 8,138-sq-km Lake Cocibolca, also known as Lake Nicaragua. In addition it has 26 lagoons, over 100 rivers, four reservoirs and five of Central America’s 19 largest river basins.

Land degradation

Different organisations say the level of soil erosion in Nicaragua is 10 times higher than the maximum rate that permits an optimum level of crop productivity, and this is affecting the country’s water sources.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) reported that Nicaragua’s soil is eroding at an irreversible pace because of the conversion of forest to pasture land for extensive grazing.

The maximum tolerable soil loss in the country is four tons (degraded due to poor agricultural and livestock management practices) per hectare per year. But in Nicaragua soil loss stands at 40 tons a year, CIAT researcher Carlos Zelaya explained during environmental workshops held in Managua in May.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) confirmed the magnitude of the problem.

“In Nicaragua land degradation is around 30 percent, and as high as 35 percent in the west,” said FAO food security facilitator in Nicaragua, Luis Mejía.

Incer Barquero, the presidential adviser, said that if erosion is not curbed, “in less than 50 years we’ll stop being called Nicaragua, and water will be a distant memory.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

One of the many protests held in 2014 by sexual diversity activists and organisations demanding recognition of the right of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans persons to marry and adopt, which was not included in the new Family Code. Credit: Courtesy of the Sustainable Development Network of Nicaragua

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Apr 29 2015 (IPS)

A new Family Code that went into effect in Nicaragua this month represents an overall improvement in terms of the rights of Nicaraguans. However, it has one major gap: it fails to recognise same-sex marriage, and as a result it closes the doors to adoption by gay couples.

Organisations that defend the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans and intersex persons (LGBTI) fought to the end without success to get the new Code – Law 870 – to include the right of gay couples to marry and adopt children.

Marvin Mayorga, an activist with the Urgent Actions Against Discrimination for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Project in Nicaragua, told IPS that the law is discriminatory.

“The lack of recognition of gay marriage forces us to formally remain single, and single people are not legally allowed to adopt children in this country and establish a family,” he said.“The lack of recognition of gay marriage forces us to formally remain single, and single people are not legally allowed to adopt children in this country and establish a family.” -- Marvin Mayorga

“And outside the family there are more barriers to achieving minimal guarantees and benefits like decent work, social security coverage, education, healthcare and housing,” he complained.

The activist stressed that “families in Nicaragua are diverse, but they want to impose one single model of what a family is.”

The new Code, approved by the legislature in 2014, finally entered into force on Apr. 8.

Its aim is to protect the rights of each member of the family as well as enforce the collective rights and obligations of families.

The driving force behind the drafting of the new Code, lawmaker Carlos Emilio López of the governing left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), told IPS that the 674-article Code updates and brings together in one legal instrument what was previously dispersed in 47 different laws and regulations.

The new Code addresses questions such as marriage, property rights, adoption, retirement, the rights of mothers, fathers and children, divorce, alimony and paternal and maternal responsibility.

Up to now, family questions were mainly included in the 1904 Civil Code, which according to López regulated these issues with a strongly conservative and Catholic tint, which subordinated women and children to the father as the breadwinner of the family.

“A careful analysis was made so that each member of society, as individuals that form part of families, had clear rights, obligations and duties in keeping with the country’s constitution and laws, so that there would be no discrimination against anyone for any reason,” he said.

López argued that there is no discrimination against the LGBTI community because the Nicaraguan constitution, which is above the new Code, protects the right of all Nicaraguans, and provides guarantees against inequality.

But Luis Torres, head of the local NGO Nicaraguan Sexual Diversity Alternative, told IPS that the new Code does discriminate against LGBTI persons by excluding them from the right to marry and forcing the state to provide social benefits only to family units recognised as such by the new Code.

“It’s a step backwards,” he complained. “Through the Code, the state excludes cohabiting same-sex couples from social security coverage. Neither marriage nor civil union between people of the same sex are recognised.”

That means in practice that “LGBTI couples do not have access to related rights like the right to a family loan, to adopt children, or to obtain social security coverage in case of the death or injury of a spouse, among other rights enjoyed by heterosexual couples,” Torres said.

The advances made by the new Code include recognition for the first time in this Central American country that civil unions – but only between a man and a woman – have the same rights and obligations as traditional married couples.

Ramón Rodríguez, a professor of criminal law and human rights law at the Central American University and the American University, said that because the Code “establishes that marriage and stable civil unions are only between a man and a women, a significant segment of the population, which forms part of the sexual diversity spectrum, is the direct victim of the violation of the universal principals of equality and non-discrimination.”

But Samira Montiel, Nicaragua’s ombudswoman for sexual diversity, disagreed with the criticism by human rights activists and LGBTI rights organisations.

“I would also have liked the Code to allow me to marry and adopt, but the constitution does not permit that and the Code cannot be above the constitution,” she told IPS.

Montiel said that although “for now” same-sex marriage has not been recognised, “the individual rights of each member of the lesbian-gay community are protected because they have equal rights as siblings, children, parents, relatives and citizens.”

“No lesbian woman or gay man who has a child will lose their right to parenthood, and they won’t be denied any benefits. So far I haven’t received a single formal complaint about the Code, no one has appealed it, there isn’t a single request for adoption of a child by a gay couple, and healthcare has not been denied to any lesbian or bisexual,” she told IPS.

One of the positive aspects of the Code is the fact that it accelerates the legal process for suing for alimony in divorce cases. Instead of dragging on for up to five years, the process can now take no longer than 150 days.

It also sets child support for sons and daughters under 18 to up to half of the income of the parent who is being sued, and creates fines for incompliance.

In addition, it creates a process for elderly parents to sue their children for abandonment, and gives sons and daughters up to the age of 24 the right to receive from their families money to buy food, in the case of proven need.

Furthermore, it addresses matters related to divorce, the division of assets, child protection, parental leave and other areas.

It also prohibits physical punishment or other humiliating treatment of children in any setting, and sets the age of marriage at 18 – the age of majority for both sexes, in terms of legal obligations.

The Nicaraguan federation of non-governmental organisations that work on behalf of children and adolescents had demanded that the age of marriage be raised, in order to put an end to marriages between girls aged 14 or even younger to adult men.

These marriages are often the so-called “family remedy” in cases of sexual abuse or pregnancy of girls and adolescents by adult men.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Executives of the Chinese company HKDN and members of the Nicaraguan Grand Interoceanic Canal Commission, behind a large banner on Dec. 22, 2014, in the Pacific coastal town of Brito Rivas, during the ceremony marking the formal start of the gigantic project that will cut clean across the country. Credit: Mario Moncada/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Mar 31 2015 (IPS)

The new interoceanic canal being built in Nicaragua has brought good and bad news for the scientific community: new species and archeological sites have been found and knowledge of the local ecosystems has grown, but the project poses a huge threat to the environment.

