Instruction: Write an article about: Nicaragua se sale de la OEA, arma golpista controlada por EEUU. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Bolivia, Cuba, Denis Moncada, golpe de estado, Juan Guaidó, Luis Almagro, Nicaragua, OEA, Venezuela

Output:
El gobierno sandinista de Nicaragua se sale de la Organización de los Estados Americanos (OEA), condenándola como un “instrumento de injerencia” que “tiene como misión facilitar la hegemonía de EEUU”

El gobierno sandinista de Nicaragua se salió el 19 de noviembre de la Organización de los Estados Americanos (OEA), condenándola como una “entidad colonialista” dominada por Estados Unidos.
Por varias décadas, la OEA ha sido conocida popularmente en Latinoamérica como el “ministerio de colonias yanquis”.
La OEA siempre ha sido un arma del poder geopolítico de EEUU, pero su actual secretario general, Luis Almagro, infame por su corrupción y extremismo político, ha destruido la reputación de la organización.
En 2019, la OEA orquestó un golpe de estado de extrema derecha en Bolivia, derrocando al presidente socialista Evo Morales, quien fue elegido democráticamente por el pueblo. La OEA inventó acusaciones falsas de “fraude electoral” para justificar la operación anti-democrática.
Siguiendo el ejemplo de Washington, la OEA desconoció las elecciones del 7 de noviembre de 2021 en Nicaragua, pretendiendo hacer otro intento de golpe.
Nicaragua, con dignidad, se sale de la OEA, el ministerio de colonias yanquis.
El Canciller Moncada: La OEA es "instrumento de injerencia" que "tiene como misión facilitar la hegemonía de EEUU"
La OEA orquestó el golpe de estado fascista en Bolivia, pero no podrá en Nicaragua. pic.twitter.com/g4fUpRqsgy
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 19, 2021

En una carta oficial a Almagro y la OEA, el canciller de Nicaragua, Denis Moncada, dijo que la OEA es un “instrumento de injerencia” que “tiene como misión facilitar la hegemonía de EEUU”.
“No nos reconocemos como colonia de ninguna potencia”, dijo Moncada. Y la OEA es una de las “entidades colonialistas” de EEUU.
Estados Unidos creó la OEA en 1948, al inicio de la primera guerra fría, como una alianza anti-socialista de regímenes derechistas. La reunión fundacional tuvo lugar en Colombia y fue organizada por el secretario de estado de EEUU, George Marshall, un fanático anti-comunista.
Uno de los miembros fundadores de la OEA fue la brutal dictadura nicaragüense del general Anastasio Somoza, cuyo régimen dinástico, patrocinado por EEUU, asesinó, torturó y desapareció a decenas de miles de sus compatriotas.
El presidente de EEUU, Richard Nixon, con el dictador nicaragüense, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, en 1971
La Agencia de EEUU para el Desarrollo Internacional (USAID), una fachada de la CIA que Washington usó para financiar a la Contra, los escuadrones de la muerte de extrema derecha, en Nicaragua en la década de 1980, admitió en su informe interno en 2018 que la OEA “promueve los intereses políticos y económicos de EEUU en el hemisferio occidental, contrarrestando la influencia de los países que están en contra de EEUU como Venezuela ”.
Cuba fue expulsada de la OEA en 1962, después de su revolución. Y el gobierno chavista de Venezuela se salió de la OEA en 2019.
El mismo año que la OEA patrocinó el golpe de estado de extrema derecha en Bolivia, también reconoció a Juan Guaidó, el títere golpista de Washington, como el supuesto “presidente” de Venezuela. Aunque Guaidó no controla prácticamente nada dentro del país, su régimen paralelo creado por EEUU ocupa el puesto de Venezuela en la OEA.
El secretario general de la OEA, Luis Almagro, con Juan Guaidó, el títere golpista de EEUU
Después de que Estados Unidos orquestó un golpe militar en Honduras en 2009, la OEA también ayudó a legitimar el nuevo régimen anti-democrático. Hizo lo mismo después de dos golpes de estado derechistas en Haití.
Además, la OEA apoyó las operaciones de desestabilización de Washington en Brasil, donde el gobierno del Partido de los Trabajadores fue derrocado en un golpe parlamentario suave, y el principal candidato presidencial, Lula da Silva, fue encarcelado por cargos falsos, otorgando al candidato de extrema derecha Jair Bolsonaro la victoria en la elecciones de 2018.
El canciller nicaragüense anunció que el país se salió de la OEA frente a un retrato grande de Augusto Sandino, el rebelde nicaragüense que dirigió una guerrilla revolucionaria que luchó y expulsó con éxito a los militares estadounidenses que ocupaban su país en las décadas de 1920 y 1930.
El Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), que derrocó a la dictadura de Somoza en 1979 y que ha gobernado el país desde que regresó al poder a través de elecciones democráticas en 2006, es inspirado en el legado anti-imperialista del general Sandino.
La salida de Nicaragua de la OEA ocurre en un momento en que muchos países de la región están hablando de reemplazar la organización por la Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños (CELAC), que excluye a Estados Unidos y Canadá.
Este septiembre, la CELAC realizó una cumbre histórica en México, donde el presidente venezolano Nicolás Maduro declaró que la diferencia entre la CELAC y la OEA es la diferencia entre el bolivarianismo (la integración latinoamericana) y el monroeísmo (el neocolonialismo estadounidense).


