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| Central American University - UCA |
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Number 262 | Mayo 2003 |
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Nicaragua
NICARAGUA BRIEFS
Envío team
THE DATA TRADE
News that a Guatemalan business in Nicaragua called Infor.net plus two other companies had for months been gathering personal data on Nicaraguans (name; address; profession; phone number, profession, tax, ID, passport and credit card numbers, bank data, etc.) caused uproar in mid-April. The partners in this data trade were US companies who in turn resell the information to the US government as part of the security measures in its anti-terrorist war. For days the media focused on the controversy over the legality of this practice and the confidentiality of such personal information.
President Bolaños denied that the government had authorized the sale of personal data; National Assembly representatives announced they would pass a privacy law; and the Ministry of Government launched an investigation into the businesses involved to find out which state institution could have sold them the largely public data, which is found in voting records and the registries of various institutions.
On April 29, Minister of Government Eduardo Urcuyo concluded that the companies were working legally and were not dealing with confidential data, pointing out that “similar businesses exist all over the world and are legal.” The only aspect of such an enterprise that could constitute a crime, he stated, is neither the gathering nor sale of data, but the mechanism by which such data are acquired, for example violating banking privacy.
A SOCIETY OF DESPERATION
Nicaragua’s official suicide records show that 65 citizens took their own life in the first four months of the year. According to the Ministry of Health’s Mental Health Office, such data are under-reported and it would be fair to calculate that two Nicaraguans have committed suicide per day since the 1990s, a high percentage of them adolescents and young adults of both sexes.
According to Dr. Luis Molina, deputy director of the National Psychiatric Hospital, and Dr. Alvaro Lacayo, director of the Institute of Neurology and Human Development, “desperation” is the main cause of suicide. “Nicaragua is a society of desperation,” they explain, “in which moral, political and cultural values are disappearing every day while 70% of the population did not finish primary school, does not have decent drinking water and is unemployed. To these desperate factors must be added endemic problems such as alcoholism and lack of identity.” These two professionals feel that their health care field is the most abandoned one in the country, meaning that all kinds of depressions are not dealt with and often culminate in suicide.
TWO PNEUMONIAS
As of the first week of May, the atypical viral pneumonia known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), first detected in Asian countries, had caused some 500 deaths around the world. In that same period, the well-known bacterial pneumonia, for which antibiotics exist, caused 83 deaths in Nicaragua alone, which speaks volumes about the deficiencies of Nicaragua’s health care system.
THE NICARAGUA-COLOMBIA TERRITORIAL DISPUTE NOTCHES UP
On April 28, the government of Nicaragua presented a Memorial to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, providing continuity to its request for a maritime delimitation with Colombia and detailing its argument based on the Law of the Sea. Since 1928, Colombia has had possession of a 50,000-square-kilometer area of the Caribbean Sea that includes the San Andrés and Providencia archipelago and the Serrana, Serranilla, Roncador and Quitasueño keys. Handed over to Colombia at a time when Nicaragua was under US military occupation, the latter has since claimed the area as part of its own territorial waters, “continental platform” and “exclusive economic zone,” which are modern concepts incorporated into the Law of the Sea. “Today is an historic day for Nicaragua, which many generations and defenders of our sovereignty and territorial integrity longed to see,” said Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Norman Caldera while in The Hague. “Seventy-five years had to pass before Nicaragua could initiate this definitive claim over its rights in the Caribbean.” Colombia has until June 28 to present its Counter-Memorial. The historic conflict had heated up in the preceding days, when Nicaragua opened bidding for oil exploration within the disputed maritime area. The government of Colombia threatened armed action and Nicaragua responded with its legal defense, thus ushering in a new phase of this histo
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a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America