Preliminary reports by the British consulting firm Environmental Resources Management (ERM) revealed the existence of previously unknown species in the area of the new canal that will link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The study was commissioned by Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development (HKND Group), the Chinese company building the canal.

Among other findings, the study, “Nicaragua’s Grand Canal”, presented Nov. 20 in Nicaragua by Alberto Vega, the consultancy’s representative in the country, found two new species of amphibians in the Punta Gorda river basin along Nicaragua’s southern Caribbean coast.

The two new kinds of frogs have not yet been fully studied, said Vega, who also reported 213 newly discovered archaeological sites, and provided an assessment of the state of the environment along the future canal route.

The aim of the study was to document the main biological communities along the route and in adjacent areas, and to indicate the species and habitats in need of specific conservation measures in order to identify opportunities to prevent, mitigate and/or compensate for the canal’s potential impacts.

The 278-km waterway, which includes a 105-km stretch across Lake Cocibolca, will be up to 520 metres wide and 30 metres deep. Work began in December 2014 and the canal is expected to be completed by late 2019, at a cost of over 50 billion dollars.

The environmental impact study will be ready in late April, Telémaco Talavera, the spokesman for the presidential Nicaraguan Grand Interoceanic Canal Commission, told Tierramérica.

“The studies are carried out with cutting-edge technology by an international firm that is a leader in this area, ERM, with a team of experts from around the world who were hired to provide an exhaustive report on the environmental impact and the mitigation measures,” he said.

Three farmers study the route for the interoceanic canal on a map of Nicaragua, which the Chinese firm HKND Group presented in the southern city of Rivas during one of the meetings that the consortium has organised around the country with people who will be affected by the mega-project. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

Víctor Campos, assistant director of the Humboldt Centre, told Tierramérica that HKND’s preliminary documents reveal that the canal will cause serious damage to the environment and poses a particular threat to Lake Cocibolca.

The 8,624-sq-km lake is the second biggest source of freshwater in Latin America, after Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo.

Campos pointed out that HKND itself has recognised that the route that was finally chosen for the canal will affect internationally protected nature reserves home to at least 40 endangered species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.

The route will impact part of the Cerro Silva Nature Reserve and the Indio Maiz biological reserve, both of which form part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (CBM), where there are endangered species like scarlet and great green macaws, golden eagles, tapirs, jaguars, spider monkeys, anteaters and black lizards.

Along with the Bosawas and Wawashan reserves, Indio Maíz and Cerro Silva host 13 percent of the world’s biodiversity and approximately 90 percent of the country’s flora and fauna.

This tropical Central American country of 6.1 million people has Pacific and Caribbean coastlines and 130,000 sq km of lowlands, plains and lakes. There have been several previous attempts to use Lake Cocibolca to create a trade route between the two oceans.

The Cocibolca Group, made up of a dozen environmental organisations in Nicaragua, has warned of potential damage by excavation on indigenous land in the CBM, on the country’s southeast Caribbean coast.

One site that would be affected is Booby Cay, surrounded by coral reefs and recognised by Birdlife International as an important natural habitat of birds, sea turtles and fish.

Studies by the Cocibolca Group say that dredging with heavy machinery, the construction of ports, the removal of thousands of tons of sediment from the lake bottom, and the use of explosives to blast through rock would have an impact on the habitat of sea turtles that nest on Nicaragua’s southwest Pacific coast.

Map of Nicaragua with the six possible routes for the Grand Canal. The one that was selected was number four, marked in green. Credit: Courtesy of ERM

The selected route, the fourth of the six that were considered, will run into the Pacific at Brito, 130 km west of Managua. A deepwater port will be built where there is now a beach that serves as a nesting ground for sea turtles.

ERM’s Talavera rejects the “apocalyptic visions” of the environmental damage that could be caused by the new waterway. But he did acknowledge that there will be an impact, “which will be focalised and will serve to revert possible damage and the already confirmed damage caused by deforestation and pollution along the canal route.”

The route will run through nature reserves, areas included on the Ramsar Convention list of wetlands of international importance, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) biosphere reserves, and water basins.

According to Talavera, besides the national environmental authorities, HKND consulted institutions like the Ramsar Convention, UNESCO, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Birdlife International, “with regard to the feasibility of mitigating and offsetting the possible impacts.”

The canal is opposed by environmental organisations and affected communities, some of which have filed a complaint with the Inter-american Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

In an IACHR hearing on Mar. 16, Mónica López, an activist with the Cocibolca Group, complained that Nicaragua had granted HKND control over the lake and its surrounding areas, including 16 watersheds and 15 protected areas, where 25 percent of the country’s rainforest is concentrated.

López told Tierramérica that construction of the canal will also lead to “the forced displacement of more than 100,000 people.”

In addition, she criticised “the granting to the Chinese company of total control over natural resources that have nothing to do with the route but which according to the HKND will be of use to the project, without regard to the rights of Nicaraguans.”

The 2013 law for the construction of the Grand Interoceanic Canal stipulates that the state must guarantee the concessionaire “access to and navigation rights to rivers, lakes, oceans and other bodies of water within Nicaragua and its territorial waters, and the right to extend, expand, dredge, divert or reduce these bodies of water.”

The state also gives up the right to sue the investors in national or international courts for any damage caused to the environment during the study, construction and operation of the waterway.

In the IACHR hearing in Washington, representatives of the government, as well as Talavera, rejected the allegations of the environmentalists, which they blamed on “political interests” while arguing that the project is “environmentally friendly”.

They also repeated the main argument for the construction of the canal: that it will give a major boost to economic growth and will enable Nicaragua, where 42 percent of the population is poor, to leave behind its status as the second-poorest country in the hemisphere, after Haiti.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Nicaraguan soldiers unloading election materials from an Antonov 26 military plane, part of Russia’s cooperation with the country. Credit: Courtesy of the Nicaraguan army

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Mar 14 2015 (IPS)

Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas, is tapping into its depleted coffers to upgrade its ageing military fleet with costly new equipment from Russia – a move that has sparked controversy at home and concern among the country’s Central American neighbours.

The decision was officially confirmed Feb. 10 by the Nicaraguan army chief, General Adolfo Zepeda.

When rumours spread in the international media that Managua was seeking to acquire a fleet of six to 12 MiG-29 fighter jets, Zepeda acknowledged that they were looking for warplanes for “defensive” purposes: to intercept drug trafficking flights by cartels in the country’s Caribbean region. He also said the military planned to buy gunboats. No further details were offered.

The announcement drew criticism from civilian sectors in Nicaragua and Central America, which argued that the poorest country in the Americas after Haiti shouldn’t be trying to buy fighter planes, which in the case of the MiG-29s cost 29 million dollars apiece. “This kind of spending on arms will further reduce the already small budget dedicated to education, which should be one of the leading areas of the budget but which is cut every year.” -- Ricardo De León

According to World Bank figures, 42.5 percent of Nicaragua’s 6.1 million people were living in poverty in 2009, the last year official statistics were provided by the government.