Instruction: Write an article about: China ayuda al gobierno sandinista de Nicaragua a construir viviendas para el pueblo. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: China, Daniel Ortega, FSLN, Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo, Sandinistas

Output:
China firmó un acuerdo con el gobierno sandinista de Nicaragua para construir miles de viviendas para familias pobres y trabajadoras, expandiendo el Programa Bismarck Martínez de casas dignas.

(You can read this article in English here.)
El gobierno sandinista de Nicaragua ha revelado que firmó un acuerdo con la República Popular China para construir miles de viviendas para familias pobres y trabajadoras.
La Vicepresidenta Rosario Murillo anunció la noticia el 28 de enero.
China “ha aprobado un importante proyecto de cooperación con nuestra Nicaragua y el pueblo nicaragüense, un gran programa de viviendas para las familias en todo el país”, dijo Murillo.
“El plan es para tres años, beneficiando a decenas de miles de familias nicaragüenses en 84 municipios del país, familias que van a recibir una casa bonita, segura, digna, con todos los servicios básicos”.
La vicepresidenta dijo que el diseño de las casas se está desarrollando en coordinación con los ministerios de Nicaragua. Las llamó “obras que son de fraternidad, de solidaridad y de bien común”.
Murillo también anunció otros proyectos de infraestructura pública en construcción, incluyendo calles, caminos y un nuevo estadio de béisbol.
Viviendas construidas por el gobierno nicaragüense como parte de su Programa Bismarck Martínez
Aunque Nicaragua es un país pequeño de aproximadamente 6,5 millones de personas, con muy pocos recursos como el segundo país menos rico del hemisferio occidental, su gobierno izquierdista se ha dedicado a crear ambiciosos programas sociales, que consisten en salud gratuita, educación universal, carreras técnicas e iniciativas de alivio de la pobreza.
Nicaragua de hecho ya tiene una iniciativa de vivienda pública llamada Programa Bismarck Martínez. Desde su lanzamiento en 2019 hasta 2021, el proyecto entregó aproximadamente 3.000 viviendas, así como 30.000 lotes urbanizados.
En 2021, el gobierno sandinista entregó a los nicaragüenses humildes otras 3.000 viviendas como parte del Programa Bismarck Martínez. Esto además de otorgar títulos de propiedad a miles de familias y campesinos, para que no puedan ser desplazados.
El programa tiene el nombre de Bismarck Martínez, un activista sandinista que trabajaba en la alcaldía de la capital Managua. Fue secuestrado, brutalmente torturado y asesinado por extremistas de extrema derecha durante un violento intento de golpe de estado en 2018, patrocinado por Estados Unidos. El video de su espantoso asesinato se hizo viral e inspiró indignación en toda Nicaragua.
La alcaldía de Managua anunció en septiembre de 2021 que tenía planes para construir 50.000 viviendas nuevas en los siguientes siete años como parte del programa Bismarck Martínez. También planeó distribuir 50,000 lotes urbanizados más a las familias.
Pero esto fue antes de que el gobierno central restableciera las relaciones con China e hiciera planes para expandir aún más este programa con la ayuda de Beijing.
Viviendas construidas por el gobierno nicaragüense como parte de su Programa Bismarck Martínez
El gobierno de Nicaragua restableció relaciones diplomáticas oficiales con la República Popular China en diciembre de 2021.
Nicaragua rompió por primera vez los lazos con Taiwán y reconoció a China en los años ochenta, luego del triunfo de la Revolución Popular Sandinista en 1979.
Pero cuando los sandinistas perdieron el poder en 1990, en unas elecciones injustamente comprometidas por la intromisión de EEUU, la presidenta derechista que asumió el poder, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, representante de la familia oligárquica más poderosa del país, cortó de inmediato los lazos con la RPC y reconoció a Taiwán nuevamente.
Desde que se restablecieron los lazos en diciembre de 2021, Nicaragua y China se han convertido en aliados cercanos.
El Presidente Daniel Ortega reveló en un discurso en su toma de posesión el 10 de enero que Managua había firmado acuerdos con Beijing para incorporar a la nación centroamericana a la Iniciativa de la Franja y la Ruta.
Al firmar los acuerdos con China, Ortega declaró, “Tenemos a Estados Unidos que no acepta que el fin de la hegemonía es un hecho”.


