Daniel Ortega sought his fourth presidential term in Sunday’s Nicaraguan elections. With more well-known challengers sitting in jail, Ortega stood a greater chance of winning.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega reappeared Wednesday after 34 days in which he was not seen in public.

It demands that the administration return to negotiations with opposition group Civic Alliance and consolidate the country’s Supreme Electoral Court.

DNP Petronic, a publicly purchased company, has allegedly been used to funnel money into the Ortega family through non-competitive Nicaraguan contracts.

Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador’s nods to Russia and China are often read as a jealousy game in the U.S. bilateral relationship. Regional leaders claim sovereignty and multipolarity as their mantra. Experts say that non-ideological short-term calculus and a search for impunity are instead guiding their actions.

With the country no longer isolated as it was under Bolsonaro, who engaged with only a few international pariahs, President Lula da Silva has endangered Brazil’s return to the international scene by supporting Russian actions in Ukraine.

Mexico’s president said Wednesday that Peru’s ousted president, Pedro Castillo, remains “the legal and legitimate president” of that country and that he was jailed as part of a “coup,” saying that Peru’s current government is “racist” and had jailed Castillo because he is Indigenous.

By stripping 316 Nicaraguans of their nationality, the Ortega-Murillo regime borrowed a concept from George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and put into practice the unpersoning its enemies. They are now non-existent socially, politically and economically within Nicaragua.

Last week Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega packed off 222 political leaders, priests, students, activists, and other dissidents to the United States. Shortly after, Ortega’s government voted to strip the former prisoners of Nicaraguan citizenship.

Nine months before the presidential election, the country’s right-wing regime is fracturing into rivaling projects as progressive groups discuss the elusive idea of a united candidacy. Meanwhile, electoral authorities are indulging the pre-campaigning by the ruling party and top conservative Zury Ríos.

Amid multiple corruption and misconduct probes muddling his first three months in office, President Rodrigo Chaves has lashed out at the press. In July, authorities shuttered a business financing the operations of leading newspaper La Nación.

“¡No nos callarán!” —They will not shut us up!— chanted dozens of concerned citizens and journalists outside the Palace of Justice in Guatemala City on Monday morning as they waited for the hearing of prominent journalist José Rubén Zamora.

Central American leaders are averting their gaze from Nicaragua’s Ortega-Murillo regime, aware that picking a fight with the most consolidated autocracy in Central America would give more oxygen to criticism of corruption and human rights violations in their own countries.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. imposed sanctions Friday on Nicaragua’s state-owned gold mining company and the president of its board of directors in part over the Central American nation’s ties to Russia.

Four days before the Summit of the Americas begins on June 6 in Los Angeles, the U.S. is short on friends in the Northern Triangle. Even Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, once President Joe Biden’s ally of last resort, said he will not attend.

MEXICO: Authorities this week discovered the body of Debanhi Susana Escobar, who went missing on April 9 in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, submerged in a cistern at a motel close to where she was last seen alive. Her body had been decomposing for two weeks, nearly unrecognizable, said Assistant Public Safety Secretary Ricardo […]

On the fourth anniversary of protests in 2018 and the ensuing brutal repression, the opposition seems unable to find a response to the imprisonment of its key leaders and the kidnapping of the electoral process. But the Ortega-Murillo government’s weaknesses are also evident, as shown by recent internal divisions in the Sandinista party.

While many in the United States use social media information to justify a regime change, the reality is, that’s not what every Cuban wants.

CHILE: The Governor of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago last Monday announced a protocol for rationing water in the capital to address a record-breaking 12-year drought.

Leading presidential candidate Gustavo Petro announced Wednesday that the Black environmentalist lawyer Francia Márquez will serve as his running mate in May’s presidential elections. Márquez is the first Black woman to run in presidential elections in Colombia’s history.

Nicaraguan Ambassador Arturo McFields denounced the Ortega-Murillo government as a “dictatorship” in an unexpected statement to the Organization of American States on Wednesday, announcing his departure from the administration. McFields urged other public servants to overcome their fear and do the same.