Word: nicaragua
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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, the Central American nation noted for its connection to Iran during a political scandal two decades ago, is coming under fresh scrutiny for its ties to Tehran. Back in the '80s, Oliver North and members of the Reagan Administration found themselves embroiled in controversy for selling arms to Iran and illegally funneling the profits to the anti-Communist rebels known as the contras, who were fighting the regime of Daniel Ortega. Now Ortega is once again President of Nicaragua - and apparently forging new ties with Tehran...
...State Department has been cryptic in its assessment of Iran's role in Nicaragua. "Iran's track record does not suggest it wishes to play a constructive role in the hemisphere," David Foley, a State Department spokesman on Middle East issues, said in an e-mail, then added in a telephone interview, "We're not adjusting our policy in Nicaragua depending on what Ahmadinejad is up to." The Bush Administration has not focused on Nicaragua much at all, despite the election of the leftist Ortega. Foley says merely that Washington "has a positive agenda in the hemisphere...
...need more jails or laws in Nicaragua, we need more opportunities for young people," says Commissioner Hamyn Gurdi?n, head of the police effort to demobilize gangs. Gurdi?n - who during the 1970s, at age 16, had gone into the mountains to join the Sandinista rebels - says that guerrilla experience, shared by many police officers, helps them to empathize with gang members and identify personally with the three-step demobilization process: cease-fire, disarmament and social reintegration. "That experience made us sensitive to their problems," he said. "Their life, the lack of opportunities they have, that is what it was like...
...gang culture at bay, since the major transnational gangs that terrorize Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras - the Mara Salvatrucha and the M-18 - are essentially foreign, originating in Los Angeles. Mauricio Bustamante, 19, spent three years living in Guatemala spying on M-18 for the Salvatrucha before returning to Nicaragua and getting involved in his old local gang, the Cumbas. He says that Nicaraguan gangs have rejected the culture of the Salvatrucha and M-18 in keeping with the Nicaraguan spirit of resistance to foreign intervention...