NICARAGUA BRIEFS

Envío team

CONTROVERSIAL PURÍSIMA PUBLICITY

At the initiative of President Ortega and his wife, the government of Nicaragua took steps to get UNESCO to declare the traditional “La Gritería” as Cultural and Immaterial Heritage of Humanity. In that celebration—culminating nine days of prayer leading up to the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, known as Púrisima—Nicaraguan families set up altars to the Virgin Mary at the entrance to their houses, while people go from door to door singing to the Virgin in exchange for gifts including candy, sticks of sugar cane, tamales or plastic toys

The initiative triggered differences of opinion among the Catholic bishops. Leopoldo Brenes, the archbishop of Managua, recognized it as a “nice idea of doña Rosario and the President,” but felt it “would be a bit negative. La Gritería is a heritage of the Catholic Church. It is not a cultural act but a religious act, an act of faith. And we know that not everyone in Nicaragua is Catholic.” He explained that this was his personal view and that the Episcopal Conference does not have an official position. And indeed, Bosco Vivas, bishop of León, where this tradition was born, declared that “from faith, culturally, folklorically, in all aspects, Purísimais a representation of being Nicaraguan.” He cited the case of the Elche Mystery Play, declared a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible World Heritage by UNESCO in May 2001. Rather than a celebration, this is a lyrical drama with a text written in ancient Valencian that has been staged for some five centuries inside the Basilica of Santa María de Elche in Valencia, Spain, but because it honors the Virgin of the Ascension in Elche, Vivas considered it “a precedent extremely similar to the Purísima.”

PROTESTING AGAINST THE CRIMINALIZATION OF ABORTION

On September 28, as part of a tireless campaign for the decriminalization of abortion in Latin America, some 2,000 women from diverse expressions of Nicaragua’s women’s movement took to the streets of Managua to demand of the Supreme Court of Justice, the Public Ministry, the National Assembly, the National Police, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education the reinstatement of the right to therapeutic abortion, criminalized since 2006. The women held those state institutions responsible for this decision and more specifically accused “unconstitutional President Daniel Ortega and his de facto regime of having been direct artifices of the total criminalization of abortion” and Ortega personally “of being the maximum representative of misogyny, sexual abuse and violence against women in the country.” In their denunciation, the women defined the State of Nicaragua as one “that permits impunity for rapists, perpetrators of femicide and aggressors of girls and women, where the dispensers of justice obey a machista and sexist system.” During the march they reported a tragic figure: 1,453 girls between 10 and 14 years of age were raped, impregnated and forced to give birth in 2011, without having the right to interrupt that pregnancy. Women’s organizations again stressed that number on October 11, the first international celebration of the Day of the Girl.

INTER-OCEANIC CANAL TAKES
ANOTHER STEP FORWARD

President Ortega met on October 31 with a delegation from China “to evaluate the progress and secure the next steps in the construction of the Grand Canal through Nicaragua.” Announcing the meeting, First Lady Rosario Murillo, coordinator of the Communication and Citizenship Council, stated: “The Grand Canal is now indeed going forward… It is a certain possibility, a certainty now guaranteed by the different proposals, the different agreements that are being made with Chinese companies
in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China… A project like this will, with God’s intervention, pull us definitively out of poverty and will also set us on routes of effective complementarity based on dignity because it will remove us from dependence and set us on routes of social justice.” Days earlier, in an exclusive interview with the Russian RT television chain, President Ortega declared that the deadlines for the Grand Canal becoming a reality “won’t be as long as originally thought.” When the journalist mentioned the ten-year period the government had spoken of initially, Ortega said it would now be less.

WE’VE HIT SIX MILLION

The new census by the National Institute of Development Information (INIDE), shows Nicaragua with a population of 6,071,045 inhabitants, an increase of 988,947 people in the last seven years. Managua is the most populated city, with 1,448,271 inhabitants. In second place is Matagalpa, with 542,419.

NICARAGUA HIGHEST ON THE
REGIONAL CORRUPTION SCALE

Transparency International presented its latest study on the perception of corruption in Central America and the Dominican Republic in mid-October in Tegucigalpa. Based on a 10-point scale in which 0 is very corrupt and 10 is very transparent, Nicaragua registers the most negative index (2.5), followed closely by Honduras and the Dominican Republic (2.6) and Guatemala (2.7). Panama was rated 3.3, El Salvador 3.4 and Costa Rica 4.8. In a study two years earlier Nicaragua was in second place with 2.7.

NOT A GOOD PLACE FOR
CHILDREN TO BE BORN

The “2012 Child Survival Map,” presented at the end of September by Save the Children Spain, shows the best and worst countries in which a child can be born. Among the criteria analyzed for this appraisal are the infant mortality rate, maternal health and schooling. Nicaragua occupies 103rd place in the world, with only Guatemala (107th place) worse off among the Central American countries. The rest of the region ranks in double digits: Honduras 96, El Salvador 90, Panama 76 and Costa Rica 47. The study shows 22% of Nicaraguan children under five years old in a state of malnutrition, an infant mortality rate of 63 per 100,000 live births, 13% without access to primary school and 45% without access to secondary school for a total of 200,000 school-age children without no access to education.

DUTCH COOPERATION
PULLING OUT TOO

The Netherlands announced on October 23 that its bilateral cooperation with Nicaragua will conclude on December 31, 2013. Last year it decided to reduce its bilateral cooperation with 33 countries, and will continue aiding only 15. Nicaragua, a country with which it maintained bilateral cooperation relations for over 30 years, will not be among them. Starting in 2014, the Netherlands will only provide regional cooperation in Central America: with the Central American Integration System, the Organization of American States and some NGOs, specifically on human rights issues and violence prevention.

Print text

Send text