Elvira Cuadra, the head of the non-governmental Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policy (IEEPP), told IPS that the funds invested in the purchase of Russian planes would be better spent on reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of development and anti-poverty targets that in the year 2000 the international community agreed to meet by the end of 2015.

“The country’s economic situation and especially the vulnerability of certain population groups suffering from poverty and extreme poverty make it necessary to direct all resources and efforts towards resolving this kind of challenge,” she said.

Cuadra, a sociologist, said the announcement of the planned military upgrade has generated many more questions than answers.

For example, she said: “Does Nicaragua have a clear national strategy for the fight against drug trafficking? And how will that strategy be implemented and coordinated with respect to the rest of the countries of Central America and the security policies of Mexico, Colombia and the United States?”

In her view, the government of left-wing President Daniel Ortega is playing into Russia’s geopolitical strategy in its power struggle with the United States.

“Some analysts think it’s a game of mirrors, in the sense of (Russia) creating a diversion in this region, which has historically been under the control of the United States, in order to exercise pressure and reach another kind of objective in other regions of the world of greater geostrategic interest to both powers,” Cuadra said.

Since the official announcement of the purchase of new military equipment, which followed an agreement signed with Moscow in 2013 to modernise the army and acquire missile launchers and patrol boats, neither the military authorities nor the government have clarified doubts that have been raised about the plan.

Nicaragua and Russia established diplomatic ties in December 1944, during World War II, as part of the Allies opposed to the Axis powers headed by Nazi Germany.

When the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) seized power in 1979, after overthrowing dictator Anastasio Somoza, the country forged close ties with Moscow, which armed the new army in the context of the Cold War, while the U.S. financed the “contra” rebels to fight the leftist Sandinistas.

Relations cooled off after 1990, when the Sandinistas were voted out of office and the conflict with the contras came to an end. That was until Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007, after heading the government of national reconstruction from 1979 to 1985 and governing as president from 1985 to 1990 as the winner of the country’s first free elections.

Since then, Nicaragua has supported geostrategic readjustments by Russia in its zone of influence, on the last occasion backing the Kremlin in the conflict with Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea.

Russia has responded to that support with donations and loans of technology, medicine, means of transport and food. The military provisions and cooperation totaled 26 million dollars from 2009 to 2014.

Russia’s defence minister, General Sergey Shoygu (right), signing military cooperation agreements with Nicaraguan army chief General Julio Cesar Avilés, during his visit to Managua in February. Credit: Courtesy of the Nicaraguan army

Russian warships dock in Nicaraguan ports while its fighter jets land in Managua; and Nicaraguan and Russian vessels patrol the waters of the Caribbean, as a training centre for the fight against drugs is being built in the capital with Russian funds and support from Russian experts.

On Feb. 11-12, Russia’s defence minister, Sergey Shoygu, visited Managua with the stated aim of strengthening bilateral cooperation in the area, after his deputy minister, Anatoli Antonov, included Nicaragua on a list of Russia’s three main military partners in Latin America, along with Cuba and Venezuela.

Arms vs development

Ricardo De León, dean of the Faculty of Legal Sciences and Humanities at the American College University in Managua, said the Nicaraguan army and government are making a mistake by “militarising” their efforts against drug trafficking and organised crime.

“It’s a mistake to believe they can fight drug trafficking by buying more arms; El Salvador already showed that police and military capacities are overwhelmed in the fight against transnational narco or crime, with its Mano Dura (Iron Fist) and Super Mano Dura (Super Iron Fist) plans,” the academic told IPS.

De León complained that the military purchases took funds away from social spending priorities.

“In a country like ours, which is the second-poorest in the hemisphere, this kind of spending should not be included in the budget and future debts like this shouldn’t be racked up,” he argued.

“This kind of spending on arms will further reduce the already small budget dedicated to education, which should be one of the leading areas of the budget but which is cut every year.”

In 2014 defence spending represented 0.54 percent of Nicaragua’s GDP of 11.25 billion dollars, while education spending amounted to 2.94 percent, according to official statistics.

The announcement of arms purchases by Nicaragua is causing concern among its neighbours.

Government officials and politicians from Costa Rica, Honduras and Colombia warned of a possible rise in violence in the area and a stimulus for an arms race. All three countries have maritime boundary disputes with Nicaragua.

“The main risk is that a spiral of violence will be triggered, like what has happened in other countries,” Carlos Murillo, a professor of international relations at the National University of Costa Rica, told IPS. “Another risk is that the armed forces could return to the phase of the ‘national security doctrine’ and we could see a militarisation of the country and above all of politics.”

The expert maintained that in the region, Managua’s military intentions are seen in another light. The impression, he said, is that “The real intention of the purchase of war equipment, especially the fighter jets, is not to fight the drug trade but has other purposes that are not very clear.”

One of the real reasons, Murillo said, is the aim of dissuading Costa Rica and Colombia “from taking actions that could weaken Managua’s territorial claims.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Daniela Alfaro standing in front of the University of El Salvador med school, where the complaints she has filed about the harassment and aggression she has suffered as a transgender student of health education have gone nowhere. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Feb 18 2015 (IPS)

Despite the aggression and abuse she has suffered at the University of El Salvador because she is a trans woman, Daniela Alfaro is determined to graduate with a degree in health education.

“There is very little tolerance of us at the university. I thought it would be different from high school, but it isn’t,” Alfaro, a third year student of health education at the University of El Salvador med school, in the capital, told IPS.

Rejected by the rest of her family, Alfaro only has the emotional and financial support of her mother, “the only one who didn’t turn her back on me,” she said.

Like her, many members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community suffer harassment, mistreatment and even attacks on a daily basis in Central America because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, said activists from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua interviewed by IPS.

The discrimination, aggression and harassment that Alfaro has experienced at the university have come from her own classmates, as well as professors and university staff and authorities.“We don’t exist for the state in the areas of health, education, work or social matters, there is no protocol for how public employees should treat us.” -- Carlos Valdés

Since 2010 she has been filing reports and complaints with the university authorities for the aggression she has suffered in the men’s bathroom, which she is forced to use. “But they don’t take my complaints seriously because I’m trans,” said the 27-year-old student.

Alfaro has also experienced the invisibility of LGBTI persons when they receive no response from institutions or officials because their complaints or reports are dismissed or ignored simply because of prejudice against non-heterosexuals, said Carlos Valdés, with the Lambda Organisation in Guatemala.

“We don’t exist for the state in the areas of health, education, work or social matters, there is no protocol for how public employees should treat us,” Valdés told IPS by phone from Guatemala City.

Lambda and three other organisations in Central America are carrying out the regional programme “Centroamérica Diferente” (Different Central America), aimed at securing respect for the human rights of people with different sexual orientations or gender identities.

“Basically we want to improve the quality of life of the LGBTI community, so we are no longer discriminated against by sectors and institutions of the government,” said Eduardo Vásquez, with the Salvadoran Asociación Entreamigos, which is involved in the initiative.