Instruction: Write an article about: Why Peru has had 7 presidents in 6 years: Legacy of Fujimori dictatorship’s constitution. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Alberto Fujimori, Dina Boluarte, Francisco Sagasti, Manuel Merino, Martín Vizcarra, Mercedes Aráoz, Pedro Castillo, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Peru

Output:
Peru has had 7 presidents in just over 6 years, due to the undemocratic constitution inherited created by far-right US-backed dictator Alberto Fujimori. This timeline explains how and why each head of state rose and fell so quickly.

In just over six years, Peru has had seven different presidents. The period between July 2016 and December 2022 has been a time of deep political instability.
This chaos is largely due to Peru’s deeply undemocratic constitution, which was inherited from the far-right US-backed dictator Alberto Fujimori, who governed the country with an iron fist from 1990 until 2000, committing genocide against the Indigenous population and killing, torturing, and disappearing thousands of dissidents.
Article 113 of Peru’s constitution gives the unicameral congress the ability to remove presidents if two-thirds of members vote to declare that they have a “moral incapacity.”
Fujimori wrote this constitution in 1993, after launching a self-coup against Peru’s democratic institutions the year before. Peruvian journalist, scholar, and former lawmaker Manuel Benza Pflücker explained that the Fujimori constitution was largely created by the United States in order to make neoliberal economic policies a mandatory part of the state structure:
The proximity between the coup d’état and the convocation of a constituent assembly shows us that the main reason for the 1992 coup d’état (Alberto Fujimori’s self-coup) was the drafting of a new constitution according to the ‘Washington Consensus’ (WC), a document that was delivered in New York to Fujimori by authorities of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Department of the Treasury of the United States of America and the World Bank, institutions controlled by said country, days before take an oath to the presidency of Peru. The WC had been prepared a few months before by the aforementioned organizations, under the responsibility of [neoliberal economist] John Williamson and representatives of the establishment.
Although the gap between rich and poor in Peru has grown much wider since the acceleration of neoliberalism in the 1980s, a strong racial element remains quite apparent as well.
According to the 2017 national census, although Peru is only 5.9% white, yet four out of these last seven presidents (57%) are of European descent, making this demographic over-represented in the president’s office by a factorial of nearly 10 times.
Since December 7, 2022, the majority of the Peruvian population seems to have gotten fed up with the perpetual economic and racial disparities, and mass protests have broken out mostly in the southern region of Peru, concentrated in cities such as Arequipa, Cusco, Puno, Ayacucho, and Andahuaylas, in addition to the northern Andean city of Cajamarca, where President Pedro Castillo is from.
At least 25 protesters were killed in the first 10 days of the unelected regime of Dina Boluarte.
The following timeline shows how quickly Peruvian heads of state have changed, and provides a brief summary of why.
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski
Term
July 28, 2016 to March 23, 2018
Background
Kuczynski attended elite universities – Oxford University in England and Ivy League Princeton University in New Jersey.
He worked at the World Bank, which has trapped countries across Latin America in debt. He also worked at New York-based investment banks and U.S. mining corporations.
Kuczynski was a U.S. national who renounced his citizenship in November 2015, in order to make himself eligible to become president of Peru.
Why was their presidential term so short?
Leaked video showed supporters of Kuczynski apparently attempting to bribe members of Congress to cast their votes in Kuczynski’s favor, in the infamous “Mamanivideos” scandal.
After serving 20 months, Kuczynski resigned on March 23, 2018.
Martín Vizcarra
Term
March 23, 2018 to November 9, 2020
Background
Vizcarra was Kuczynski’s protégé, vice president, and close ally. He became wealthy through several family companies and made his name as a conservative governor of Moquegua.
Why was their presidential term so short?
Allegations of corruption during his term as the governor of Moquegua brought Vizcarra down.
