NICARAGUA BRIEFS

Envío team

BOSAWAS IN DANGER OF EXTINCTION

A study financed by the German cooperation agency GTZ on deforestation and the agricultural frontier’s advance into the 20,000-square-kilometer Bosawas Biosphere Reserve concluded that 42,000 hectares are being deforested in the reserve every year and if that rate continues this biological treasure will have disappeared by 2058. The Bosawas reserve, which represents 14% of Nicaragua’s territory, is the most extensive tropical forest not only in Nicaragua but in the whole of Central America and was named Heritage of Humanity in 1998. The reasons for its destruction are the expansion of extensive cattle ranching, land speculation, illegal lumber cutting and trading, and murky legal lumber concessions, with land speculation apparently the most serious. The study also blames this tragedy on the authorities’ lack of political will, the lack of linkage between environmental and economic policies, the failure to regulate investments in the area, and the greed and ignorance of lumber dealers, cattle ranchers and farmers, who move into the reserve destroying as they go, with no effective controls to stop them.
Mayangna communities living in the reserve charged at the beginning of this year that several kilometers of a highway were being built that is penetrating into the core area of Bosawas to extract lumber, noting that the company responsible for the construction is Albaforestal, one of the companies of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) in Nicaragua.

ASSANGECASE

Spain’s judge Baltasar Garzón, who is the defense lawyer for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, visited Nicaragua for a few hours on August 30 to meet with President Daniel Ortega. Together with the other governments in ALBA, Ortega has endorsed the diplomatic asylum granted to Assange by the government of Ecuador in the name of human rights and defense of freedom of expression. A number of the 1,432 diplomatic cables (48 of them secret and 638 of them confidential) from the US Embassy in Nicaragua that are among the avalanche published by Wikileaks revealed alleged murky goings on in the Nicaraguan government. Several claimed the Ortega government was being financed by drug trafficking and reported on the freeing of drug traffickers by Nicaragua’s Supreme Court of Justice and the fraud organized by the FSLN in the 2008 municipal elections. At the time, President Ortega dismissed the cables as gossip.

LETTERS TO FIDEL CASTRO

On August 13, Fidel Castro’s 86th birthday, President Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo congratulated him in a long public letter dripping with the poetic excesses for which Murillo is known: “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel... Blue, like the far mountains...Green, like the near mountains... Fidel, Fidel, Fidel... Light in the Future of this Our America, which we forge day by day, taking into account each word of yours, each road map, so much Dignity, so much Greatness, so much infinity accumulated in your passage across this Plane of Life, where we have the good luck to enjoy your curiosity and your inexhaustible thought...
“You Fidel, celebrate Eternities, live Eternities, inhabit that unnamable space of Unity and Plenitude, where, beyond everything, and from Totality, you have the Strength, you have the Transparency, you have the Prism, and are therefore Inspiration and Guide of all thoseof us who know you to be the Artifice of that Polychrome, Solidary, Better World, of that Socialism of Dreams and Life in Justice, of that Life in Evolution, of those Ideas and that indefatigable Intelligence that inhabit, encourage and constantly renew, the Panorama of Humanity….”

Days later, Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) leader and legislator Enrique Sáenz sent Castro his own letter, which among other things says: “The delirious servility exuding from the letter you received is very far from representing the dignity of Nicaraguans. Despite their poverty and humility, our people are not servile. That raving servility is also an offense to the memory and the legacy of Sandino, who took up the fight out of dignity. He heroically resisted the US military intervention out of dignity. And he went to his immolation out of dignity. To the contrary, the terms of the referred-to communication far exceed the servility that Anastasio Somoza García lavished, in his time, on his gringo masters… I recognize that you at least have maintained to the end the obstinacy of your convictions, albeit at the cost of ignoring the suffering and privations that stubbornness provokes in millions of beings. It is quite to the contrary of your colleague Ortega who, cloaked in a discourse pregnant with falsehoods, is imposing the consolidation of a neoliberal model that allows him, his family and allies, old and new oligarchs, enormous enrichment while ever fewer resources are being assigned to education, health and creating opportunities for the majority of Nicaraguans who remain submerged in poverty.”