The programme began in May 2014 and will run through June 2016 in the four participating countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

With funds from the European Union, it aims to get 40 organisations and more than 200 human rights activists involved, and to reach 3,550 members of the LGBTI community, 160 communicators, 600 public employees, 8,000 adolescents and 10 percent of the population of the four countries.

The programme provides legal support in cases of abuse and violence, and training for sexual diversity rights activists, and it carries out national and regional campaigns against homophobia.

The activists coordinate the activities with government institutions that provide public services to the LGBTI community, and exercise oversight to prevent abuses and discrimination, for example in health centres, schools and the workplace, or in police procedures.

“We are sad to see that some police continue to use poor procedures during searches, or refer in a disrespectful manner to gay or transgender persons,” Norman Gutiérrez, with the Centre for AIDS Education and Prevention in Nicaragua, another group taking part in the initiative, told IPS by telephone.

The programme will also set up a regional LGBTI human rights observatory to monitor cases of abuse, attacks and violence, and will conduct a study to gauge the magnitude of human rights violations based on sexual orientation or identity.

Hate crimes

The observatory and the study will play a key role in detecting, for example, how severe is the phenomenon of homophobic murders, especially against transgender persons, since official statistics do not recognise hate crimes and merely classify them as homicides, the activists explained.

“In Guatemala the right to life is one of the rights that is most violated, and these murders often target trans persons,” Valdés said.

Given the lack of clear official figures, the organisations compile information as best they can, without the necessary systematisation. Based on this information, the groups participating in the programme estimate that in the last five years, at least 300 members of the LGBTI community, mainly transgender women, were murdered in hate crimes.

These murders occur in a context of generalised violence in the region. The so-called Northern Triangle, made up of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, is one of the most violent regions in the world.

The murder rate in Honduras in the last few years has stood at around 70 per 100,000 population, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) – far above the Latin American average of 29 and the global average of 6.2.

In Honduras, LGBTI activists have reported at least 190 homophobic murders in the last five years, some of which were included in a report published Dec. 17 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The document reports human rights violations against the LGBTI community committed between January 2013 and March 2014 in 25 Organisation of American States member countries. In that period, at least 594 people perceived to be LGBTI were killed, while another 176 were victims of serious physical assaults.

The IACHR “urges States to adopt urgent and effective measures to prevent and respond to these human rights violations and to ensure that LGBTI persons can effectively enjoy their right to a life free from violence and discrimination.”

Among the cases compiled by the IACHR is the murder of a trans woman in Honduras who was stoned to death on Mar. 4, 2013 in the northern city of San Pedro Sula. She was identified as José Natanael Ramos, age 35.

Unlike other programmes that are implemented only in the capital cities, Centroamérica Diferente plans to reach small cities and towns as well, where the violence, discrimination and vulnerability are generally worse.

“In small towns there is much more ‘machismo’, more violence and more homophobia. Some hate crimes and murders aren’t even reported,” added Gutiérrez, the Nicaraguan activist.

There is also a high level of discrimination in the workplace against the LGBTI community in Central America, said Valdés, with the Lambda Organisation from Guatemala.

“For example, gays have to hide their identity in order to get a job, and if their sexual orientation is discovered, they are harassed until they quit,” he said.

Alfaro, meanwhile, said in front of the med school where she studies that she will not stop denouncing the discrimination and harassment she suffers, until she finally sees justice done.

“I just hope that someday they will respect my identity as a woman,” she said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Three farmers study the route for the interoceanic canal on a map of Nicaragua, which the Chinese firm HKND Group presented in the southern city of Rivas during a meeting with people who will be affected by the mega-project. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Aug 1 2014 (IPS)

Víctor Sánchez doesn’t want gold or the comfortable future income he was promised.

He just wants to live the life he has always lived on his farm along the Banks of the Las Lajas river – but the river is slated to become part of the route followed by the Nicaragua Interoceanic Grand Canal.

Sánchez, a 59-year-old small-scale farmer from the southwestern department or state of Rivas, told IPS that he isn’t familiar with the details of the mega-project that the government touts as the ticket for this country to lose its dubious status as the second-poorest in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti.

He is worried that he will be removed from the land where he has always lived with his extended family, and that he won’t receive compensation for his property.

That’s what he told representatives of the HKND Group at a Jul. 15 meeting in the International University of Agriculture and Livestock in Rivas. HKND is the Hong Kong-based Chinese company that was granted the concession to build the canal.

The Chinese technicians, with the support of interpreters and Nicaraguan officials, provided details of the ambitious project to a local audience in the city of Rivas, the departmental capital, 110 km south of Managua.

The canal will connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans by means of a 278 km waterway, which includes a 105 km stretch across Lake Cocibolca.

The numbers involved are impressive: the canal will cost 50 billion dollars to build and will be up to 520 metres wide, with a monimum depth of 27.6 metres and a maximum of 30 metres. An estimated 5,100 vessels a year will make the 30-hour crossing through the canal.

Pang Kwok Wai, assistant director of HKND’s department of construction management, explained that the work is set to begin in December in the municipality of Brito, in Rivas, on the Pacific coast.

The department will be split in half by the canal and part of the local population will be relocated.

The project will create a city of 140,000 people on the Pacific side of the country. A 29 sq km duty-free zone will also be established in Rivas, along with four tourist complexes, an international airport with warehouse capacity for thousands of tons of cargo, a deepwater port, giant bridges and other “sub-projects” in the terminology used by HKND.

In June 2013, the government of leftwing President Daniel Ortega granted the concession for HKND Group to build and run the canal for 50 years, extendable by another 50 years.

The government argues that the canal will definitively transform the economy of this Central American nation, where 42.5 percent of the population of 6.1 million lives in poverty and 70 percent of jobs are in the informal economy.

Telémaco Talavera, the president of the National Council of Universities and a member of the Special Commission for the Grand Canal, told IPS that to carry out the work, large industrial companies will be created that will require local labour power: 50,000 direct jobs during the construction phase and 200,000 permanent jobs after 2019, when the canal is to be completed.

HKND also announces the construction of new cement, steel, dynamite, asphalt, fuel and energy plants.

The Nicaraguan government estimates that as a result of the construction work, GDP growth will accelerate from the current four-five percent to 10.8 percent in 2014 and 15 percent in 2015.

The government projects that GDP will climb from 11.2 billion dollars to 24.7 billion dollars in 2018.

HKND Group, led by the mysterious Chinese businessman Wang Jing, has given the world the impression that the project is a sure thing, from its news releases.

But doubts about the company, and especially about the fund created to finance the canal, are far from being cleared up.

The company says it hired the China Railway Construction Corporation to carry out the technical feasibility studies, the U.S. McKinsey & Company for the information analysis and the UK-based Environmental Resources Management consultancy for the social and environmental impact assessments.

HKND technical experts have repeated in public and private meetings in Nicaragua and China that the company invited businesspeople from China, Russia, the UK, the United States, Germany, Belgium and Australia to support the project.