After a congressional debate on November 9, 2020, the congress approved the removal of Vizcarra (in his second impeachment) due to “moral incapacity,” with 105 votes in favor – surpassing the 87 out of 130 vote supermajority threshold (67%) required to remove a political official.
He served as president for two years and eight months, with a temporary disruption in September to October 2019.
Mercedes Aráoz (right) with Kuczynski and coup-plotting OAS chief Luis Almagro
Term
September 30 to October 1, 2019
Background
Aráoz is a neoliberal economist who received her Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Miami. She subsequently worked with U.S.-based organizations like the World Bank, the Organization of American States (OAS), and Inter-American Development Bank.
Why was their presidential term so short?
Vizcarra dissolved the congress on September 30, 2019. In response, the congress suspended Vizcarra as president, making his second vice president, Aráoz, temporary president.
With just one day in office, Aráoz never actually came to govern, and resigned the very next day. Vizcarra was quickly returned as president.
Manuel Merino
Term
November 10 to 15, 2020
Background
Merino is from the city of Tumbes, the most right-wing region of Peru, and is a lifelong conservative.
As president of congress, Merino was criticized regarding how hastily he pushed for impeachment proceedings against Vizcarra, who didn’t have a vice president at the time, which would have made Merino next in line to become president.
Two months later, Merino succeeded in his quest and ousted Vizcarra.
Why was their presidential term so short?
Merino lasted only five days as president, before resigning due to mass protests against him, which left two young Peruvians dead.
Francisco Sagasti
Term
November 17, 2020 to July 28, 2021
Background
Sagasti Hochhausler established close connections to the United States while attaining a Master’s degree in industrial engineering at Penn State University and a PhD in operational research and social systems science at the Wharton Business School, at the elite Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.
He went on to work at the World Bank.
Why was their presidential term so short?
Sagasti was named as interim president to serve until Peru’s next election in July 2021, which was the end of the five-year term begun by Kuczynski back in 2016.
Pedro Castillo
Term
July 28, 2021 to December 7, 2022
Background
Castillo is a farmer and teacher who represents the indigenous Andinos, who have had virtually no power in the government in the modern history of Peru.
After becoming well known for leading a teachers’ strike, Castillo ran for president with the Marxist-Leninist party Peru Libre, and he won the 2021 elections.
Why was their presidential term so short?
After stating his intention to dissolve congress – which he was legally entitled to do according to article 134 of Peru’s constitution – Castillo was impeached, removed by the military, and imprisoned without trial on December 7.
Castillo’s five-year term was cut short to less than 17 months. Mass national protests ensued, demanding his release from prison, fresh elections, and a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.
Castillo supporters have blocked major highways all over Peru, impeding national transportation and bringing the country to a virtual standstill.
Without any due process, the unelected Peruvian government subsequently sentenced Castillo to 18 months of “preventative prison.”
Dina Boluarte (right) with CIA agent turned US ambassador Lisa Kenna
Term
December 7, 2022 until now
Background
The neoliberal-appointed “interim” president, who had previously been expelled from the leftist Peru Libre party, was sworn in by congress in order to serve out the last three-and-a-half years of Castillo’s term.
Mass protests across Peru led Boluarte’s unelected government to suspend civil liberties, declaring a nation-wide “state of emergency.”
Boluarte’s unelected government unleashed large numbers of violent police and deployed soldiers into the streets. They shot protesters with live ammunition, even using helicopters to shoot at demonstrators and drop tear gas bombs on them.
Dozens of protesters were killed and hundreds were wounded in the first week of Boluarte’s rule.
While Peruvian civil society organizations accused Boluarte of “state terrorism,” the US government strongly supported her, claiming her unelected government was “democratic.”


