NICARAGUA BRIEFS

Envío team

OIL EXPLORATION:
WHO OWNS SEAFLOWER?

Minister of Energy and Mines Emilio Rappaccioli confirmed the existence of a presidential decree granting a concession to the Spanish oil company Repsol to explore and exploit hydrocarbons in Nicaragua’s Caribbean waters. The first well is to be drilled some 200 kilometers from Bluefields, the capital of the southern Caribbean Region. The US oil company Noble Energy has had a concession since 2009 for exploratory drilling for oil and gas some 100 km from Bilwi in the northern Caribbean Sea as well as 140 km from Bluefields, which it will initiate in August.
Environmentalists have warned that America’s most extensive coral barrier reef, in an area called Seaflower which the International Court of Justice at The Hague recognized as Nicaraguan in November last year, could be adversely affected by the Repsol concession. In an official note, the Costa Rican government expressed “its most energetic protest” about these oil explorations, claiming they are being done in Costa Rican maritime space. “It is very clear that Nicaragua is virtually selling off its country,” declared Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla. “If they want to do that with their country, let them, but they must respect the limits and sovereignty of Costa Rica.” Her claim about the geographic limits between the two countries is unfounded and reveals that Costa Rica is backing Colombia’s resistance to The Hague’s ruling. On July 31, the Colombian government sent Nicaragua a protest note alleging that the exploration is being done in its maritime territory and will affect the Seaflower Reserve.

HUGO CHÁVEZ PLAZA

The Hugo Chávez Plaza in Managua was inaugurated on July 28. It has four “trees of life” similar to the ones permanently installed at the edge of the plaza where the 34th anniversary of the revolution was celebrated, as well as a gigantic metal image of Chávez’s face. Managua’s municipal government employees worked around the clock to have everything ready by that date, which would have been Chávez’s 59th birthday. Rosario Murillo presided over the evening’s inaugural ceremony, this time unaccompanied by Daniel Ortega. In her speech she said that “paying homage to Chávez means saying: ‘Here we are,’ carrying out all the tasks decreed in Permanent Mission, Permanent Vision. We say glory to brave Chávez, thinking, analyzing, doing everything possible, and taking steps to achieve the impossible. Glory to brave Chávez, admiring the spontaneous configuration of the natural human being, without additives or alterations… Although we still have not succeeded in measuring the meaning in the totality of Hugo Chávez, although we do not yet have an idea of the cosmic space he covers or of the mystic and spiritual mission he came to carry out, we do know, because we experienced it, that Chávez is now prophecy, fulfilling itself as peoples-comandantes, struggling and conquering, in the fervent and critical air of his beloved homeland, the great homeland, all our America!”

CONTROVERSY OVER THE
CUSTOMS SCANNER COMPANY

The controversy over the 15-year contract the Ortega government granted on June 28 to Alvimer, a Panamanian company, to install and operate scanners in Nicaragua’s customs posts to detect contraband merchandise has continued throughout July. Alvimer will receive 90% of the taxes collected by Nicaraguan customs for this service. While the contract between the General Customs Division (DGA) and Alvimer, the rush by the majority of FSLN legislators to approve it and the privileges granted to the company mirror on a much smaller scale, the way the canal concession signed with Wang Jing was handled. The business members grouped in the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) filed a suit of unconstitutionality against the Alvimer concession for a number of irregularities, including violating international treaties on customs traffic. Again not unlike Wang Jing’s HKND Group, Alvimer was created only a month and a half before receiving the generous contract with the DGA and it was also learned that it has no office in Panama and that its shareholders are fake. Its counterparts and associates in Nicaragua are also mysterious, suggesting that they are close to Daniel Ortega’s circle of power. It is calculated that in the 15 years the contract will last, Alvimer will receive US$200 million in earnings.

NICARAGUA HAS REDUCED
HUNGER BY HALF

At a high-level ceremony at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome, attended by several heads of state, 18 countries were awarded diplomas for early achievement of Millennium Development Goal No. 1, established in 1996 to halve the proportion of hungry people by 2015, plus the tougher World Food Summit goal of halving the absolute number of hungry people by 2015. They are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cuba, Djibouti, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Peru, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Vietnam. Vice President Omar Halleslevens received the diploma for Nicaragua.