Hopes for the future…and doubts

The canal has raised hopes among thousands of Nicaraguans for a more prosperous future, according to two national surveys.

One of the pollsters, MyR Consultores, found in a July poll that 31.3 percent of respondents thought the canal would bring benefits to a smaller or greater extent.

Another survey, by the Americas Barometer of the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University in the U.S., presented in Managua this month as well, found that 72.8 percent of those interviewed stressed the generation of jobs by the canal as a potential benefit.

But 43.4 percent of respondents were worried about the environmental effects that the project could have.

That fear is shared by dozens of environmentalists and non-governmental organisations, like the Nicaraguan Foundation for Sustainable Development, which under the leadership of biologist Jaime Incer, environmental adviser to the president of Nicaragua, is opposed to the construction work with the argument that it will irreversibly affect Lake Cocibolca.

The lake is the biggest in Latin America: 8,624 sq km of freshwater. According to the organisation’s estimates, the construction of the canal would affect 400,000 hectares of jungle and wetlands.

Incer told IPS that Nicaragua gave HKND authority over the lake and surrounding areas, which include more than 16 watersheds and 15 protected areas representing 25 percent of the country’s rainforest.

HKND Group has not yet completed its environmental impact studies. Nevertheless, it has already decided on the route to be followed by the canal, as well as the construction of a 400 sq km artificial lake and 41 giant deposits along the route to store the earth that is removed.

Another aspect criticised by opponents is the lack of transparency surrounding the project’s financing. Detractors have not received any response to their questions about who is financing the project and how they operate.

The company and its executives in Nicaragua, as well as the Nicaraguans in charge of the project, have avoided revealing the identity of their sources of financing.

“The fund is guaranteed, but it is confidential; these matters are business secrets, especially because of the companies that trade on the stock market,” said HKND’s Pang.

Talavera, with the Special Commission for the Grand Canal, told IPS that the important thing at this time is to explain to the population the reach of the mega-project and to guarantee that it brings benefits for the country. “The details about the financing will be provided when the time is right, if the financing partners decide on that,” he said.

The country’s refusal to reveal information about the partners and the origin of the funds has given rise to speculation. For example, opposition lawmaker Eliseo Núñez has insinuated that the Chinese government is behind the project – a suspicion that Wang Jing has consistently denied.

Edited by: Estrella Gutiérrez / Translated by: Stephanie Wildes

The Las Canoas lake in Tipitapa, near Managua, dries up every time Nicaragua is visited by the El Niño phenomenon, leaving local people without fish or water for their crops. Credit: Guillermo Flores/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jul 10 2014 (IPS)

The spectre of famine is haunting Nicaragua. The second poorest country in Latin America, and one of the 10 most vulnerable to climate change in the world, is facing a meteorological phenomenon that threatens its food security.

Scientists at the Nicaraguan Institute for Territorial Studies (INETER) say the situation is correlated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a weather cycle that periodically causes drought on the western Pacific seaboard and the centre of the country, in contrast with seasonal flooding in the north and the eastern Caribbean coast.

Crescencio Polanco, a veteran farmer in the rural municipality of Tipitapa, north of Managua, is one of thousands of victims of the climate episode. He waited in vain for the normally abundant rains in May and June to plant maize and beans.

Polanco lost his bean crop due to lack of rain, but he remains hopeful. He borrowed 400 dollars to plant again in September, to try to recoup the investment lost by the failed harvest in May.

If the rains fail again, it will spell economic catastrophe for him and the seven members of his family.

“In May we spent the money we got from last year’s harvest, but with this new loan we are wagering on recovering what we lost or losing it all. I don’t know what we’ll do if the rains don’t come,” he told IPS.

His predicament is shared by thousands of small producers who depend on rainfall for their crops. Some 45 kilometres south of Tipitapa, southwest of Managua, campesino (small farmer) Luis Leiva regrets the total loss of three hectares of maize and squash to the drought.

Leiva sells his produce in the capital city’s Mercado Oriental market, and uses the profits to buy seeds and food for his family. Now he has lost everything and cannot obtain financing to rent the plot of land and plant another crop.

“The last three rains have been miserable, not enough to really even wet the earth. It’s all lost and now I just have to see if I can plant in late August or September,” he told IPS with resignation.

Rainfall in May was on average 75 percent lower than normal in Nicaragua. According to INETER, there was “a record reduction in rainfall”, up to 88 percent in some central Pacific areas, the largest deficit since records began.

Based on data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), INETER has warned that the drought could last until September.

The nightmare is affecting all farmers on the Pacific coast and in the centre of the country. Sinforiano Cáceres, president of the National Federation of Cooperatives, a group of 300 large farming associations, expounded the sector’s fears to the inter-institutional National Board for Risk Management.

“We have already lost the early planting (in May), and if we lose the late planting (in August and September) there will be famine in the land and a rising spiral of prices for all basic food products,” he told IPS at a forum of producers and experts seeking solutions to the crisis. There is a third crop cycle, in December, known as “apante”.

The country’s main dairy and beef producers raised their concerns directly with the government. Members of the Federation of Livestock Associations and the National Livestock Commission told the government that meat and milk production have fallen by around 30 percent, and could drop by 50 percent by September if the ENSO lasts until then, as INETER has forecast.

Moreover, the National Union of Farmers and Livestock Owners said that over a thousand head of cattle belonging to its members have perished from starvation.

It also warned that the price of meat and dairy products will rise because some livestock owners are investing in special feeds, vitamins and vaccines against diseases to prevent losing more cattle on their ranches.

The agriculture and livestock sector generates more than 60 percent of the country’s exports and earns 18 percent of its GDP, which totalled 11 billion dollars in 2013, according to the Central Bank of Nicaragua.

In the view of sociologist Cirilo Otero, head of the non-governmental Centre for Environmental Policy Initiatives, a food crisis would have a particularly severe economic impact on a country that has still not recovered from a plague of coffee rust that hit plantations in Nicaragua and the rest of Central America over the last two years.

“Thousands of small coffee farmers and thousands of families who depended on the crop have still not been able to recover their employment and income, and now El Niño is descending on them. I don’t know how the country will be able to recover,” he told IPS.

According to Otero, if ENSO continues its ravages for the rest of the rainy season, thousands of families will suffer from under-nutrition in a country where, in 2012, 20 percent of its six million people were undernourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

“Producers do not know how to mitigate the effects of climate change, nor the mechanisms for adapting to soil changes. Unless the government implements policies for adaptation to climate change, there will be a severe food crisis in 2014 and 2015,” he told IPS.

The government has set up commissions to monitor the phenomenon, as well as information meetings with farmers and livestock producers.

The authorities have also expanded a programme of free food packages for thousands of poor families, and are providing school meals for over one million children in the school system, as well as a number of small programmes for financing family agriculture.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega ordered urgent imports in June of 20.5 million kilograms of beans and 73.5 million kilograms of white maize to supply local markets, where shortages were already being felt. The government’s intention is to lower the high prices of these products while hoping for a decent harvest in the second half of this year.

