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Nicaraguan authorities have raided the offices of a critical television station and shut it down, a week after raiding the offices of non-governmental groups and a newspaper. Lucia Pineda, press director for the 100% Noticias station, sent WhatsApp messages to other journalists saying that station director Miguel Mora was detained during the Friday night raid. Backers of President Daniel Ortega had filed criminal complaints accusing Mora of generating hate and during a wave of anti-government protests that broke out in April. Pineda also said police were taking away control equipment from the station, which went off the air. Other journalists...

Trump administration officials have made thinly veiled calls for a military coup that would topple the Venezuelan dictatorship and pave the way for democracy. But some well-respected academics are warning that a military coup would more likely produce a Russia or China-backed anti-American dictatorship. Evan Ellis, a Latin America expert with the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, and Brian Fonseca, a professor at Florida International University who has written extensively about the Venezuelan military, are among those who believe that a military coup in Venezuela would probably lead to a pro-Russian or pro-China regime, rather than to a...

Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos asked his American counterpart Donald Trump to urge Russian leader Vladimir Putin to stop supporting Venezuela’s government. Santos took to Twitter on Saturday to ask Trump to address Russia’s support for the authoritarian government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The governments of both Colombia and the United States fiercely oppose Maduro. Russia, however, has been accused of helping Venezuela evade sanctions imposed by Washington DC. Furthermore, Venezuela’s military appears to have received thousands of Russian surface-to-air missiles, according to news agency Reuters. “To contribute to the crisis in Venezuela I am asking President Trump to...

Nicaraguan national police and armed pro-government civilians laid siege Tuesday to and then retook a symbolically important neighborhood that has recently become a center of resistance to President Daniel Ortega's government. Government forces began advancing on the Monimbo neighborhood of Masaya city before dawn and had largely regained control of it by the afternoon for the first time since massive protests against Ortega's government began in mid-April. Youths fired homemade mortars from behind barriers of stacked paving stones pried from streets lined by single-story homes and artisan workshops in the town about 16 miles southeast of the capital, Managua.

Responding to criticism from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who has asked the Nicaraguan government to stop state violence and disarm pro-government groups, Mr Oquist accused the UN High Commissioner was guilty of inaccuracy. "This is based on nothing," Mr Oquist said. "It's based on local human rights sources, which have been partial for decades. These unproven generalizations are not helping the search for peace." When asked about the possibility that President Ortega will resign and hold elections, the minister responded: "... Why should the president resign?... Sandinistas also know how to put barricades on the street." Daniel Ortega...

The privation in the northern triangle—Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador—that has sent thousands of migrants to the U.S. border in search of work and a better life is ultimately the result of failed institutions. The bloody upheaval in Nicaragua is another case in point. Since April 19 more than 300 people have been killed while protesting against strongman Daniel Ortega. The U.S. Treasury last week imposed sanctions on three Ortega henchmen—the national police commissioner and a Sandinista Youth official for human-rights violations, and the head of Nicaragua’s state-owned oil company for corruption. Central America is strategically important, and Russia’s role...

Pope responds to an attack by Sandinista troops against the nuncio and bishops in Nicaragua - Edit: the Church is no stranger to hostility from the Communist Sandanista regime. And none of the news stories I see are covering the Communism angle and the apparent end of the romance. Managua (kath.net) On Monday, in Nicaragua, in an attack by pro-government thugs on the Cardinal of Managua, the apostolic nuncio and several bishops, including Managua suffragan bishop Silvio Baez, were injured. Demonstrators against dictator Ortega and his wife's government, who were attacked by Sandinista paramilitary groups, retreated to the Basilica of...

The wave of violence unleashed during harshly repressed anti-government protests has left some 220 people dead. What had been a vibrant tourism industry has been devastated, with ripple effects on the broader economy in a country that was already one of the poorest in the Americas. Business closings have left 200,000 people jobless, and unless the crisis ends soon, some 1.3 million of Nicaragua's 6.2 million people "risk falling into poverty," according to a study by the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (Funides).

You've heard of skunks at the garden party? Such as still-ruling Nicaraguan socialist strongman, Daniel Ortega, who got his famous nickname from none other than the great Ronald Reagan? Well, now we have pigs at the garden party of democracy, the Organization of American States' Summit of the Americas, and this time, quite literally. At the globally watched summit, locals released a bunch of pigs through the streets of the Peruvian capital of Lima, around the Plaza San Martin, which is one of its main public spaces, spray-painted with the names of Venezuela's dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and Cuba's dictator, Raul...

PUNTA BRITO, Nicaragua — One of the largest engineering projects in history would start here, on this desolate and pristine crescent of dark-sand Pacific beach. From in front of the hammock-swinging shrimpers on the porches of their tin-and-wood shanties, the trench would run east in sinuous curves up through the mangroves and banana fields until it reaches the shores of Central America’s largest freshwater lake, then cut across the Caribbean highlands and through indigenous territory, ending its journey 172 miles away on the beaches of the Atlantic. They call it the Grand Inter-Oceanic Canal: an audacious $50 billion plan by an...

