Nicaragua Network

1. Nicaragua celebrates Central American independence
2. Colombia claims World Court ruling violates its constitution
3. Exports drop in value and volume
4. Economists at conference praise Nicaragua’s poverty reduction efforts
5. Correa wants to study Nicaraguan policing
6. At-risk youth rehabilitated through sports
7. Nicaraguans call on US to free the Cuban Five
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1. Nicaragua celebrates Central American independence

On Sept. 14, President Daniel Ortega presided over the independence day parade of school children in Managua that each year celebrates both the declaration of independence from Spain on Sept. 15, 1821, and the victory over the forces of U.S. filibuster William Walker at San Jacinto Hacienda on Sept. 14, 1856.  Accompanying the president were Communications Coordinator Rosario Murillo, Minister of Education Miriam Raudez, and Youth Minister Bosco Castillo.  Marching bands and rhythmic marching groups from schools located in all districts of the capital participated.  Before the march, students from many schools had visited the historic San Jacinto Hacienda.  Also on that day a number of new and renovated schools were inaugurated in Managua.  School children marched in all other cities around the country as well.  La Prensa reported on marches in Boaco, Jinotega, Chinandega, Somoto, Granada, and Matagalpa.

Each year student athletes from the five historic Central American countries carry a torch symbolizing independence through the isthmus.  This year the run began at the Plaza of the Liberators in Guatemala City on Sept. 2.  The torch entered Nicaragua from Honduras on Sept. 10 and was received at the Plaza of the Revolution in Managua by Ortega on Sept. 12.  The next day it was turned over to Costa Rican students at Nicaragua’s southern border.  When the torch passed through Sebaco on its way to Managua, it was used to light another torch which was carried by deaf athletes up the north highway through Matagalpa to Jinotega.  One of those athletes, Jasiel Rodriguez, had just returned from the Central American Special Olympics in Panama with one gold and two silver medals in the 100, 200 and 400 meters races. Rodriguez said, “It’s an honor for me to participate in an event that commemorates the patriots who defended our national sovereignty.”

Meanwhile, Nicaragua received congratulations from US President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Pope Francis, Cuban President Raul Castro, Iranian President Hasan Rohani, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, and Swiss Vice-President Ueli Maurer, among others.  (Radio La Primerisima, Sept. 10, 14; La Prensa, Sept. 11, 13, 15; El Nuevo Diario, Sept. 10, 16)

2. Colombia claims World Court ruling violates its constitution

As we noted last week, on Sept. 9 Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos formally rejected the November 2012 World Court ruling that, while it gave Colombia the islands of the San Andres Archipelago, gave Nicaragua most of the surrounding waters and opened to Nicaragua the possibility of expanding its territorial waters to the fullest extent of its continental shelf.  The next day, Sept. 10, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said in an address to the nation that he noted that Santos had proposed a treaty that would resolve Colombia’s constitutional issues with the ruling.  “We are taking President Santos at his word,” said Ortega, “and we are ready to work to come to an agreement based on the Court’s ruling that will permit us to make the transition with this dispute that has been resolved and decided by the Court and move to put in practice this ruling by the International Court of Justice.” Ortega reiterated his commitment to preventing that the dispute become confrontational expressing his hope that peace will prevail but he added that a treaty between the two countries would have “as its sole objective making possible compliance with the Court’s ruling.”  He said it was “ridiculous” for Colombia to call Nicaragua “expansionist” because it has appealed to the United Nations [Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS)] given that nine other Latin American and Caribbean nations have similar petitions before that body to extend their territorial waters.

However, Colombian Senator Juan Lozano, a member of the Senate’s international affairs committee, said that the Congress would not approve any treaty which fixed Colombia’s maritime limits along the lines of the World Court’s ruling.  And former President Alvaro Uribe said, “It’s good that President Santos did not accept the ruling.  Surely Nicaragua will not sign a treaty that gives it less than what it wanted to take away from Colombia.  That makes it absolutely inapplicable.”

Again, on Sept. 11, at an event commemorating the 40^th anniversary of the coup in Chile, Ortega called on Santos to accept the World Court’s ruling.  He said that he understood Santos’ position.  Nicaragua, he said had claimed the islands of the San Andres Archipelago and the surrounding waters but the Court gave the islands to Colombia and “there is no other remedy but to accept that ruling.”  He added, “So, in homage to Salvador Allende, we commit ourselves today and always to peace.”