The price of red beans has doubled since May to two dollars a kilogram, in a country where over 2.5 million people subsist on less than two dollars a day, according to a 2013 survey by the International Foundation for Global Economic Challenge.

Troops from the special military battalion set up to protect Nicaragua’s forests confiscate an ilegal shipment of logs in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. Credit: José Garth Medina/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jun 19 2014 (IPS)

More than 30,000 members of the Mayagna indigenous community are in danger of disappearing, along with the rainforest which is their home in Nicaragua, if the state fails to take immediate action to curb the destruction of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, the largest forest reserve in Central America and the third-largest in the world.

Arisio Genaro, president of the Mayagna nation, travelled over 300 km from his community on the outskirts of the reserve in May to protest in Managua that the area where his people have lived for centuries is being invaded and destroyed by settlers from the country’s Pacific coastal and central regions.

In early June, Genaro returned to the capital to participate in several academic activities aimed at raising awareness on the environment among university students in Managua and to protest to whoever would listen that their ancestral territory is being destroyed by farmers determined to expand the agricultural frontier by invading the protected area, which covers 21,000 sq km.

The Mayagna chief told Tierramérica that in 1987 the nucleus of what is now the biosphere reserve had a total area of 1,170,210 hectares of virgin forest and an estimated population of fewer than 7,000 indigenous people.

In 1997, when it was declared a Word Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the reserve covered more than two million hectares of tropical rainforest, including the buffer zone.

By 2010, when the indigenous people living in the reserve numbered around 25,000, the jungle area had been reduced to 832,237 hectares, according to figures cited by Genaro. The presence of non-indigenous settlers within the borders of the reserve had climbed from an estimated 5,000 in 1990 to over 40,000 in 2013.

“The y are burning everything, to plant crops. They cut down forests to raise cattle, they log the big trees to sell the wood, they shoot the animals and dry up riverbeds to put in roads,” Genaro told Tierramérica.

Antonia Gámez, a 66-year-old Mayagna chief, also made the trek from her community to speak out in towns and cities along the Pacific coast about the situation faced by her people in Bosawas, whose name comes from the first syllables of the main geographical features that delimit the reserve: the Bocay river, the Salaya mountain, and the Waspuk river.

“All of our families used to live on what nature provides; the forest is our home and our father, it has given us food, water and shelter,” she told Tierramérica in her native tongue, with the help of an interpreter. “Now the youngest ones are looking for work on the new farms created where there was once forest, and the oldest of us don’t have anywhere to go, because everything is disappearing.”

Gámez said that in the forest, her people planted grains and grew and harvested fruit, and hunted what they needed for food with bows and arrows. She added that there were abundant crabs and fish in the rivers and wild boars, tapirs and deer in the forests.

“Now the animals have gone. With each bang from a gun or mountain that is cleared, they either die or move deeper into the jungle. There aren’t many left to hunt,” she complained on her visit to Managua.

Part of the reserve is also inhabited by Miskitos, the largest indigenous group in this Central American country, where by law native people have the right to collectively own and use the lands where they live.

The complaints by the indigenous people were corroborated by Tierramérica in conversations with independent academics and activists as well as government officials.

Anthropologist Esther Melba McLean with the Atlantic Coast Centre for Research and Development at the Bluefields Indian and Caribbean University has led studies that warn that if the invasion by outsiders and destruction of the forest are not brought to a halt, both the Mayagna people and the native flora and fauna of Bosawas could disappear in two decades.

“The destruction of the forest would mean more than the end of an ethnic group; it would mean the end of the site where 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity is found,” she told Tierramérica.

The reserve is home to endemic species like the Nototriton saslaya salamander and the crested eagle, which are listed as endangered by local environmental organisations that point out that there are still many species that have not even been documented.

According to environmentalist Jaime Incer, an adviser on environmental affairs to the office of the president, if the destruction of the indigenous territory continues, “in less than 25 years the jungle will have completely disappeared.”

A study published in 2012 by the German development cooperation agency, GIZ, Nicaragua’s National Union of Agricultural and Livestock Producers (UNAG), the European Union and the international development organisation Oxfam warned that it would take 24 years to lose the forest in Bosawas and 13 years to lose the buffer zone around the reserve, at the current rate of deforestation.

Incer told Tierramérica that in response to the indigenous community’s complaints and the backing they have received from environmentalists, the administration of President Daniel Ortega, who has governed since 2007, has begun to take measures against the destruction of the forest. “But they have been insufficient,” he acknowledged.

Ortega ordered the creation of a military battalion of more than 700 troops to guard the country’s forests and nature reserves. The government also organised a committee of national authorities aimed at coordinating actions and applying a zero tolerance approach towards people and organisations accused of destroying the environment.

Alberto Mercado, the technical coordinator of Bosawas in the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, said at the Central American University in Managua on Jun. 10 that the government has been carrying out actions to curb the destruction of the reserve.

He said the authorities had removed dozens of non-indigenous families from the nucleus of the reserve, and that they had brought people to trial who were dedicated to illegally selling land in Bosawas.

Mercado said dozens of lawyers have been investigated and suspended for allowing sales transactions involving indigenous property. In addition, he said, the authorities have been combating trafficking in local fauna and flora.

“But the struggle is huge…traffickers identify the ‘blind spots’ and that’s where they make their incursions into indigenous territory, fence it in, claim it is theirs, and that’s how the trafficking of land starts,” the official said, sounding discouraged.

The complaints of the indigenous community have gone beyond national borders, and have reached international human rights organisations. The non-governmental Nicaraguan Human Rights Centre also filed a complaint with the Organisation of American States (OAS).

Vilma Núñez, director of the Human Rights Centre, told Tierramérica that she had denounced the situation faced by the Mayagna people during the 44th OAS General Assembly, whose main theme was “development with social inclusion”, held Jun. 3-5 in Asunción, Paraguay.

“The state and the government should guarantee the right of the Mayagna and all indigenous people in this country to live on their own land, and defend them from extermination,” Núñez said.

Biofortified beans. Credit: Courtesy of BioFORT

By Fabíola Ortiz
KIGALI, Apr 17 2014 (IPS)

Latin America is one of the regions in the world suffering from “hidden hunger” – a chronic lack of the micronutrients needed to ward off problems like anaemia, blindness, impaired immune systems, and stunted growth.

Brazil is heading up a food biofortification effort in the region to turn this situation around.

Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras are targets of the biofortification programme, after six countries in Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia) and three in Asia (Bangladesh, India and Pakistan).

Behind the initiative is HarvestPlus, which forms part of the CGIAR Consortium research programme on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health.

CGIAR is an independent consortium leading the global effort to modify food in developing regions by adding essential minerals and vitamins.

In Latin America, the project is led by the Brazilian Biofortification Network (BioFORT), which since 2003 has brought together 150 researchers from EMBRAPA, the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency, and from universities and specialised centres.