Instruction: Write an article about: Invoking Monroe Doctrine, US congressman calls Argentina a ‘threat’ over China alliance. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Alberto Fernández, Argentina, Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, Republican Party, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping

Output:
Trump-allied Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz called Argentina a “threat” to US “security,” complaining that its alliance with China challenges the 200-year-old colonialist Monroe Doctrine.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
An influential right-wing US lawmaker invoked the 200-year-old colonialist Monroe Doctrine on the floor of Congress and called Argentina a “threat” because of its alliance with China.
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, a key ally of former president Donald Trump, said in a speech in the House of Representatives on February 7 that there is a “significant threat to our nation accelerating rapidly close to home.”
“Argentina, a critical nation and economy in the Americas, has just lashed itself to the Chinese Communist Party, by signing on to the One Belt One Road Initiative,” Gaetz fumed.
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, a key ally of Donald Trump, invoked the 200-year-old colonialist Monroe Doctrine on the floor of the Congress and called Argentina a "threat" to US "security" because of its alliance with China.
Read more here: https://t.co/aCiWQ7fGOc pic.twitter.com/xyVYkxfFT9
— Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) February 8, 2022

The Florida lawmaker was reacting to the news that Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández visited Moscow and Beijing for meetings with Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping on February 3 and 6, respectively.
Explaining his trips, Fernández said, “I am consistently working to rid Argentina of this dependence on the IMF and the US. I want Argentina to open up new opportunities.”
Argentina signed on to join Beijing’s international infrastructure campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, and China offered the South American nation $23.7 billion in investments and infrastructure projects. Moscow similarly pledged to strengthen political and economic ties with what it called “one of Russia’s key partners in Latin America.”
Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of odious debt from the US-controlled IMF.
Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, Argentina's President Alberto Fernández traveled to Russia and China, forming an alliance with the Eurasian powers, joining the Belt & Roadhttps://t.co/rTbO1ZGsPE
— Multipolarista (@Multipolarista) February 6, 2022

Representative Matt Gaetz angrily described Argentina’s growing links with China as “a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine.”
The Monroe Doctrine, which dates back to 1823, was a message to European colonialists that the United States considers Latin America to be its own colonial territory.
Two centuries ago, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams created the doctrine, and President James Monroe made it government policy, insisting that the US would not intervene in the European colonial powers’ spheres of influence as long as they recognized Central and South America to be Washington’s imperial sphere of influence.
This attitude that Latin America is US colonial property is still very much alive today, and thoroughly bipartisan in Washington.
Multiple senior officials in the Donald Trump administration invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify their coup attempt in Venezuela, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton.
This January, President Joe Biden echoed colonial Monroe Doctrine rhetoric by referring to Latin America as Washington’s “front yard.”
While Matt Gaetz, like his political mentor Donald Trump, sometimes opportunistically criticizes other right-wing factions such as “neocons,” he pushes a similarly hawkish imperialist foreign policy.
One constant in virtually all of Gaetz’s speeches is his obsessive demonization of China. He strongly advocates for a new cold war to contain the Asian superpower.
While many neoconservatives and liberal-interventionists push for an aggressive policy against Russia, Gaetz’s message is essentially that China is the real threat to the United States, not the Kremlin, and that Washington should seek war with Beijing instead of war with Moscow.
In his House speech declaring Argentina a “threat,” Gaetz reiterated this talking point, claiming, “China is a rising power. Russia is a declining power. Let us sharpen our focus so that we do not join them in that eventual fate.”
Gaetz, who represents Florida’s northwestern Panhandle, joined the Trump administration in strongly supporting a right-wing coup attempt in Venezuela.
The Republican lawmaker frequently calls for the overthrow of Cuba’s government as well, while spreading fake news claiming that “Venezuelan thugs, flavored w[ith] Russians, are now ‘kill squads’ going through homes. They are slaughtering adults and abducting children.”
Gaetz is closely linked to far-right extremists. In 2018, he invited a notorious white-nationalist blogger who has promoted Holocaust revisionism to Trump’s State of the Union address.
In addition to his extreme political views, Gaetz has been investigated by US authorities for the alleged sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl.