TELEVISA CASE CLOSED

On July 25 Nicaragua’s Prosecutor General’s Office definitively closed investigations into the much talked about drug trafficking case related to Televisa, the Mexican media corporation. Seventeen men and one woman who pretended to be Televisa journalists were captured a year ago in Nicaragua transporting US$9.5 million in six fully-equipped vans with the Televisa logo in which traces of cocaine were found. They have been in prison since January serving a 30-year sentence—Nicaragua’s maximum—for money laundering and drug trafficking. Although migratory records show that this same group had passed through Nicaragua in those same vans some 45 times in the previous two years, nothing came to light in their trial about the kind of complicity they must have enjoyed from Nicaraguan officials in different institutions that protected them from being detained earlier. Nor was it explained in the trial why they were finally detained last August.

Televisa denied any link to the group, but the evidence suggests otherwise, and it is precisely the follow-up to that evidence that the Prosecutor General has now consigned to a cold file, even though 106 calls were made from the telephones of the group’s apparent leaders, Raquel Alatorre and José Luis Tórrez, to Televisa News Vice President Amador Narcia Estrada. The Prosecutor’s Office declared it lacked sufficient information to “be able to provide a categorical and definitive resolution” on Televisa’s evident involvement.

REARMED GROUPS
BATTLE WITH THE ARMY

One soldier died, another was wounded and one peasant was seriously wounded and captured in a battle between the Army and armed peasants in Talamaque, a community in the municipality of Pantasma, Matagalpa. This confrontation put the issue of the rearmed groups in the northern part of the country back in the national headlines. While the Army insists they are criminal groups dedicated to cattle rustling and assaults, the wife and brother of the wounded peasant insisted in Managua that they have taken up arms out of discontent with the course the government is taking. The Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH) office in Matagalpa, which accompanied the peasant’s relatives, quoted them as saying, “We can’t be sure they’re armed groups with political goals, but they can’t be just dismissed as criminal groups.” Nicaragua’s bishops have been insisting on seeing this challenge from a perspective other than the official one. This month, Managua’s Archbishop Leopoldo Brenes reiterated that the bishops of both Estelí and Jinotega, “who are in those areas, know there are rearmed groups that have taken up arms at a political level.” And Managua’s auxiliary bishop, Silvio Báez, argued that “we are only going to be able to resolve the problem by talking, listening to each other and taking each other seriously.”

LAWSUITS AGAINST THE CANAL

On August 6, the 22 representatives of the National Assembly’s opposition bench filed suit with the Supreme Court arguing that Law 840, which granted Wang Jing the concession to construct an interoceanic canal, is unconstitutional. The next day, the recently created “Group of 21”—including representatives from the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) of Carazo and Chinandega and the Autonomous Women’s Movement—filed a similar suit. And the following day the MRS Executive Commission and MRS representatives from Managua, Masaya, Estelí, Matagalpa and Jinotega filed their own unconstitutionality suit against the canal law, arguing that it violates no fewer than 40 articles of the Constitution. And finally, the fourth unconstitutionality suit against the law in four days was filed by MRS representatives from Rivas, Granada and Chontales.

POOR CONSTRUCTION

According to a study by the Nicaraguan Chamber of Construction (CNC), 80% of the constructions in Nicaragua—almost all of which are built by individuals or informal businesses—come up short in terms of technical design advice and the quality of the materials used, despite laws stipulating the required standards. The CNC views this as very serious given Nicaragua’s seismicity. To improve the situation it published 20,000 folders with basic construction information. A 2012 report by the Inter-American Development Bank found that Managua is one of the Latin American capitals in which more than half of the families can only afford a home if they build it themselves.

HOW MANY CATHOLICS
DOES NICARAGUA HAVE?

Timed to coincide with Pope Francis’ visit to Brazil, the Vatican released figures on the Catholic population in Latin America, revealing that 5.1 million people out of Nicaragua’s total population—put at 5.8 million by the Vatican—are Catholic. This high percentage (87%) contradicts both the daily evidence in urban and rural areas of Nicaragua and an M&R survey from April of this year, in which only 53.4% of the polled population declared itself Catholic. Since the nineties there has been a steady drop in the Catholic population and rise in identification with a wide array of Evangelical or Protestant denominations, the most numerous of which are those grouped in the Assemblies of God.

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