NICARAGUA BRIEFS

Envío team

PRESIDENT ORTEGA’S HEALTH

A September 10 communiqué by the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) responding to the official information about the meteorite that supposedly fell on Managua also contained the first reference by any political grouping to President Ortega’s health: “Everyone in Nicaragua knows Ortega is suffering an illness that prevents him from going out into the sun or conducting certain types of activities. We also know his appearances are programmed to give the impression that everything is all right and he is really running the government. No one, even in the ranks of Ortega followers, believes the story that he is in perfect health and is personally in charge of the government. It is an enormous lie maintained in sight of the entire country.”

ORTEGA DIDN’T ATTEND THE
UN CLIMATE CHANGE SUMMIT

President Ortega did not attend the UN Climate Summit in the UN general headquarters in New York at the end of September or offer any reason for his absence, even though UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had paid a surprise visit to Nicaragua on July 29 to personally invite him. He sent Vice President Omar Halleslevens in his place. Ban Ki-moon’s visit was to learn about Nicaragua’s renewable energy projects up close and congratulate the government on them, and he issued his personal invitation so Ortega would share them with the other summit participants as contributions to slowing down climate change. On his visit to the Camilo Ortega Wind Park in Rivas, Ban Ki-moon said he was impressed with that project and with Nicaragua’s achievement of Millennium Development Goal 3, doubling renewable energy, even before 2015: “[You are] already at 58%. By 2028, you will have achieved 97% renewable energy [in your mix]. That is an extremely excellent goal.” He expressed interest in “Nicaragua’s energy policy with a future vision,” stating that “this electricity, energy, is the golden thread of our lives.” The Inter-American Development Bank’s Climatescope 2013 Report lists Nicaragua as Latin America’s third most attractive country for investing in renewable energies.

MISKITUS TAKE THE “CLEARANCE”
PROCESS INTO THEIR OWN HANDS

Distressed that the government is still not initiating the “title clearance” stage for what are defined as “third parties” settled on demarcated indigenous territories, leaders of the Prinzu Auhya Un Miskitu territory in Layasiksa, Northern Caribbean, decided to start the process themselves on September 30. Called “saneamiento” in the Law of Communal Property Regime (Law 445), promulgated in December 2002, the process involves verifying the right of usually mestizo settlers on those lands and evicting and relocating those found to be occupying them illegally. Using a more frontal approach than the Rama-Kriol territorial government in the Southern Caribbean, they started by burning the houses of 38 families that had already abandoned them, and announced that they would continue taking matters into their own hands in response to the national and regional authorities’ incompliance. They called on other communities to do the same.

In May of last year some 300 settler families arrived to occupy that territory and announced that another 700 families would be following. With that they proceeded to deforest a protected area. At the time the indigenous community members seized 60,000 board feet of guapinol, cedar and other types of wood. The leaders of the territory held the mestizo settlers responsible for causing an environmental destruction of “catastrophic dimensions.”

SEXUAL DISCRIMINATION
NOT ALLOWED

In response to advocacy work by various sexual diversity groups, the health minister released a ministerial resolution establishing that: “The personnel of public and private health establishments where health care is provided must not discriminate against any citizen for his or her sexual orientation, identity and gender expression, for being a carrier of HIV or for engaging in sexual work.” It also “urges public and private health establishments to publicize and implement public health policies to eradicate all forms of discrimination toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) individuals, those with HIV and sex workers.”