VENEZUELAN CAMPAIGN

In early August, during his campaigning in the state of Anzoátegui, Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles presented his “Petroleum for Progress” plan. In doing so, he noted that the Chávez government is “giving away” more than US$7 billion through oil agreements in which crude has been sold at favorable prices to a number of countries, among them Nicaragua. “The oil must be for Venezuelans, but regrettably they use it to buy loyalties, because what they have and are defending with the oil is a political project.” Capriles announced that if he wins the elections, “not a single barrel of oil will be given away,” adding that “we want to have the best relations with the countries, but we want to have friends without having to buy them.” In concrete reference to Nicaragua, he said that Venezuelan oil must not be devoted “to buying war tanks, donating ambulances to other countries or asphalting streets in Nicaragua.”

SUIT OF UNCONSTITUTIONALITY
AGAINST THE POSSIBLE CANAL

In August the Rama and Kriol (formerly known as Creole) Territorial Government on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast filed a suit of unconstitutionality with the Supreme Court of Justice against the project to construct a Grand Inter-oceanic Canal through Nicaragua,presented this year by Daniel Ortega’s government. According to the indigenous autonomous government, this project “considers various routes over our ancestral and traditional lands without the State having taken us into account.” The suit also expresses “deep concern” about other governmental infrastructure initiatives on other indigenous territories “without having conducted consultations in line with what is established by the OIT [International Labor Organization] Convention 169, ratified by the State of Nicaragua in May 2010.” It refers to “the planning, construction and start-up of a 2,000-meter airstrip in San Juan de Nicaragua in the Afro-descendant community of Greytown” and the advance of the Nueva Guinea-Bluefields highway, which crosses a large part of the Rama and Kriol territory.

VISIT OF US ANTI-SOA DELEGATION

A delegation of the US-based Movement against the School of the Americas (SOA) recently came to Nicaragua to again request that President Ortega withdraw all Nicaraguan soldiers being trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. A delegation from the movement visited Ortega in 2008 and at the time he pledged to make an effort to get the US Congress to close the school. Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia have already pulled their solders out of the school and Ecuador has promised to do so. Some 4,500 Nicaraguan military have received training at the school, most of them from Somoza’s National Guard, and also officers from the Nicaraguan Resistance (contras) in the eighties. In 2008 Nicaragua sent 78 of its military personnel to the school, and now only 5 are there. Catholic priest Roy Bourgeois, founder of the movement and well known in Nicaragua in the eighties for his struggle against Reagan’s policy in Central America, reiterated on this trip that the SOA is “a school of assassins and torturers,” a symbol of Washington’s worst militarist policy. Many of the tens of thousands of people tortured, disappeared and killed in Latin America’s Southern Cone countries between the sixties and the eighties died at the hands of military trained in the SOA.

NICARAGUA IS A HIGH-RISK COUNTRY...

In its investigation of the situation of 197 countries, Britain’s Maplecroft corporation, dedicated to analyzing risks, among them environmental ones, listed Nicaragua as the 10th most vulnerable country to disasters caused by natural events, in
our case floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes. The countries above Nicaragua on the list are, in ascending order: Bangladesh, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Myanmar, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Laos and Haiti.

...BUT IT’S ALSO ATTRACTIVE FOR INVESTING IN CLEAN ENERGY PROJECTS

A report titled “Climascopio” revealed that investments in clean energies in Latin America and the Caribbean rose to US$90 billion between 2006 and 2009. It also underscores three important findings:
1) Although Brazil is listed as the most attractive country for investing in clean energy projects, Nicaragua is the second most attractive. Five other countries in the region—Panama, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador—are also among the top ten.
2) At least 80 clean energy policies are in effect or in their final planning stages in the region. Most of them focus on regulating the energy market and on tax incentives.
3) Micro-financing has helped extend access to clean energies to the poor. Of a total of 448 micro-financing institutions in the region, 71 of them offer financial products related to clean energfies.

Print text

Send text