Word: nicaragua
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year after Irish Rocker Bono visited Nicaragua in 1986 to raise awareness about Central American war refugees, U2 released its smash-hit album The Joshua Tree, and Nicaraguans immediately recognized that one of the songs seemed to be written about their country. It wasn't, but 20 years later, most people here still hold as fact that Where the Streets Have No Name was written about Managua, a squat and sprawling capital city where, well, the streets are unnamed...
Finding one's way around Nicaragua means developing an intimate understanding of the spatial relations between current and past landmarks, some of which were destroyed more than 30 years ago, in the 1972 earthquake. The quake and the civil war between the contras and the Sandinistas disrupted, among other things, plans to number the streets. And so giving directions here is still, as former New York Times Managua bureau chief Stephen Kinzer described it, a "Socratic" technique, based on first determining what the direction asker knows, then working backward from there...
...uncertainty isn't limited to Nicaragua. When I lived in Costa Rica, a friend in the U.S. asked for my mailing address. I jokingly gave the directions in Spanish as the locals would explain it: "From the Lourdes Church in Montes de Oca, two blocks west, past the Pali supermarket, take a right at the next corner where an old woman sells fruit, past the Bar Maguey to the end of the dead-end street, where the gringos live. Costa Rica, Central America." His letter actually arrived...
...Eric Volz was found guilty of murdering his Nicaraguan ex-girlfriend Doris Ivania Jimenez. She had been found hogtied, raped and strangled to death in the back of her clothing boutique in the touristy beach town of San Juan del Sur on Nicaragua's Pacific coast. However, a second man, Julio Martin Chamorro, a small-town bully with the reputation of being a "tourist leech," stood trial alongside Volz and was also found guilty of the murder. Both he and Volz were sentenced to 30 years in prison...
...sentence against Chamorro. Yet before Volz's release papers could be signed, his voluminous case file was mysteriously "lost," prompting his lawyers to cry foul. In the meantime, even though his passport has been ordered returned to him, he has not been allowed out of jail and cannot leave Nicaragua because the judge at his original trial has not signed off on the release order...