Instruction: Write an article about: Nicaragua leaving US-controlled, coup-plotting OAS: ‘We are not a colony’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Augusto Sandino, Bolivia, CELAC, Cuba, Juan Guaidó, Luis Almagro, Mexico, Nicaragua, OAS, Organization of American States, Richard Nixon, Venezuela

Output:
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is leaving the Organization of American States (OAS), condemning the US “instrument of interference” that organizes coups to “facilitate hegemony” in Latin America.

Nicaragua’s Sandinista government officially announced that it is leaving the Organization of American States (OAS) on November 19, condemning the institution as a “colonialist entity” dominated by the United States.
The OAS, which is based in Washington, DC and receives the majority of its funding from the US government, is popularly known in Latin America as the “ministerio de las colonias yanqui” – the “Yankee Ministry of the Colonies.”
The OAS has always been an arm of US geopolitical power in Latin America, but its current, notoriously corrupt Secretary-General Luis Almagro has shredded the organization’s credibility in recent years.
In 2019, the OAS helped to orchestrate a far-right military coup in Bolivia, overthrowing democratically elected socialist President Evo Morales by fabricating false claims of electoral fraud.
Following Washington’s lead, the OAS refused to recognize Nicaragua’s November 7, 2021 elections, seeking to launch a whole new coup attempt.
The US-controlled OAS:-orchestrated the 2019 coup in Bolivia-legitimized the post-coup regime in Honduras-rubber-stamped two coups in Haiti-supported the soft coup against Brazil's Workers' Party-recognizes coup puppet Guaidó in Venezuela
Now Nicaragua is in its crosshairs https://t.co/K9l4QT5fu3
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 10, 2021

In an official letter to OAS chief Almagro, Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister Denis Moncada called the OAS an “instrument of interference and intervention,” with the “mission to facilitate hegemony of the United States with its interventionism against the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
“Nicaragua has repeatedly expressed its condemnation and rejection of the interventionist actions of the OAS, defending its sovereignty,” Moncada said.
We are not “a colony of any power,” the Nicaraguan foreign minister declared, noting that the OAS is one of the “colonialist and neocolonialist entities” controlled by Washington.
The United States created the OAS in 1948, at the start of the first cold war, as an anti-socialist alliance of right-wing regimes. The founding meeting was held in Colombia and hosted by US Secretary of State George Marshall, a hard-line cold warrior.
One of the founding members of the OAS was the brutal Nicaraguan dictatorship of General Anastasio Somoza, whose US-sponsored dynastic regime killed, tortured, and disappeared tens of thousands of his countrymen.
US President Richard Nixon with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1971
The US Agency for International Development (USAID), a CIA cutout that Washington used to fund far-right Contra death squads in Nicaragua in the 1980s, admitted in its 2018 Congressional Budget Justification report that the OAS, “promotes U.S. political and economic interests in the Western Hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-U.S. countries such as Venezuela.”
The US State Department openly boasts that the OAS is its puppet:
"The Organization of American States (OAS) promotes U.S. political and economic interests in the Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-U.S. countries such as Venezuela"https://t.co/D9d0jnHyrX pic.twitter.com/hG69W5Qf8v
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 15, 2019

