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| Central American University - UCA |
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Number 368 | Marzo 2012 |
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Nicaragua
NICARAGUA BRIEFS
Envío team
SEXUAL ABUSE IN THE CHURCHRome’s Pontifical Gregorian University held a symposium titled “Towards healing and renewal” in the Vatican during the first days of February. The objective was to debate the thousands of cases of sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests throughout the world. Justice promoter Monsignor Charles Scicluna from the Vatican’s doctrinal department called on the symposium to make the Church’s 5,000 bishops responsible for mishandling child abuse cases involving priests under their authority, noting that a bishop’s “negligence” in a pederasty case is a “crime” under canon law. He called it “unacceptable that when there are set standards, people do not follow them.”
Bishop René Sándigo, president of the Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference, disagreed. “Each priest is responsible for his own acts and the institution cannot assume responsibility for those individualities,” he argued, adding that in Nicaragua “we have a good clergy, very well prepared priests, and we haven’t been affected by such very sad kinds of phenomena.” Archbishop of Managua Leopoldo Brenes echoed Sándigo: “That is the fault of the priest, not the bishop. Each person is responsible for his own acts and I think that if he committed the offense, he is the one who has to assume responsibility for it.” He added that during his six years as archbishop he had yet to hear of any case in his archdiocese.
SENTENCING IN THE “EL CARRIZO CASE”After several days of a trial that generally followed the letter of the law, Judge Erick Laguna caused indignation on February 17 when he sentenced the three accused of three political murders in the community of El Carrizo with the minimum of three years and three months in prison. Last November 8, two days after the general elections, the defendants—the FSLN’s political secretary in the municipality of San José de Cusmapa, the municipal police chief and a Supreme Electoral Council official—drove into El Carrizo at night in municipal government pickup trucks, accompanied by other men, and opened fire on the Torres Cruz family, killing the father and two sons and wounding two other sons, while jeering at them for belonging to the PLI Alliance.
Citing “extenuating factors” in a confused 53-page document explaining the minimum sentence, Judge Laguna justified it on the grounds that the perpetrators were drunk and were acting in “self-defense” because they felt themselves in danger in that community. The sentence corresponding to their crime should have been between 13 and 22 years. At the end of February, Irinea Mejía Cruz, the widow and mother of those killed, went to Managua to file a demand that the sentence be adjusted to the severity of the crimes committed.
CANAL DREAM STILL ALIVE On February 21, at an anniversary commemoration of the assassination of General Augusto César Sandino, President Ortega announced that, “to honor Sandino’s dream and ensure full sovereignty and economic independence,” Nicaragua will build an inter-oceanic canal wider than Panama’s along the Río San Juan, whose southern bank borders Costa Rica. According to Ortega, the canal will be the “main objective” of his third term in government and he has entrusted Edén Pastora, already responsible for the controversial and ineffective dredging of the same river, and Manuel Coronel Kautz, the polemical deputy foreign affairs minister, with presenting a study on the project. Many studies have already been done on the viability of a Nicaraguan canal. The last one, at the end of the Bolaños government, calculated the cost at some US$30 billion; the idea was rejected because it was impossible to use the river for a canal without causing an ecological catastrophe and because its width and depth would not permit it.
A week later, while Costa Rica’s President was inaugurating her country’s controversial 160-km highway along the Costa Rican side of the river, Ortega symbolically placed the cornerstone of the first of eight vehicular bridges that will cross the San Juan, a Bolaños government project agreed to in 2002 with funding by the government of Japan. Would the super tankers that can no longer fit in Panama Canal clear these bridges?
DRUG TRAFFICKING IN THE RAASThe Nicaraguan Navy seized three tons of cocaine on a Colombian ship on March 5 in the waters of the Nicaragua’s South Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAS). After a chase on the high seas that lasted for hours, the drug traffickers abandoned the ship and escaped onto the Nicaraguan mainland. Given the volume of drugs seized, the Navy says this is the biggest blow to drug trafficking in many years.
At the beginning of February, a report from the National Police in Bluefields, the capital of the RAAS, revealed that there are 44 violent deaths for every 100,000 inhabitants in the region, putting this particular area of Nicaragua on the same level as Guatemala (43 per 100,000). Bluefields is the second largest center of the drug trade in Nicaragua, resulting in drug trafficking penetrating the whole social fabric, taking over neighborhoods, universities and schools. There were 40 hitman-style murders in Bluefields in 2010 (see Roberto Orozco’s article “Societal Validation for Drug Trafficking is Growing” in the December 2010 edition of envío).
ORTEGA IN HONDURASPresident Ortega attended a meeting called and hosted by Honduras’ President Porfirio Lobo on March 6 in which the Central American President and US Vice President Joe Biden discussed the situation of violence in the region. Days earlier, Ortega received a visit from Guatemala’s Vice President Roxana Baldetti, who presented him President Otto Pérez Molina’s proposal to legalize drugs. Making no precise comments on the issue, Ortega declared that “we are all exposed to the destruction of society’s foundations by drug trafficking and organized crime. This is the moment to give battle, with the willingness to join a dialogue to address this issue.”
WHITAKER IN NICARAGUAUS Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Kevin Whitaker spent three days in Nicaragua between February 13 and 15. He met with Foreign Minister Samuel Santos, last year’s losing presidential candidate Fabio Gadea, opposition National Assembly deputies, and representatives of business and civil society. Whitaker, who was the US Embassy’s political adviser in Nicaragua between 1995 and 1998, said the United States is “very concerned” about the regression in democracy that he alleges marked the recent elections. “In the State Department, we see it as something that needs to be addressed and can be addressed,” he said.
While he said the US had not yet made any decision about aid to Nicaragua, he added that the Nicaragua issue is gaining momentum. On the one hand, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that she opposed the Administration’s proposed increase in U.S. assistance to Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador in the Fiscal Year 2013 budget request. And on the other Kirk Dahlgren, interim director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Nicaragua, extended US assistance to Nicaraguan agricultural cooperatives. “We have a project here that is going to continue for the next two years,” he said.
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a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America