Nicaragua Update and Parallels
Journalist Carrie Kahn reports on legal measures that Nicaragua's increasingly authoritarian president has recently implemented to restrict dissent . In the guise of fighting terrorism, new laws appear to make free expression and free assembly even more difficult. Ortega signals a willingness to continue ignoring human-rights organizations, the international community, the Catholic Church and to embolden a violent minority of Nicaraguans to commit atrocities in support of his regime. For more details of how such a beautiful country arrived at such a terrible impasse so quickly, please see my #SOSnicaragua (May) and Nicaragua's Kent State (July) posts, as well as journalist Jon Lee Anderson's Fake News article, appearing in the current issue of the New Yorker . He describes Ortega's application of lessons learned from autocrates abroad. Parallel Just as Ortega is intensifying his attacks on dissidence by branding protestors as terrorists, parallel strategies are emerg...