NICARAGUA BRIEFS

Envío team

EARTHQUAKE DAMAGE

As of May 3, the date of the last report before this issue closed, there had been a total of 661 aftershocks following the first earthquake on April 10. The red alert issued on April 10 for the whole country was reduced to yellow in most Pacific municipalities on April 25, although it remained red in the six most affected ones (Nagarote, Mateare, La Paz Centro, Managua, Ciudad Sandino and León, listed in order of the severity of the damage caused). The three quakes that registered over 6 on the Richter scale damaged 4,805 houses, 1,853 of which collapsed totally. Only two people died
in the first two days of quakes, both from heart attacks. Architect Francisco Mendoza estimated that some 40% of Managua’s buildings should be checked out given their questionable construction. More than 400 Managua families had to be evacuated and taken to shelters from at-risk houses or from the previously earthquake-damaged shells of buildings they were living in. The quakes damaged 101 of the 398 schools in the same six municipalities. Primary and secondary schools remained closed for the entire week after Holy Week in the country as a whole, and in the six municipalities for still another week.

SENTENCE INEXPLICABLY
REDUCED FOR HENRY FARIÑAS

On April 11, Managua’s Appeals Court surprisingly cut 12 years off the 30-year drug trafficking sentence received in October 2012 by Henry Fariñas, the intended target of the bullets that killed Argentine singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral in Guatemala in July 2011.

GOVERNMENT-BISHOPS DIALOGUE

After the National Assembly’s controversial election of the officials whose terms in office had long since ended, several bishops announced that they were considering suspending the dialogue with President Ortega, set for April 24. After a three-hour meeting on April 21, however, the 10 Episcopal Conference members agreed to go ahead with the meeting, with some mentioning a new date of May 21.

INTEROCEANIC CANAL

At the end of April, the Russian TV network RT quoted the director of the Institute of Latin America’s Studies Center in Moscow as saying that various Russian companies were interested in negotiating with Beijing to participate in the construction of the interoceanic canal through Nicaragua. In the opinion of Julio Icaza, one of Nicaragua’s representatives to the United Nations in the eighties, any interest from Russia or China isn’t so much in the canal itself, which he defined as “quite unviable from any point of view,” as in the various other megaprojects granted to Wang Jing in the canal concession (gas pipeline, airport, free trade zones, etc.). Icaza says they offer “the possibility of participating in a series of businesses without paying taxes and beyond the reach of the nation’s laws.” He suggested that this opened up “business possibilities for Mafioso capitalists who would come to associate with the national mafia in the framework of all those projects.” Meanwhile, in those same days Paul Oquist, President Ortega’s secretary for public policies, was in London presenting Nicaragua canal project to British companies.

NICARAGUA – RUSSIA
MILITARY DEALS

After learning last month that Russia will establish bases in Nicaragua to supply its air and sea fleet, this month’s news was that it will also install satellite navigation control and monitoring stations in our country, complementing its existing ones in Venezuela and Cuba. In March of last year President Ortega’s son Laureano Ortega Murillo, adviser to
the Nicaraguan government’s Investment and Export Promotion Agency, traveled to Moscow to prepare for a Nicaraguan business delegation’s visit to Russia. Then this April 5 President Ortega announced that the Army of Nicaragua will receive Russian armaments to renew the existing ones of Soviet origin. “In these times it is important to defend our right as Nicaraguans to arm ourselves, to strengthen ourselves militarily,” said Ortega, “because the Army needs to be modernized so it can provide its services better in all fields. Who could come and complain to us about that? Did the United States ever show any interest in supplying this Army the logistics it needs it to modernize itself?”

Then on April 29, Ortega met with Russian Foreign Minister Serguéi Lavrov on his junket through Latin America to “synchronize watches with our allies.” That was the day Ortega confirmed the news of the satellite station. Lavrov said the world system is currently polycentric and Russia “is advocating that Latin America be one of the solid underpinnings of this new world order.”

US SERIAL SEXUAL ABUSER WILLIAM VAHEY FOUND OUT IN NICARAGUA

In April the FBI released information on its investigation into the criminal activity of US citizen William James Vahey, a serial sexual abuser. Vahey committed suicide in the United States on March 21, after his activities had been discovered.

Working as a secondary school teacher in nine different countries for decades, he took advantage of the trust he generated and the trips he organized to commit his crimes, usually drugging his victims so they would forget what happened. He was finally exposed in Nicaragua, where he worked between August 2013 and March 2014 at the elitist Nicaraguan American School where children of the country’s most well-to-do families study. Having stolen some of Vahey’s belongings and been dismissed, his housekeeper found on a USB memory stick pornographic photos of many of his students from different schools and countries. In a highly criticized move just to avoid a scandal that would affect the school’s image, the Nicaraguan American School authorities denounced Vahey to US officials, not Nicaraguan ones, as soon as they learned of the memory stick’s contents, and facilitated his quick departure from the country. Surprisingly, the National Police made the unsupported statement that Vahey had no victims in Nicaragua, a country in which sexual abuse is epidemic.

In 2012, Nicaragua’s Institute of Legal Medicine produced 3,020 reports on cases of sexual abuse affecting children between 0 and 13 years old, 82% of them female. That year alone, 1,453 girls between 9 and 14 became pregnant as a result of rape.

NICARAGUA – COSTA RICA:
THE FIGHT GOES ON

Costa Rica’s new President, Luis Guillermo Solís, visited almost all Central American countries to personally invite their heads of State to his May 8 inauguration. In the case of Nicaragua, the invitation was a simple protocol letter because, as Solís explained, “President Ortega’s declarations against Costa Rica have been disrespectful and unacceptable.” He specifically referred to an August 2013 speech in which Daniel Ortega suggested the possibility of reclaiming for Nicaragua the Costa Rican province of Guanacaste. On April 9, Ortega offered Solís “the possibility of establishing a dialogue on political and diplomatic matters,” which Costa Rica’s President-elect rejected on the grounds that he preferred to wait and respect the decision of the International Court of Justice at The Hague on the border dispute between the two countries.

In one of his first interviews on Colombia’s Radio Caracol, Solís called Nicaragua an “uncomfortable neighbor,” although he admitted that “being adjoining countries we need a relationship that gives no cause for divorce.” He recognized that “thousands of Nicaraguans live in Costa Rica and thousands in remittances go back to that country, so we have interactions that go beyond fights between foreign ministries and even differences between States.”

POLO SHIRTS SAVE ENERGY?

April, always hot in Nicaragua, was hotter than usual this year. It was learned in March that the polo shirts the government has been giving out to the more than 95,000 employees of the state institutions for use during work hours were to save energy. The shirts have the institution’s insignia embroidered on one side, while on the other side the shield of Nicaragua designed by Rosario Murillo in 2007 has appeared, having already replaced the official shield in the documents of nearly all state institutions. According to Rolando Lugo, a Ministry of Energy and Mines specialist in energy efficiency, it’s not about making the employees wear uniforms, but about saving energy because the shirts don’t need to be ironed and keep people refreshed at work when the air conditioning isn’t turned on. The savings these shirts represent hasn’t been evaluated in figures, nor has the name of the company given the contract to make such an enormous volume of shirts been made public.

FEMICIDES

According to the daily monitoring by the Catholic Women for the Right to Decide organization, 29 women were murdered in Nicaragua between January 1 and April 30 of this year, 13 by their partners or former partners, 16 in their own home and 15 with firearms. It is more than a 20% increase over the same period last year.

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