Cuba’s revolutionary government was expelled from the OAS in 1962, and Venezuela’s leftist Chavista government withdrew in 2019.
The same year the OAS backed the far-right coup d’etat in Bolivia, it also recognized Washington’s coup puppet Juan Guaidó as so-called “president” of Venezuela. Although Guaidó controls virtually nothing inside the country, his US-appointed parallel coup regime fills Venezuela’s seat at the OAS.
Corrupt, coup-plotting OAS chief Luis Almagro (right) with Washington’s Venezuelan coup puppet Juan Guaidó (left)
After the US government orchestrated a military coup in Honduras in 2009, the OAS helped rubber-stamp the new undemocratic regime. It did the same after right-wing coups in Haiti.
And the OAS supported the US-backed destabilization operations in Brazil, where the Workers’ Party government was overthrown in a parliamentary soft coup, and leading presidential candidate Lula da Silva was imprisoned on false charges, handing far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro victory in the 2018 elections.
Reminder: @Almagro_OEA2015 and @OAS_official congratulated Brazil on legitimacy of 2018 election, despite the leading candidate being jailed in connivance with the US and military.Bolsonaro won as a result.
The OAS is not a serious organization.
????https://t.co/AE8bBrZmRJ https://t.co/yLwKK61sOD
— Brasil Wire (@BrasilWire) November 10, 2021

Nicaragua’s foreign minister announced that the country is leaving the OAS in front of a large portrait of Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan rebel who led a revolutionary guerrilla army that fought and successfully expelled the US military occupiers from his country in the 1920s and ’30s.
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which overthrew Nicaragua’s US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and has governed the country since it returned to power through democratic elections in 2006, is inspired by the anti-imperialist legacy of General Sandino.
Nicaragua’s departure from the OAS comes at a time when many countries in the region are talking about replacing the organization with the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States (CELAC), which excludes the United States and Canada.
This September, CELAC held a historic summit in Mexico, where Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared that the difference between CELAC and the OAS is the difference between Bolivarianism (Latin American integration) and Monroeism (US neocolonialism).


Instruction: Write an article about: Latin America refuses to send Ukraine weapons, despite Western pressure. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Alberto Fernández, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Gustavo Petro, Latin America, Lula da Silva, Russia, Ukraine

Output:
Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia have refused to send weapons to Ukraine, despite pressure by the US and EU. Latin American left-wing leaders have urged peace with Russia and called for neutrality in the West’s new cold war.

(Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.)
Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia have rejected requests by the United States and European Union that they send weapons to Ukraine.
The commander of the US military’s Southern Command (Southcom), which operates in Latin America and the Caribbean, revealed on January 19 that Washington has been pressuring countries in the region to arm Ukraine.
Southcom wants Latin American nations to “replace [their] Russian equipment with United States equipment – if those countries want to donate it to Ukraine”, said Army General Laura J. Richardson.

But Latin America’s left-wing leaders have refused, instead maintaining neutrality and urging peace.
The socialist governments in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua blamed NATO expansion and US meddling for causing the war in Ukraine.
Mexico’s progressive President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) offered to hold peace talks to end the conflict.
And the leftist governments in Bolivia and Honduras have joined Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia in refusing to be part of the proxy war.
The US and EU have pressured Latin America to send weapons and military equipment to Ukraine.
Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina refused, instead calling for peace.
Many other left-wing governments in the region did the same, staying neutral.
More here: https://t.co/bnVOY6qqlS pic.twitter.com/quZn1BwMiw
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 29, 2023

