PEÑAS BLANCAS, Guanacaste – When he began the long journey north from Ecuador, doctor Henry Roque wore a brand-name watch, carried a suitcase full of clothing and had a hat to protect him from the sun. Twenty-two days later, the only possessions he has are the clothes on his back and a Cuban passport.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia, eager to return to superpower status, is increasingly trying to play out its conflict with the United Sates in Latin America while “profiting from weapons sales and challenging and provoking the USA,” Costa Rican social scientist Constantino Urcuyo told a U.S. congressional committee in Washington, D.C. last Thursday.
It isn’t looking good for Chinese billionaire Wang Jing and his planned $50 billion Nicaragua canal project. New financial, social and environmental concerns have cast doubt on the feasibility of the proposed interoceanic canal, and construction has now been delayed until March.
Nicaragua’s proposed $50 billion interoceanic canal – the biggest earthmoving project in world history – will cut poverty in half, double the country’s GDP growth and energize Central American integration by servicing a boom in global shipping that will quickly outgrow even the newly enlarged Panama Canal. So claims Paul Oquist, a key adviser to President Daniel Ortega.
A man who shot up an anti-government protest in Nicaragua last week says a government critic put him up to it. Others say the Sandinista party was behind it.
"What's going to happen if along the [canal] route it will require land expropriation, and how are they [the Sandinista government] going to do it?" U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Phyllis Powers asked in an interview published Monday in the Nicaraguan news magazine Confidencial. "Because we have U.S. citizens who have property along the route."
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Nicaragua’s political opposition, despite its noisy protests against President Daniel Ortega and his ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party, has virtually no chance of winning next year’s elections. That’s because Ortega enjoys a 74 percent popularity rating, according to the latest Gallup poll, and because Nicaragua’s feeble opposition isn’t connecting with average voters or raising issues people really care about – like poverty and rising crime.
Demonstrators from Nicaraguan opposition parties and civic groups marched Wednesday, amid a massive police deployment, to the local election court to demand clean elections in 2016. President Daniel Ortega is expected to run for a third consecutive term after the legislature changed Nicaragua's constitution last year, scrapping term limits.