EMBRAPA food engineer Marília Nutti, who heads the BioFORT network in Brazil and the rest of the region, told IPS that the three countries in Latin America with the highest rates of micronutrient deficiency are Haiti, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

HarvestPlus developed a Biofortification Priority Index (BPI) to identify countries in the developing South with the highest levels of micronutrient deficiency.

Agronomist Miguel Lacayo at the Central American University in Managua told IPS that Nicaragua is second only to Haiti in terms of problems in the production and availability of food for a nutritious diet in this region.

“The diet in Nicaragua is principally made up of maize and beans, which are eaten two to three times a day,” the expert said. “People eat a lot of maize tortillas, accompanied by beans, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Lacayo spoke with IPS during the Mar. 31-Apr. 2 Second Global Conference on Biofortification, organised by HarvestPlus in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

“The idea is to increase the concentration of iron and zinc in these two staple foods, to reduce nutrition problems. We want to help bring down anaemia levels,” he said.

Severe nutritional deficits are especially a problem among children in rural areas in Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in Latin America. “It’s a chronic problem among the rural poor, who make up 60 percent of the population,” Lacayo said.

Biofortification uses conventional plant-breeding methods to enhance the concentration of micronutrients in food crops through a combination of laboratory and agricultural techniques.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that two billion people in the world today suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies, and that every four seconds someone dies of hunger and related causes.

In December 2012, the World Bank released a toolkit providing nutrition emergency response guidance to policy-makers, seeking to ensure health, food and nutritional security for vulnerable mothers and their children in Latin America and the Caribbean.

According to the World Bank an estimated 7.2 million children under five are chronically malnourished in the region.

The Bank also warned about the economic costs of malnutrition, estimating individual productivity losses at more than 10 percent of lifetime earnings, and gross domestic product lost to malnutrition as high as two to three percent in many countries.

The World Food Programme (WFP) Hunger Map shows that the malnutrition rate in Nicaragua stands at between 10 and 19 percent, while in Haiti 35 percent of the population is malnourished.

Nicaragua began to biofortify foods in 2005 with support from Agrosalud, a consortium of institutions working in 14 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean that is mainly financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Agrosalud has also supported the inclusion of micronutrients in foods in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru.

Of these countries, Panama went on to launch a national biofortification programme, with no outside financing.

The first phase of Agrosalud ended in 2010, and Nicaragua was made a priority target in the second phase, with backing from BioFORT, initially focused on maize and beans.

“We want to support biofortified crops,” Lacayo commented. “We are going to create a network in Nicaragua with HarvestPlus, governments, non-governmental organisations, universities, and national and international bodies.”

The alliance will include 125 researchers from 25 university institutions, and the national plan is to get underway in June, with the aim of promoting food security and sovereignty in Nicaragua.

Lacayo stressed that one element of the plan will be support for small farmers in the production of seeds “for their own consumption, as well as a surplus to sell…We want to give this added value, and to strengthen small rural enterprises.”

The agronomist foresees a lasting alliance with Brazil through EMBRAPA, to help reduce hidden hunger in Nicaragua.

BioFORT’s Nutti said the network has an “innovative focus” of combining nutrition, agriculture and health.

“Biofortification is a new science. The big advantage of the project is that it has brought together agronomists, economists, nutritionists and experts in food sciences behind the common goal of having an impact on health,” she said.

Initially, HarvestPlus asked Brazil only to biofortify cassava. But BioFORT decided it was also necessary to incorporate other micronutrients in seven other foods that are essential to the Brazilian diet: cowpeas, beans, rice, sweet potatoes, maize, squash and wheat.

“This is a very big country. You have to show people that this biofortified diet is better,” Nutti said.

Brazil is one of the HarvestPlus country programmes, because it operates with its own technical resources and is seen as a model in the administration of the biofortification effort.

While in Africa, the main target of the initiative, 40 million dollars will be allocated to biofortification, the budget for Latin America over the next five years will range between 500,000 and one million dollars.

That is not much, considering the magnitude of the task, BioFORT technology researcher José Luis Viana de Carvalho told IPS.

In his view, Brazil has the experience needed to forge alliances that contribute to the development of biofortification in the region.

“Brazil is a granary due to the quantity of cereals it produces and its cutting-edge technology. We should think in terms of a 20-year timeframe for reducing the pockets of hidden hunger,” he added.

He said that in terms of public health, the cost of spending on biofortification is lower than the cost of not undertaking the effort.

“Prevention through quality food is important. Biofortification is not medicine, it is prevention. It is the daily diet,” de Carvalho said.

The San Juan River in Nicaragua, one possible route for the canal. Credit: Oscar Navarrete/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Aug 23 2013 (IPS)

The law passed in Nicaragua to grant a concession to a Chinese company to build a canal between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans repealed legislation that protects Lake Cocibolca and its tributaries.

Lake Cocibolca, also known as Lake Nicaragua, is the biggest source of freshwater in Central America and the second largest lake in Latin America after Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo.

The alarm over the new threats to the lake was sounded by two local NGOs, the Nicaraguan Alliance on Climate Change (ANACC) and the National Risk Management Body (MNGR), in representation of 20 environmental groups in the country.

Law 840, dubbed “the great inter-oceanic canal law” by the press, was approved by the legislature in June, with the votes of the governing left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of President Daniel Ortega.

The canal, which will go across the lake, will be nearly four times longer than its rival, the Panama Canal.

The concession to build and run the canal for 50 years, extendable by another 50 years, was won by the Hong Kong-based Chinese company HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co. Ltd. (HKND Group), owned by Chinese tycoon Wang Jing. The cost of building the canal is an estimated 40 billion dollars.

According to the MNGR, the new legislation repealed the laws that defend the country’s natural resources and bodies of water, included in the “legal compendium on potable water and sanitation”.

The compendium, compiled in 2011 by the national commission on potable water and sanitation and sewage, includes 85 laws, decrees, municipal ordinances, constitutional provisions, international treaties and administrative regulations that protect the country’s bodies of water.

But the canal law establishes that it is the state’s obligation to guarantee the concession-holder “access to and navigation rights on rivers, lakes, oceans and other bodies of water in Nicaragua, and the right to extend, expand, dredge, divert or reduce such bodies of water.”

The state also gives up the right to sue the investors in national or international courts for any damage caused to the environment during the studies for and the construction and operation of the canal.

Law 840 also revoked the principle of application of the general law on national waters, which established that Lake Cocibolca “must be considered a national reserve of potable water, being of the utmost interest to, and highest national priority for, national security.”

Nicaragua granted HKND control over the lake and its surrounding areas, including 16 watersheds and 15 protected areas, where 25 percent of the country’s rainforest is concentrated, David Quintana of the Nicaraguan Foundation for Sustainable Development told Tierramérica*.

The proposed canal routes run through nature reserves that are home to hundreds of species of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, molluscs and crustaceans.

