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| Central American University - UCA |
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Number 323 | Junio 2008 |
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Nicaragua
NICARAGUA BRIEFS
Envío team
ABNORMAL CLIMATIC ACTIVITYTropical storm Alma hit Nicaragua’s Pacific zone with unexpected force on May 29. The damage caused by its 60-mile-an-hour winds and torrential rains cast a pall on Mother’s Day plans the following day. Both the time and the place of such a strong storm were unpredictable and abnormal, with the most affected areas Corinto, Puerto Sandino and Nagarote in León and Chinandega, typically the country’s driest zone. Thousands of trees and dozens of electricity posts were felled; hundreds of kilometers of roads, streets and highways were washed out; and the ecosystems of the affected coastal zone were seriously altered, with dead fish found along many of the beaches. The currents dragged huge amounts of garbage, much of which came to rest in protected areas (the Padre Ramos Estuary and Juana Venado Island).
Rains over the next few days in expansive areas of the Northern Caribbean further aggravated the situation of the victims of Hurricane Felix, which hit that region in September of last year. President Ortega was out of the country, whereabouts unknown, when Alma hit, and on his return made no reference to this tragedy or the one on June 5, when a violent whirlwind—a phenomenon never before seen in the area—destroyed 100 houses in Muhan, Chontales.
SEXUAL ABUSE, POLICE RESPONSEThe recently-created Movement against Sexual Abuse provided information on June 4 about the inadequate actions of state institutions with respect to this crime of epidemic proportions in Nicaragua. It first cited a report by the National Police Stations for Women and Children that they had received 1,097 charges of sexual crimes in the first quarter of 2008, half of them against children and adolescents, for an average of 12 a day. Movement spokespeople then specifically charged the National Police (PN) delegations of Granada with failing to provide information in its police files to the victims, thus obstructing their right to find out about the investigative process and retarding or impeding accusations against their abuser. It further charged that the police do not adequately investigate the charges, which means that the Public Ministry has insufficient evidence to accuse the abusers. Even more serious is that when those charged are PN officers, institutional complicity kicks in to keep investigations from taking place at all. And finally, the movement charged that when files do finally make it to the Public Ministry, the trial dates are constantly reprogrammed due to the no-show of the assistant prosecuting attorney assigned to represent the victims in the oral public hearing. Such delays re-victimize the victims over the long processes.
COOPERATION’S CONCERNSThe government distributed a first draft of its announced Human Development Plan to the cooperating countries’ ambassadors in an act on April 25 in which the diplomats were not permitted comments or questions and President Ortega offered no explanation of the plan’s logic. For planning purposes, the donor community later submitted to the government its recommendations and observations on the text received that day. The recommendations included more clearly defining the central objectives and priorities and including goals and indicators when defining actions and duration periods. The donors noted that they detected more ideology than practical proposals in the plan and that the gender perspective was absent. The cooperating communities’ Budgetary Support Group (made up of Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Low Countries, Sweden, Switzerland, Great Britain, Japan, the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank) signed an aide-mémoire on May 29 for the disbursement of US$115.2 million for the 2008 national budget (8% of the budget total), conditioning it on three principles: transparency/accountability, independence of the judicial branch, and macroeconomic stability. They also signaled their interest in respect for sexual and reproductive rights and once again expressed their concern about the criminalization of therapeutic abortion.
COLOMBIANS OFFERED ASYLUM IN NICARAGUAOn May 11 the government of Nicaragua requested permission from Colombia for one of its army planes to make an official flight over that country’s territory. A few days later it was learned that the plane had flown to Quito, Ecuador, bringing back Martha Pérez and Doris Bohórquez, two Colombian survivors of their government’s March 1 bombing of a FARC camp in Ecuadorian territory. The Nicaraguan government granted the two young women political asylum, having previously welcomed Lucia Morett, a Mexican student who had survived the same military attack. In the context of the tense dispute between Ecuador and Colombia over the FARC’s use of Ecuadorian territory and the Colombian military’s violation of Ecuador’s borders, the Ecuadorian Attorney General’s Office announced that it would request extradition of the three young women to investigate their links to the FARC. Ignoring the national and Latin American controversy, President Ortega declared that he had personally instructed the Army to conduct this mission and will never extradite the women. The Colombian government immediately sent a protest note to Nicaragua’s Foreign Ministry claiming that the government of Nicaragua had lied, but in the OAS General Assembly meeting in Medellín, Colombia, on June 3, the Nicaraguan foreign minister denied that the plane had in fact flown over Colombian territory. In a second protest note Colombia’s President Uribe responded that he considers Pérez and Bohórquez terrorists and Morett an accomplice to terrorist activities.
INDIGENOUS NICARAGUAIn late May the United Nations’ Committee against Racial Discrimination exhorted Nicaragua to speed up adoption of the General Law of Indigenous Peoples of Pacific, Central and Northern Nicaragua, as well as the creation of a Special Ombudsman for the indigenous peoples of those regions. It’s the first time that the committee has referred to these particular indigenous peoples in one of its resolutions on Nicaragua. They weren’t mentioned in an earlier resolution (1995) because Nicaragua argued that there are only indigenous peoples in the Caribbean region. According to Indigenous Movement data 24 groups from the Chorotega, Nahuatl, Sutiaba and Matagalpa peoples are found in Nicaragua, as well as dozens of indigenous peoples who are not organized. According to the census of these peoples, they number 388,000 in the Pacific, central and northern part of the country, of which 221,000 are Chorotegas, 49,000 Sutiabas, 20,000 Nahuatls and 98,000 Matagalpas. Adding those numbers to the various indigenous and Afro-descended peoples of the Caribbean gives a total of 597,000 non-mestizos, over 11% of the total national population.
The current struggle of the groups on the Pacific side of the country is approval of the above-mentioned law, which establishes the promotion of indigenous identity, recognition of their communal territories and ancestral organizations and the promotion of traditional medicine, among other things.
A PEOPLE HEMORRHAGEOne of the signs of the crisis brought down on Nicaragua is the growing emigration, a trend that has increased since the change of government. In the latest national M&R poll (May 3-9), 66.2% of all those surveyed and even 61% of the self-identified FSLN sympathizers admitted they would like to leave the country, half of them in search of work. In an interview in La Prensa some days before initiating her hunger strike, MRS leader Dora María Téllez was asked how it was possible that we’re not seeing social upheaval given such a bleak panorama, to which she responded, “Of course there are social upheavals. There are two types of hemorrhages: the external kind, when you get stabbed with a knife and there’s blood on the street. That’s spectacular. But what’s happening in Nicaragua is internal hemorrhaging. The country is dying from loss of blood because its people are leaving.”
FOREST FIRE RAVAGES ROSITASome 5,000 hectares of forest felled by Hurricane Felix in September 2OO7 in Rosita, in the northern Caribbean, burned in a mid-May fire that took some 500 people from various institutions and civic organizations days to bring under control. As had been expected ever since Felix’s winds uprooted over a million hectares of forests, mainly pine, the fire was caused by the agricultural burning that, despite all warnings, precedes every planting period—the hottest and driest time of the year. The first rains in the area on May 19 helped squelch the fire, which also consumed 200 hectares of the felled lumber earmarked for reconstruction of housing destroyed by the hurricane.
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a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America