Leaders of the political opposition in Nicaragua lined up behind Ortega, among them Eduardo Montealegre, a former presidential candidate, former foreign minister Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, and former candidate for vice-president Edmundo Jarquin.  On Sept. 12, the National Assembly, meeting at the San Jacinto Hacienda in honor of the patriotic holidays, voted unanimously for a resolution that said, “The National Assembly declares its total support for the Government of Nicaragua for the peaceful solution [of this conflict] by means of a treaty to apply the ruling.”

Also on Sept. 12, Santos introduced at the Constitutional Court of Colombia a demand that the Court rule on the Pact of Bogota saying that “There are two articles in that treaty that clearly violate our constitution because they say that the country would have to change its borders automatically based on some ruling of the World Court.”  [The Pact of Bogota, the part of the legal framework of the Organization of American States (OAS) which recognized the jurisdiction of the World Court, was signed by most Latin American countries, including Colombia, in 1948.]  Colombia’s Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin said her country is not rejecting the ruling of the Court but that it cannot carry it out because the Colombian constitution says that a change to the country’s borders can only be made based on a treaty.  She said that her country’s representative had explained that to World Court President Peter Tomka at The Hague.

Meanwhile, leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), currently in Cuba attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the Colombian government, said, “In the case of the differences between Colombia and Nicaragua, if we were in the government we would resolve this in a different way, totally different, beginning with the fact that we are sister peoples and we should resolve these disagreements in a fraternal, friendly manner.”

And finally, on Sept. 16, Costa Rican Foreign Minister Enrique Castillo confirmed that, in conjunction with Colombia, Costa Rica was preparing a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations “to alert the international community that in our region one country tends to violate international law, altering the balance of power in the zone with aggressive attitudes such as increasing its armaments.” Some sources said Panama and Jamaica were also involved with the letter.  President Ricardo Martinelli had stated last week with relation to Nicaragua’s attempt to claim its continental shelf, “We are going to fight as an individual country or jointly [with others] because we cannot permit that Nicaragua … try to grab Panamanian territorial waters.”  (El Nuevo Diario, Sept. 10, 12; Informe Pastran, Sept. 10, 11, 12, 13, 16; Radio La Primerisima, Sept. 11, 12; La Prensa, Sept. 13, 15)

3. Exports drop in value and volume

The Center for Export Procedures (CETREX) reported that the value of Nicaragua’s exports came to only US$1.7 billion dollars during the first eight months of 2013, which is 7.7% less than last year’s US$1.87 billion for the same period.  The volume of foreign sales was also down 4% from the 1,267,747 during the first eight months of 2012 to only 1,216,703 metric tons so far this year. The CETREX report stated that the drop in value was due to falling international prices for some of Nicaragua’s traditional export crops including coffee, gold, peanuts, bananas, sugar, beans and dairy products.  [Coffee of the type produced in Nicaragua dropped from US$180 per hundredweight ($1.80 per lb.) in August of 2012 to US$135 per hundredweight in August of this year while gold has declined 31.2% since September of 2011 and sugar has declined by a third since August 2011.]

However, the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) predicted that Nicaragua would end the year with a small growth in exports of 0.1%, stating that in the July to December period sales would recover.  Latin American exports as a whole are predicted to grow in volume by 3% this year but decline in value by 1.5%.

CETREX said that coffee, gold and beef, in that order, continue to be Nicaragua’s principal exports while the country’s principal markets for its exports continue to be the United States, Venezuela, and Canada. Last year Nicaragua exported a record total value of US$2.677 billion, up 18.3% from 2011. [As reported last week, economists continue to predict an overall economic growth for Nicaragua of 5% for 2013. The flattening of exports must also be seen in terms of the rapid growth the export sector has experienced in recent years.] (La Prensa, Sept. 11, 15; Radio La Primerisima, Sept. 15; Informe Pastran, Sept. 10; world prices from several web sources)

4. Economists at conference praise Nicaragua’s poverty reduction

Last week Managua welcomed the annual international conference of the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA), founded in 2004 by economist Amartya Sen, who was in attendance.  World Bank senior vice-president and chief economist Kaushik Basu said, speaking of poverty reduction, “You have done it pretty well.”  He clarified that between 2005 and 2009, the 40% of Nicaraguans living in poverty has been increasing its income 4.8% per cent per year while the advance for the entire population has been 1.2% yearly.  That is to say, he went on, that the poorest social segment of Nicaraguan society is growing economically faster than the average and “that is one of the policies that the World Bank is promoting.”  He said that Nicaragua’s growth rate of 5% per year is very good taking into account the world economy but, in order to move the country out of poverty, per capita income, which is still very low, must grow even more.  He recommended policies that make possible the easy growth of small scale businesses and industries.