Managua (AFP) – One evening as she watched some local kids play outside in her Managua neighborhood, Nicaraguan Mireya Alegria was shocked to see police, motorcycles and a white van carrying hooded men speed past. “They started firing,” she says. It was the moment she decided enough was enough. Now Alegria is one of the thousands of Nicaraguans desperately seeking to process migration documents and flee to neighboring Central American countries, as two months of anti-government dissent has triggered increasingly violent state repression. “Thousands of people come daily to do paperwork,” said Nubia Manzanares, a migration agent, adding that many...

MANAGUA: At least 121 people have been killed in a wave of protests since Apr 18 against President Daniel Ortega's government, Nicaragua's main human rights group said Tuesday (Jun 5), calling it a "human tragedy." The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) said another 1,300 people have been wounded in the protests, which have met with a violent crackdown from the government. "This is now a massacre, a human tragedy where the goal is to exterminate all those young people who think differently than or are critical of the government," the group's executive secretary, Marlin Sierra, told AFP. "It amounts...

Police in Nicaragua have ended the siege of a church where opposition supporters had sought refuge after being attacked by riot police and pro-government militias. Doctors have been allowed to treat the injured inside the church in the city of Masaya. Two people have died. Some 30 people who were inside the church were released after the local Catholic Church intervened. More than 100 people have been killed in Nicaragua in six weeks of violence. … Ortega, the former Sandinista rebel leader, is in his third consecutive term in power. He was re-elected in 2016, after the constitution was changed...

In this April 24, 2018 photo, demonstrators protest in honor of those who have died during anti-government protests in Managua, Nicaragua. Since protests directed at the Sandinista government in Nicaragua began in April, the Jesuit-run University of Central America has been a hub of student activism and, as a result, a target of violence. On Sunday, Father Jose Alberto Idiaquez, S.J., the rector of U.C.A., condemned the latest attack on his university as government-sponsored. In a statement addressed to the Nicaraguan people, Father Idiaquez announced that U.C.A.’s campus in Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua was attacked on May 27 at...

The U.S. Embassy in Managua removed all nonessential personnel and family members from Nicaragua on Monday after days of violent clashes between antigovernment protestors and dictator Daniel Ortega’s enforcers. The trouble may not be over. Mr. Ortega is the Sandinista revolutionary who first came to power in 1979 with Soviet and Cuban backing. During more than a decade of rule, he and his comrades grabbed millions of dollars in private property and homes. This cleanup—known as “the piñata”—by self-described champions of the poor is a great lesson in socialism. Mr. Ortega agreed to an election in 1990, believing he could...

Then-Deacon Juan Miguel Contreras Garcia in vocations video. The priest was murdered on Friday outside Guadalajara. A priest on the outskirts of Guadalajara has been murdered, the second priest in a week killed in Mexico.Father Juan Miguel Contreras Garcia, 33, was shot dead late Friday in Tlajomulco de Zuniga by unidentified attackers in his parish office, reportedly while hearing a confession.“We make an urgent call to build a culture of peace and reconciliation. These lamentable events call all of us to a much deeper and sincere conversion. It is time to look honestly at our culture and society, and to...

As that Old Saying goes, "Birds of of a feather flock together" With all the revelations about President-elect Barack Obama's Socialist Party Ties, it is not surprising that he would try add like minded people into his cabinet. Former Congressman David Bonior fits the bill. Obama was a member of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, Bonier was a Boston member. Here's a little snippet from the 9/07 issue of the Yankee Radical, the Boston DSA's Newsletter It should also be noted that Edward’s recent statements on this issue have shown real improvement, which might be due...

Three decades after this tiny Central American nation became the prize in a Cold War battle with Washington, Russia is once again planting its flag in Nicaragua. Over the past two years, the Russian government has added muscle to its security partnership here, selling tanks and weapons, sending troops, and building facilities intended to train Central American forces to fight drug trafficking. The Russian surge appears to be part of the Kremlin’s expansionist foreign policy. In other parts of the world, President Vladimir Putin’s administration has deployed fighter planes to help Syria’s war-battered government and stepped up peace efforts in...

You won’t hear much about Rosa Maria Ortega after this week. Ortega is the Mexican alien who was caught illegally voting five times in American elections. Ortega is Bigfoot for those in the media, professors, and Democrats who tell us that "voter fraud is as rare as Bigfoot." The caustic radical Andrew Cohen is one of the purveyors of that lie (@JustADCohen). Unfortunately, when it comes to voter fraud, when you catch one crook, it usually means there are hundreds more hiding in the darkness. When it comes to aliens voting, it’s more like thousands and thousands. And yes,...

Nicaragua shut down its border with Costa Rica on Sunday to keep more than 1,000 Cubans from entering the country. The move by Nicaraguan authorities is a direct rebuke to their Costa Rican counterparts' decision, one day earlier, to grant transit visas to the migrants - a decision that the administration of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said will set off a humanitarian crisis. The border crisis comes amid increasing tensions over the rising number of Cubans crossing Central America on their way to the United States in order to circumvent the heavily patrolled Florida Straits and to take advantage of...