NICARAGUA BRIEFS

Envío team

VICE PRESIDENT ATTENDS
POPE FRANCIS’ INVESTITURE

Neither Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega nor First Lady Rosario Murillo went to the investiture of Pope Francis in Rome on March 19, a ceremony attended by a good number of Latin American heads of State and their wives. A government spokesperson explained that “the 13-hour trip to Rome is very long.” The government was represented by former Army chief and current Vice President Omar Halleslevens. Cardinal Miguel Obando also represented Nicaragua, but given his age—he is 86—he was not an elector in the conclave. The two men invited the new pope to visit Nicaragua.

SANTO DOMINGO MINERS
FINALLY RELEASED

After a month in Managua’s Judicial Auxiliary Division prison, 12 terrified and intimidated small-scale miners from Santo Domingo, Chontales, were finally released. They had been arrested on February 9 after their protest against the Canadian transnational mining company B2Gold was violently broken up by National Police anti-riot forces. The miners were protesting B2Gold’s open pit gold mining, which is causing an environmental disaster in the municipality and leaving the miners without work. The Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH), which has accompanied the miners’ struggle, considered that the “negotiation” that led to their release held “a gun to their neck” because they are forbidden to leave their municipality and were forced to abandon their struggle. The agreement was signed by the delegate of the FSLN’s Council of Citizen’s Power (CPC) in the municipality, which CENIDH sees as a “usurpation of functions.” Gonzalo Carrión, director of CENIDH’s juridical area, considers everything that has happened in Santo Domingo starting with the eviction and police repression as evidence of “the defense of the presidential family’s capital in that foreign-owned mine.”

PRIESTS OPPOSE MINING

Led by their bishop, 42 Catholic priests from the diocese of Matagalpa issued a statement on March 5 in which they define as a “mortal sin” the gold exploitation that the Canadian B2Gold mining company plans to initiate in the Yaoska Reserve in the Matagalpan municipality of Rancho Grande. Among other things, the clergy stated that “just as we oppose the Costa Rican highway along the San Juan River, we Nicaraguans must all be consistent in opposing the mining because, like that highway, mining destroys life and the environment…. The pseudo-development promised by this mining project is an assault on a large number of people…. There is no point of equilibrium in it between the profits of a few and the damage to the many…. Rancho Grande has a distinctive environment worth protecting…. The foreign mining companies interested in gold exploitation are burdening us with the danger of losing everything for the riches of gold.” The priests are calling on President Ortega to deny the mining company permission and on the mining company itself to “humbly desist” from its project.

RANCHO GRANDE RESIDENTS
MARCH AGAINST THE MINING PROJECT

On March 21, parish priest Pablo Espinoza led some 5,000 residents of Rancho Grande, Matagalpa, on a march against the B2Gold mining project, which plans to start open-pit gold mining on Pavón Hill in the Yaoska district of that municipality. Espinoza explained: “We’re saying a resounding ‘no’ to any mining company coming to intervene here.” Alluding to the problems with the same company in Santo Domingo, Chontales, he added: “What happened there has revealed to us the magnitude of the moral and environmental disaster that mining company is bringing to our peoples.” The march, the largest of three that have been held in the municipality since 2010, was organized by Guardians of Yaoska and supported by 30 other social, environmental, feminist, producer and student organizations in the area. The community’s main water sources are found in Yaoska, which is also home to a virgin ecosystem that is a designated protected area. There has never been mining activity in this zone. Father Espinoza revealed that B2Gold offered him a new truck, money and financing for the parish’s pastoral cadres if he will drop the struggle....

NICARAGUA IGNORES
IACHR REQUEST TO VISIT

In March, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) again issued a request to the Nicaraguan government to visit the country, and for the fifth time since 2008 received no response. According to Vilma Núñez, president of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH), while President Ortega’s previous “silences” express a lack of transparency and a fear of negative human rights reports about his government, this most recent one could be due to activism against the IACHR in recent months by member countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), including Nicaragua. As Núñez, the highly-respected vice president of the Supreme Court at the time she refers to, recalls, “Not even Somoza stopped the Commission visiting our country. I was responsible for attending to it at that time, in 1978.” The IACHR also came to Nicaragua in 1980, during the Sandinista government, and Núñez received it then as well. Retired Army General Humberto Ortega recently referred to the 1978 IACHR visit to Nicaragua as well: he had high praise for its report on the dictatorship’s human rights violations against the civilian population, prepared for the Organization of American States, of which it is a part. “That report,” said President Ortega’s brother, “was very important and contributed to the isolation of the dictatorship.”

NICARAGUAN PEASANTS REQUEST
POLITICAL ASYLUM IN HONDURAS

On March 5, 32 Nicaraguan peasants from different areas of the country entered Honduras, some crossing blind spots along the border and a few by bus, to ask the Honduran authorities for political asylum because they consider themselves politically persecuted in Nicaragua. They received permission to remain in Honduran territory for 90 days while their cases are studied. The peasants stated that the persecution against them and their families started after the alleged electoral fraud in the November 2011 general elections in which they were harassed by the FSLN-run Councils of Citizens’ Power (CPCs) for not collaborating with the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) or for supporting rearmed antigovernment groups operating in the areas where they live. These peasants voted for the Independent Liberal Party (PLI) that year, and at the beginning of April Fabio Gadea and Edmundo Jarquín, the PLI’s presidential ticket in those elections, visited Honduras to learn about the situation of the 28 men aged between 30 and 50, 26-year-old woman and three boys between 13 and 15, and to request that Honduras grant them political asylum.

CENTRAL AMERICA WILL
MEET WITH OBAMA

On May 4, the Presidents of the Central American countries, who will be in San José, Costa Rica, for a special meeting of the Central American Integration System, will meet with US President Barack Obama during his visit to that country. Obama will also visit Mexico on the same trip.

RUSSIA CONTRIBUTING TO
DRUG CONTROL IN NICARAGUA

The cornerstone of an Anti-Drug Training Center to be built by Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service was laid in Managua on March 22. Although the center will be in Nicaragua, it will provide training to all Central American countries. That same day, 32 police officers from the Central American region graduated in Nicaragua, thus concluding a course given by Russian specialists in drug trafficking and organized crime. US Ambassador in Nicaragua Phyllis Powers commented that with these initiatives the Russians “are becoming part of the solution and not of the problem,” adding that “I don’t see the aid from Russia as competition for the DEA, but as support.” The US Drug Enforcement Agency she was referring to has been working with both the Police and the Army in Nicaragua in the fight against drug trafficking since the nineties.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
DATA ON NICARAGUA

According to the United Nations Development Programme’s 2013 Human Development Report, presented in Mexico on March 14, Latin America is still the region with the greatest inequality between the few with a lot and the many with little. The Report investigated life expectancy, education and income in 187 countries of the world. Its data on Nicaragua include the following: 78% of the population is literate, but given a school dropout rate of 51.6%, only 37.6% of adults over 25 years old finished secondary school; 70% of the population has mobile phones, but only 0.8% has access to fixed broadband Internet; and there is not even one doctor for every 1,000 people (0.4 per 1,000). The report calculated that Nicaragua’s population will have hit 7.2 million people by 2030.

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