Indian economist Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998, said that to increase productivity in countries like Nicaragua, it was “necessary to invest in health, education and the productivity of the people—the only way that you can guarantee that growth will be sustainable and will contribute to quality of life.”  He said that direct foreign investment (DFI) can, on occasion, be a mechanism for development but not always.  “It depends,” he explained, “on what area the investment is in, what type of investment, what the economy gains and what the foreigners gain in the relationship.”

United Nations Development Program resident coordinator in Nicaragua Pablo Mandeville said that Nicaragua would meet the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.  He said that in the last few years Nicaragua has applied macroeconomic policies that have contributed to sustainability while social policies have made the enormous effort toward fulfilling the MDGs, among which are eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, and reducing child mortality. He added that Nicaragua and Brazil were among the countries in Latin America that were leading the process of defining the post-2015 goals. 

In related news, 35 Nicaraguan young people took part in a Managua gathering that brought together the findings of a process of consultation with 500 children and adolescents from other towns and cities in Nicaragua as part of the Process of Consultation with Boys and Girls and Adolescents of the World to contribute to the new development agenda for the period 2015-2030.  The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children were among many organizations sponsoring the process.  Four young people were to be chosen to present their proposals to high level government officials asking them to convey them to the High Level Panel on the Post- 2015 Development Agenda set to meet at the UN in New York on Sept. 25.(La Prensa, Sept. 11, 13; El Nuevo Diario, Sept. 12, 14)

5. Correa wants to study Nicaraguan policing

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa said that he wants to visit Nicaragua and Cuba to learn about how they handle security and health respectively. He called Nicaragua an “island of peace in a region of chaos” pointing out that Central America has the worst security indicators in Latin America “and probably the planet.” He said, “Nicaragua has had enormous success with security” and he wants to learn about its “humanist” police force. He said that Ecuador has made progress on the health front but he wants to study Cuba’s health system and how they treat people with disabilities. He called Cuba “an example of dignity for the Americas and the entire world.” (La Prensa, Sept. 15; El Nuevo Diario, Sept. 14; Informe Pastran, Sept. 16)

6. At-risk youth rehabilitated through sports

Nearly 700 at-risk youth are enrolled in sports activities that have allowed them to leave the path of drugs and alcohol that they were on. The rehabilitation program of soccer and baseball has allowed them to socialize with other youth in various departments in the country, giving them a positive experience and successful new life. The program is administered by the Directorate of Youth Affairs of the Police and various evangelical Christian leaders. The program also includes jobs in the tobacco industry for some 160 rural youth. The next goal for the program, according to Capitan David Lazo Valle, is to expand further in rural sectors of the country where the youth can join the baseball leagues formed by small farmers and farm workers. (El Nuevo Diario, Sept. 10)

7. Nicaraguans call on US to free the Cuban Five

Sept. 12 marked the 15th anniversary of the unjust arrest of the “Cuban Five” in the United States. Sandinista government spokeswoman Rosario Murillo called for their liberation at a press conference announcing participation in World Youth Day. “I am adding myself and, of course, the government of Comandante Daniel [Ortega] to the World Youth Day demand to the US government for the freedom of the Five,” Murillo said. She said that July 19 Sandinista Youth, students, activists, and diplomatic personnel had accompanied Cuban Ambassador Eduardo Martinez in the morning to tie a yellow ribbon around a tree in Cuba Plaza to call for freedom for the Cuban heroes, “recognizing the unconditional solidarity we have always received from Cuba.”

Former United Nations General Assembly President Fr. Miguel D’Escoto said of the Five, “This is another of the great atrocities committed by the terrorist, murderous, genocidal government of the US Imperial power. It is a totally absurd thing that they were condemned for espionage. They never infiltrated government organizations, but rather the Cuban-American terrorist radicals in Miami to obtain information to give to the government of the United States. Only one of the Five, Rene Gonzalez has been freed after serving his sentence. Gerardo Hernandez received two life sentences, Antonio Guerrero 22 years, Ramon Labaño 30 years, and Fernando Gonzales will have completed his term in February 2014. In an open letter on the anniversary of their arrest the Five wrote, “The US judicial system was used openly to protect the real terrorists and in an atmosphere like a lynch mob we were taken before an intimidated jury.” (Radio La Primerisima, Sept. 12, 13)