NICARAGUA BRIEFS

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PLC CONVENTION AND DISSIDENCE

The Constitutionalist Liberal Party’s April 29 “Great Convention” was preceded by a lot of expectation given the critical positions of a number of its national leaders, who the previous month had formed what they called the “Commitment to the Democratic Change of the PLC.” These dissidents urged that the party be “retooled” and that former President Arnoldo Alemán, still the organization’s political boss despite his interminable reverses, distance himself from the party. At the convention itself they demanded that the voting to elect new leadership be secret and post-by-post rather than by slate. They proposed Carlos Noguera as their candidate for the party’s new national leader. Noguera had been party treasurer until March, when he resigned because, with Alemán still holding the party’s reins, he believed it would become a rump party as small as the once equally powerful Conservative Party now is. Nonetheless, Alemán’s followers controlled both the procedures and the participation, so when Noguera arrived at the convention site with José Pallais, a distinguished long-time PLC National Assembly representative and former president of the parliamentary Justice Commission, they were booed and expelled by a group of convention members who turned off the microphone when Noguera tried to speak. Not surprisingly, therefore, Alemán’s candidate María Haydée Osuna was elected PLC president, and all of those handpicked by him to make up the party’s board of directors were also elected. Even Alemán himself was ratified as honorary president. The dissidents filed complaints with the Supreme Electoral Council about the convention’s irregularities and declared that they would continue struggling for the “dignity of Liberalism” in the Constitutionalist Liberal Movement. Alemán, considered mortally wounded by his 6% showing in last year’s presidential elections, is looking to President Ortega for new oxygen. Even if he were to try to distance himself from the party, warned Maximino Rodríguez, who left the PLC to join the PLI Alliance, Ortega wouldn’t let him.

ORTEGA SNUBS CARTAGENA SUMMIT

After having confirmed that he would attend the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, on April 14-15, and everything had been arranged at the airport and the hotel, President Ortega announced at the last moment through a Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry official that he would not attend. He offered no reasons for his decision at the time, but revealed them to thousands of young people from the Sandinista Youth on April 14—as the summit was going on—at an event in Managua honoring Cuba: “I wouldn’t feel comfortable at that summit; I’d be ashamed to be participating with Cuba absent.” Ortega also referred to the recently created Community of Latin American and Caribbean States as a “harsh blow to the Monroe Doctrine.” He said that President Obama remains locked into that doctrine, with the desire to “dictate who goes to the summit and who doesn’t; to dictate who’s democratic and who isn’t.”

NEW US AMBASSADOR

On May 3, President Ortega accepted the credentials of the new US Ambassador to Nicaragua, Phyllis Powers. That post had been vacant since last July. Powers worked in the US Embassies in Iran and Peru before becoming ambassador to Panama. She also ccupied different posts in Colombia, specializing in the anti-drugs war othat country. During her nomination hearings in Washington she acknowledged her government’s “serious concern about the erosion of democracy in Nicaragua” following elections that had been “neither impartial nor transparent.” On receiving her credentials, Ortega told Powers: “The broadest freedom of expression exists here. You will be able to see the media every day. You will be able to speak to any of the media you wish. You will be able to talk to all the people you choose, to the representatives of the different political forces, social forces and economic groups.”
It was a nice reassurance, but is tarnished by the demand made in October 2009 by FSLN-linked union leaders that then-Ambassador Robert Callahan be declared “persona non grata” and even expelled after a talk to the American Chamber of Commerce in Managua in which he, with far more diplomacy than US officials usually apply, questioned the Nicaraguan Supreme Court’s overruling of the Constitution to allow Ortega to run for reelection again. Demonstrators even shot home-made mortars over the Embassy wall, and the next day Callahan had to be evacuated from an intercultural event with other ambassadors when demonstrators threw fireworks at him.

THE FAMILY CODE

Since the beginning of the year, the National Assembly has been discussing article by article the new Family Code, a legal framework that has not previously existed in Nicaragua. In April, the conservative definition of “family” proposed by the FSLN’s majority bench sparked intense debates, given that the family was defined as the traditional matrimony or de facto stable union between a man, a woman and their children. That definition doesn’t represent the national reality as it leaves out some 40% of the country’s families headed by single mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters and brothers, as well as single men in some cases. On May 3, the plenary approved a proposal presented by Edipcia Dubón and Silvia Nadine Gutiérrez, Sandinista Renovation Movement legislators to modify the concept to include these single-parent households. For their part, sexual diversity organizations, which have become very active in recent years, proposed the recognition of families formed by same-sex couples—which they termed “diverse”—although they did not go as far as demanding the legal right to homosexual matrimony. Another element opposed by the PLI Alliance bench is the FSLN motion to insert into the Family Code the new project the governing party is calling Councils of Family, Health and Life, which involves the participation of the Councils of Citizens’ Power. The PLI Alliance fears this would encourage party control of the new code’s application.

