Word: managua
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Nicaragua-Iran embrace includes four significant events since Ortega took office as the democratically elected leader of his country last January. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, to personally congratulate Ortega days after his Jan. 10 inauguration. Then Ortega borrowed a jet from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to visit Iran in June. Two months later, Iran and Venezuela pledged $350 million to build a seaport near Monkey Point on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast. (Tehran has also been cultivating an alliance with oil-rich Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.) And last Wednesday, the Nicaraguan foreign minister returned...
...Nicaragua is a place you can basically ignore as long as it is not doing anything significantly negative," says Dennis Jett, Dean of the International Center at the University of Florida in Gainesville. However, Jett and other analysts wonder whether Tehran's romancing of Managua may mark a change in that status. "You have to wonder what the Iranians are thinking as Mr. Bush goes through his bluster and threatens military action against Iran," says Jett. "It wouldn't surprise me that if they found a willing partner in Nicaragua that they would put some terrorist capability into Nicaragua...
...could pose practical security problems for the U.S. "[Terrorist activities] could be much harder to detect than the Cuban Missile Crisis," says Jett. who notes that in the 1960s satellite photos detected the danger, but today a nuclear bomb can be hidden in a suitcase and go undetected. Neither Managua or Tehran has much to gain by an Iranian military presence, says Jett. "I would think they would just keep it covert and low key to the extent that they...
...course, the battle lines in the region have changed considerably since John Paul wagged his finger at Nicaraguan priest and Sandinista government minister Ernesto Cardenal on a trip to Managua in 1983, warning him to "straighten out the situation in your church." Catholics in Latin America continue to fight for social justice, and disagreements persist about just how and if welfare policy and religious piety should cohabitate. But after the specter of Marxism faded and John Paul proved to be a great champion of the poor, new alliances have formed. Liberation theologians still say and write things that...
...undoubtedly the most popular sport in Nicaragua. Even the smallest hamlet has at least one cockfighting arena, and no town's patron saint festivals are complete without a cockfight tournament. There are 46 registered cockfighting arenas in the capital alone, and many other clandestine ones in people's homes. Managua's mayor recently announced the city's plans to build the largest cockfighting arena in all of Central America. The sport is illegal in the United States, but there are no movements to outlaw cockfighting in Nicaragua. Considering that 22 of the 91 lawmakers in the last National Assembly were...