Revolution turns sour: Nicaragua continues its brazen crackdown. By Tom Phillips

By Dilip -

It has been a fortnight since Georgiana Aguirre-Sacasa last heard from her elderly father: a terse WhatsApp message in which Nicaragua’s former foreign minister said border guards had stopped him leaving the country and seized his passport, and that he was on his way home. “What??” she replied from her home in Denver, Colorado. “Why???” No answer came.

By then Aguirre-Sacasa believes Nicaraguan police officials on motorcycles had intercepted her father’s vehicle on the highway as he headed back to the capital, Managua. After searching it, they placed the 76-year-old retired diplomat in a pickup truck and spirited him away to an unknown destination. “We are in this nightmare,” his daughter said this week as she desperately sought news of her father. “Right now, I just need proof of life.”

Francisco Aguirre-Sacasa is the oldest target of a brazen political crackdown being waged by the government of Daniel Ortega ahead of the Central American country’s next presidential election on 7 November. Police have arrested at least 32 people since late May, including important opposition figures who were challenging the revolutionary hero-turned-autocrat as he seeks a a fourth consecutive term. “This guy is doing something that nobody believed was possible in the 21st century. He is systematically removing from the political scene each one of the politicians who could potentially challenge him,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch’s Americas director.

Some of the targets are prominent rivals of the septuagenarian Sandinista, including the 44-year-old political activist Félix Maradiaga and Cristiana Chamorro, the 67-year-old daughter of former president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Chamorro, who is under house arrest after being detained on 2 June, was widely seen as the candidate best placed to defeat Ortega, who successfully smothered a dramatic 2018 uprising against his rule….

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/francisco-aguirre-sacasa-arrested-nicaragua-political-crackdown


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Book reviews - ‘Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962,’ by Yang Jisheng


The People's Republic of Thuggery - Chinese agents bar access to the 'free' wife of Liu Xiaobo

 

Russian Justice: Sergei Magnitsky’s Torture and Murder in Pre-Trial Detention

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Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding - Intelligence sources vouch for credibility of Russia dossier author / Mark Sumner - Trump Was Bailed Out of Bankruptcy by Russia Crime Bosses


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Simon Tisdall: Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people


Book Review: Inside the Stalin Archives, by Johnathan Brent (2009) // Books from "Annals of Communism Series", Yale University Press


Review essay - What’s Left? Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 5 new books on the Russian Revolution


Book review: Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge – life in the Stalinist Soviet Union // Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge – review


Book review: - The Conscience of a Revolutionary


Alec Luhn - Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia


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