NICARAGUA–COLOMBIA DISPUTE

Between April 23 and May 4, Nicaragua and Colombia presented their arguments to the International Court of Justice at The Hague (ICJ) in the trial opened in 2007 over the maritime limits between the two countries as well as the sovereignty of the Roncador, Serranía and Quitasueños keys. Nicaragua initiated that territorial litigation in 2001, claiming 300,000 kilometers of its maritime platform and the sovereignty of both those keys and a number of smaller ones in the same area. The platform in question is extremely rich in fishing resources and is known to have oil and gas deposits, although they are yet to be exploited. Colombia argues that 200,000 kilometers of the disputed area belongs to it because it has had sovereignty over the San Andrés archipelago since 1928 while Nicaragua, which has historically disputed the area, alleges that the 1928 Esguerra-Bárcenas Treaty favoring Colombia was signed at a time when Nicaragua was under US military intervention. The ICJ has already accepted Colombia’s sovereignty over the island of San Andrés. The ICJ’s definitive ruling will take several months. The Nicaraguan government and national experts in international legislation are optimistic that the country will recover its strategic maritime platform, while ecologists in both countries have warned about the ecological tragedy that would result from either of them exploiting petroleum in that area, given its fragile and rich biodiversity.

ONGOING CONTROVERSY OVER
THE RÍO SAN JUAN HIGHYWAY

The 350-kilometer highway that the Costa Rican government is constructing parallel and extremely close to the southern bank of the San Juan river, which forms the border between the two countries but belongs to Nicaragua, is continuing to stir up major controversy. The project, with an investment of nearly US$1 billion, is not only damaging the river, a Nicaraguan Biosphere Reserve, but even violates some nine Costa Rican environmental laws. In early May Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla indignantly denounced the corruption that has surrounded this work since it got underway. Nonetheless, she labeled the project “patriotic,” a maximum expression of “national sovereignty,” which she claimed was why it was denounced by “our enemies,” i.e. Nicaraguans. On Nicaragua’s side of the river, environmental organizations charged that Costa Rica’s real intentions have nothing to do with sovereignty, but rather with a megaproject: an interoceanic dry canal in the form of a highway that will unite Costa Rica’s Puerto Limón in the Caribbean with Moin Bay in the Pacific. The project will be capped by an oil pipeline running alongside the highway.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IN NICARAGUA

Nobel Laureate in Medicine Richard J. Roberts visited Nicaragua in mid-April to participate in the Sixth Nicaraguan Biotechnology Congress organized by the Central American University’s Molecular Biology Center. Roberts shared the Nobel prize with Phillip Sharp in 1993 for having discovered the nonlinear sequence of genes. During his visit he held meetings with diverse national sectors, recommending in one of his talks that President Ortega and his government imitate former Cuban President Fidel Castro and invest in biotechnology. Roberts praised Castro’s vision, since Cuban biotechnological products are now one of the island’s main exports, and believes Nicaragua has the natural resource potential to do something similar.

In the eighties, an internationally funded project to isolate and industrially reproduce local strains of an organic pesticide known as Bacillus thuringiensis, Bt for short, was well on its way to putting Nicaragua in the regional vanguard in biotechnology research and production that Roberts envisions for it. Had the project continued, it would have saved Nicaragua millions of dollars annually in imported generic Bt from the United States, and made it a net exporter to the rest of the region, which has a similar climate and similar pests. Spinoffs to other biotechinical developments would have inevitably followed. Regrettably the Chamorro government let the project die by refusing to back its funding proposals to move to the industrial stage, largely because it considered anything “made in the USA” to be superior. That was particularly erroneous in this case, as the native strains are by nature more adapted to local conditions and crops.

DISMISSALS IN THE STATE

Álvaro Leiva Sánchez, secretary of labor affairs in the Federation of Public Service Workers, reported that during President Ortega’s last term in office (2007-2011) and in these first few months of his new term, 19,500 workers have been fired from 52 state institutions without receiving their due compensation. Leiva charged that nepotism, influence peddling and persecution of those not close to the governing party have been found in the state institutions.

RECORD REMITTANCES

According to a report by the Inter-American Dialogue, Nicaraguan migrants working in the United States, Costa Rica, Spain and other countries sent a record US$1 billion in remittances to their families back home last year. This tops the 2010 amount, which at US$823 million was still significant, given the world economic crisis.

OUR PLACE IN INTERNET

Nicaragua is listed in 131st place in the 11th edition of the Global Information Technology Report, which analyzes the Internet interconnectedness and hyper-connectedness of 142 countries. It is the lowest in the Central American region and second lowest in Latin America after Haiti, which also occupies last place globally. Costa Rica leads Central America (58th place), followed by Guatemala (98th), Honduras (99th) and El Salvador (103rd). The report identifies a still very expensive infrastructure in Nicaragua and a limited number of people who know how to use the available technology.

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