NICARAGUA-COSTA RICA | Sabre-rattling in Managua. Nicaragua’s soldiers are ready to halt ‘all foreign pretensions’ on the ‘sovereignty over the San Juan river and Harbour Head, portions of the fatherland’s soil which we will never allow to be amputated.’ This statement came from General Julio César Avilés, commander of the Nicaraguan army, in a pep talk delivered on occasion of the 32nd anniversary of the force’s creation, an allusion to its creation as the Ejército Popular Sandinista by the 1979 revolution (its actual history is much older, dating back to the wars of independence, including a period when, under US influence, it was called Guardia Nacional).
The sabre-rattling was a response to Costa Rica’s recent protests against the repeated deployments of members of the Sandinista youth movement on disputed territory, from which both countries are barred under a March ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Avilés told his audience that as a result of the ‘wall of containment’ policy pursued by the government of President Daniel Ortega, the army had prevented an annual influx to Nicaragua of 300 tonnes of cocaine. As he himself recognised in the same address, last year Nicaragua managed to interdict 8.5t of cocaine. Present at the ceremony was Avilés’s predecessor, General Omar Halleslevens, who has been picked by President Ortega as his running mate.
TRINIDAD & TOBAGO | Emergency extended. In the first week of September the government of Trinidad & Tobago extended the state of emergency for a further 60 days. Prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said that this was necessary to consolidate security, after the first two-week period [SSR-11-08] had succeeded in preventing a ‘criminal uprising of untold proportions’. When that first period began, Persad-Bissessar spoke of a ‘crime spree [of] wanton acts of violence [by] marauding acts of groups of thugs bent on creating havoc’ — which turned out to be a series of 11 separate killings.
The ‘criminal uprising’ invoked in early September appears to reflect an unofficial version of events relayed by government officials to opposition leaders, according to which a Colombian drug gang intended to wreak vengeance on a Trinidadian gang for having failed to protect a 54-kilo drug shipment that was seized by the authorities. In this version, it was the US authorities who recommended imposing a ‘lockdown’ and a state of emergency when they detected that members of Colombian and Mexican drug gangs were in Trinidad.
Questions have been raised as to why the prime minister did not mention any of this when she first introduced the state of emergency and, indeed, why there has been no official recognition of this, and information regarding the gangs involved since then.
The results of the first month of state of emergency, as announced by the public relations department of the police, was 2,167 arrests, of which 447 (21%) were make in connection with gang-related offences. There has been no announcement of arrests of Colombian or Mexican drug-gang members.