INDEPENDENT CANAL STUDY

On September 29, the recently formed Cocibolca Group, made up of 10 scientific, environmentalist and social organizations, presented in Managua the conclusions of the first independent study on the social and environmental repercussions the interoceanic canal project would have. The main conclusion of the study, conducted by Nicaragua’s Humboldt Center, is that the amount of water needed to operate a canal of that length (nearly 173 miles, over 65 of them within Lake Cocibolca) make it unviable, particularly in these times of climate change, with the result that Nicaragua’s population could end up without water within two decades. Using seven-year old census data, which is the most recent but may have doubled by now, the study calculates that 110,000 people will have to be expropriated, evicted and relocated because of the canal. It also calculates that nearly 200,000 hectares of forests will be destroyed by the canal’s construction and more than 40 already endangered species could disappear if the project is actually executed. Manuel Ortega Hegg, president of Nicaragua’s Academy of Sciences, advocated a truly national debate on a project “that one way or another commits the life of Nicaraguans for more than 100 years.”

FAMILY ADVISORY COUNCILS

Training began on September 25 for 400 women who will act as “counselors” in the Family Advisory Council the Ministry of the Family will set up in each of the country’s 153 municipalities to work on behalf of maintaining family unity. The Advisory Council concept was established by an August presidential decree that regulated the Comprehensive Law against Violence toward Women (Law 779). The law’s original objective was to prevent, sanction and eradicate violence against women, but with the regulation it has now become to preserve the family. It was announced in the training sessions that the advisory councils, in addition to having an office, will have a mobile unit that will go house to house to guide the population on harmonious family coexistence and on the protocol to follow in case of levels of violence in the home that merit a penal process. Erlinda Castillo, chief of the Women’s Police Stations, explained that each case must be addressed professionally and judicially, according to the victim’s will.

In September diverse expressions of the women’s movement presented 117 suits of unconstitutionality against the presidential regulation creating the councils. For their part, the Catholic bishops, who had rejected working with the councils as indicated in the regulation, urged the government to clear up this point.

FEMICIDES

Catholics for the Right to Decide reported 57 femicides between January and September. In contrast, the National Police, following the presidential decree’s guidelines—and also to “improve” the national statistics—started reporting as femicides only the 27 deaths of women murdered by their partner or ex-partner.

OPPOSITION UNITY

Distancing themselves from the unity process that Arnoldo Alemán and his Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) initiated two months ago with Eduardo Montealegre and his Independent Liberal Party (PLI), civil and political organizations presented a document on September 30 they consider a “first draft” and a “seed” of institutional, economic and social proposals around which to group the population that defines itself as “independent of all groups either in power or aspiring to it today.”

National Assembly Representative Víctor Hugo Tinoco of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), one of the parties that presented the document, explained more about it in the following days: “We don’t believe the unity that only the PLC and PLI are talking about can guarantee an electoral victory against the Ortega family dictatorship because both parties barely pull between 7% and 9% in the polls today. A broad alliance or unity needs to be built in which all political forces participate, not just two parties that generate no interest much less confidence, particularly among the 40% of the population that sees no transparency in that kind of pact to go to any elections aimed at getting rid of the Ortega dictatorship. We in the MRS don’t have many expectations about the unity of the PLC and PLI that would encourage us to unite around them.”

MINED AND INATEC ARE INTERVENED

In the last days of September and first days of October, FSLN treasurer/Albanisa vice president Francisco López, accompanied by a team from the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (INSS), intervened the acquisitions, information, finance and executive offices of both the Ministry of Education (MINED) and the National Technological Institute (INATEC) to analyze the documents and computers of the officials in charge of these government institutions. Although the task of monitoring public institutions properly falls to the Comptroller General’s office, this time the intervention went in through another door. In MINED 122 workers “were resigned” while the first person fired in INATEC was its executive director. Another case of corruption? As in similar cases over the past seven years of Ortega’s government, no explanations have been offered.

The government’s 2007 Communication Strategy had this to say about the fight against corruption in Daniel Ortega’s government: “Just one emblematic case would produce a very, but very hard stain to erase. And it could relegate the social efforts to the back burner…. This obliges us to be inflexible and extremely cautious in cutting any glimpsed outbreak of corruption at the roots, thus avoiding having to give explanations afterward about the knowledge that did or did not exist about the phenomenon…. An exemplary punishment of some case that is produced will give the signals we must give.”

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