The assistant director of the Humboldt Centre, Víctor Campos, said the canal would simply destroy any chance of making Lake Cocibolca the source of water for all of Central America at some point in the future.

“Construction of the canal and conservation of water for human consumption are mutually exclusive – you either have a canal or you have a reservoir of water for the population,” Campos told Tierramérica.

The canal will be built across 190 km of land, while an additional 80 km of the route will go through Lake Cocibolca. It will serve larger ships than the Panama Canal.

Biologist Salvador Montenegro, director of the Research Centre for Aquatic Resources of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, told Tierramérica that the work on the lake will generate enormous amounts of sediment that will muddy the water and suffocate most of the fish and other forms of life.

Montenegro said the size of the canal – 520 metres wide and 27.6 metres deep – poses the worst environmental scenario for the lake and surrounding watersheds.

“A small oil leak, an earthquake, or the strong winds that blow in that area could cause an ecological catastrophe that would forever put an end to potential human consumption from the lake,” the activist said.

The same concern was voiced by Jaime Incer Barquero, a scientist who advises President Ortega on environmental issues.

“We are still in time to rectify this and not make the extremely serious mistake of endangering the biggest source of water in the country and Central America; no canal is worth as much as that lake,” Barquero told Tierramérica.

In the face of the barrage of criticism, the president has stated that the environmental impact study will be decisive in determining the future of the canal project and the route it will take.

But the environmental and technical authorities did not respond to the arguments of the possible environmental risks, and have merely stressed the economic benefits that the canal will bring to Nicaragua.

HKND spokesman Ronald MacLean has stated in several communiqués that the British consultancy Environmental Resources Management would carry out a professional environmental impact assessment of the different routes considered for the canal.

“Obviously, we also have to address the environmental question, because we will have to see what impact the project will have and what will be the cost of a remediation programme so that the final outcome is positive,” he said in an early August email sent out by the company’s public relations firm in Managua.

Meanwhile, environmental organisations, business groups and opposition sectors, as well as indigenous communities worried about threats to their land and their access to water, are preparing to bring legal action against the project.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

One of the projected routes for Nicaragua’s interoceanic canal. Credit: National Assembly

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

A five-century wait could come to an end when the Nicaraguan government grants a concession this year to a Chinese company to build a canal between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, despite local protests and international scepticism.

On Thursday, the single-chamber legislature gave fast-track approval to a controversial law that paves the way for the start next year of construction of a rival to the Panama Canal. The 100-year concession will go to the Hong Kong-based Chinese company HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co. Ltd. (HKND Group).

The company was selected by the government of leftwing President Daniel Ortega to build the massive canal at an estimated cost of over 40 billion dollars.

But many voices in Nicaragua have called for greater transparency in the bidding process for the construction project that will bring to life a dream that has been cherished in this Central American country since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived.

One of the main criticisms is that the state of Nicaragua would grant complete rights over the canal for 50 years, with an option for another 50 years, to a company that was set up in October 2012 and established a holding company in the Cayman Islands that same year.

The Chinese company’s director, Wang Jing, is chairman of the Beijing-based Xinwei Telecom Enterprise Group, which was awarded a 300 million dollar telecommunications contract in Nicaragua in 2012. But Xinwei is at least four months behind in the investment pledged under the contract.

Construction of the canal is slated to begin in May 2014, and is expected to take 10 years. The feasibility studies are not yet ready, but according to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) government, a London-based firm has been commissioned to carry them out.

The first legal step was taken in July 2012, when at Ortega’s initiative parliament passed the “law for the construction of the interoceanic canal” by a mixed public-private company.

The state would hold a 51 percent stake, and the remaining 49 percent would be in the hands of investors, which could be countries, international bodies, individuals or companies.

HKND plans to build the canal across 190 km of land, while 80 km of the route would go across Cocibolca lake. The canal will be 150 metres wide and will serve larger ships than the Panama Canal.

The project has the firm support of the Ortega administration, which sent the bill – the “special law for the development of Nicaraguan infrastructure and transportation involving the canal, free trade zones and associated infrastructure” – to the legislature on Jun. 5 for fast-track treatment.

The bill approved Thursday modifies the original “law for the construction of the interoceanic canal”, modifies the projected route, and grants the concession exclusively to the Chinese investors.

It also establishes that Nicaragua gives up any claim to or sovereignty over the concession for up to 100 years.

The text was approved by 61 votes in favour, 25 against, and one abstention, after a heated three-hour debate. But the opposition lawmakers withdrew immediately during the separate votes for each one of the law’s 25 articles, to protest what they considered insufficient debate on the bill.

The construction project approved by the new law includes the canal, two deep-water ports, an international airport, a “dry canal” freight railroad, a series of free-trade zones, and an oil pipeline.

Initial estimates indicate that the canal will have the capacity to handle 450 to 500 million metric tonnes of freight a year and ships of up to 250,000 tons that are 400 metres long, 59 metres wide, and with a berth-side depth of 22 metres.

By comparison, the Panama Canal can currently handle vessels 260 metres long, 32 metres wide, with a beam of 19 metres – a size known as Panamax. But the expansion project now underway will double the capacity of the Panama Canal by 2015.

The new law grants 100 percent of the shares to the Chinese investors and establishes that the transfer to Nicaragua will be gradual, starting 10 years after the canal begins to operate. Nicaragua will receive 10 million dollars a year until all of the shares have been handed over a century later.

The business chamber and investors in Nicaragua support the government’s plan, albeit with some reservations. But it is staunchly opposed by the rightwing opposition and Sandinista dissidents, as well as environmentalists.

Eduardo Montealegre, head of the opposition legislators, told IPS that Ortega and his officials were “selling out the country” with the broad concessions granted to foreign investors that, he said, hurt Nicaragua’s current and future interests.

Constitutional lawyer Gabriel Álvarez told IPS that the concession of the project to Chinese investors violated the constitutional article on national sovereignty, and left the country vulnerable to local or international legal action.

Biologist Salvador Montenegro, director of the Research Centre for Aquatic Resources of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, told IPS that any construction project involving Cocibolca lake endangered biodiversity, and Central American society as a whole.

The 8,624-km long lake in southwest Nicaragua is the region’s largest freshwater reserve.

The government’s secretary of public policies, Paul Oquist, dismissed the demands by environmentalists and politicians and anticipated that after construction of the canal started, GDP would grow 10.8 percent in 2014 and 15 percent in 2015, compared to the current four to five percent.

The government projects that GDP will climb from 10 billion dollars today to 24.7 billion dollars in 2018. But without the construction of the canal, GDP would stand at 14.9 billion dollars in 2018.

Ortega informally discussed the idea of the canal with U.S. President Barack Obama at the May 4 summit of presidents of the Central American Integration System in Costa Rica.

The initiative has not drawn official reactions, either positive or negative, from Nicaragua’s Central American neighbours.

Only Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli congratulated Nicaragua for the plan and offered it technical assistance.