Germany announced on January 25 that it would send tanks to Ukraine, in a significant escalation of the NATO proxy war against Russia.
Berlin subsequently asked Brazil to ship tank munitions to Kiev. But newly inaugurated left-wing President Lula da Silva declined to do so.
Lula was a co-founder of the BRICS bloc, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. He has long called for a multipolar world, and supports South-South cooperation and regional integration.
Lula has denounced Western governments for ramping up the violence in Ukraine instead of encouraging peace negotiations.
During his presidential campaign in 2022, Lula criticized the White House, asking, “How can the world’s largest economic power say that it has no milk for children after President Biden announced $40 billion to buy arms meant for the war in Ukraine?”.
In an interview with Time magazine in May 2022, Lula pushed back against Western anti-Russia hysteria and pointed out that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky “is as responsible as Putin for the war. Because in the war, there’s not just one person guilty”.
“If I win the elections”, Lula tweeted in August, “we will make an effort for dialogue to establish peace again. We are not interested in any type of war”.
“The only position that interests Brazil in terms of the question of Ukraine and Russia is peace“, he added in October. “The time of war is the time of destruction. The world needs peace, addressing the issue of the climate, and ending hunger”.
A única posição que interessa ao Brasil na questão da Ucrânia e Rússia é a paz. Tempo de guerra é tempo de destruição. O mundo precisa de paz, cuidar da questão do clima e acabar com a fome.
— Lula (@LulaOficial) October 1, 2022

Colombia’s first ever left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, revealed that the United States pressured his country as well to give weapons to Ukraine. But he refused to do so, instead urging peace.
In comments at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Buenos Aires on January 24, Petro noted that Colombia had previously purchased Russian military equipment, “for its own purposes inside the country”.
Washington wants Bogotá to send that Russian equipment to Ukraine, but Petro stressed that his nation’s constitution calls for international peace, and therefore those military technologies “will stay as junk in Colombia“.
“We are not with anyone; we are with peace. That is why no weapon will be used in that conflict”, Petro stated.
“The best that could happen to humanity is peace between Ukraine and Russia, and not prolongation of the war”, the Colombian president tweeted.
“I will not help to prolong any war”, he asserted, calling for “neither invasions nor blockades”.
Lo mejor que le puede pasar a la humanidad es la paz entre Ucrania y Rusia y no la prolongación de la guerra. Yo no ayudaré a prolongar ninguna guerra.
En cambio pido que se eleve a delito internacional la agresión de un país a otro, sea el que sea.
Ni invasiones ni bloqueos. https://t.co/19Pr2GdEeP
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) January 27, 2023

Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Argentina on January 28. There, he asked President Alberto Fernández to send military equipment to Ukraine.
Fernández declined, instead stating firmly at a press conference that “Argentina and other Latin American countries do not plan to provide weapons to Ukraine, or to any other conflict zone”.
Fernández did criticize Russia for invading Ukraine, but he called for an end to the war, urging peace, not escalation.
Trapped in $44 billion in debt with the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF), Fernández’s government has boosted Argentina’s ties with China and Russia, joining Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Argentina applied to join the extended BRICS+ bloc. It attended the virtual BRICS summits in 2022, at China’s invitation.


Instruction: Write an article about: Terror attacks on Cuba’s embassy fueled by aggressive US policy. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Cuba, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, sanctions, terrorism

Output:
Cuba’s embassy in Washington has been attacked two times in three years, and no one has been held accountable. This reflects the long history of US-backed terrorism against Cuba, and six decades of illegal economic warfare.

Cuba’s embassy in Washington, DC was attacked with two Molotov cocktails on the night of September 24. This was the second terrorist attack against the embassy in the past three years.
The US Secret Service responded at around 8pm, but did not apprehend any perpetrators.
The explosives hit the front side of the embassy, which is already scarred with AK-47 bullet holes from a shooting attack in April 2020 — an emblem of the deadly risk it takes to be a Cuban diplomat in the United States, and of the long history of US-backed terrorism against the country.
The moment when the terrorist stands in front on the @EmbaCubaUS, lights up the Molotov cocktails & hurls them against the façade of the mission.
This footage was handed over to US authorities.
Original camera video of the Cuban diplomatic mission in Washington#NoAlTerrorismo pic.twitter.com/c9VWJsQ0xU
— Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) September 26, 2023

The Molotov cocktail attack occurred the same day that a Cuban delegation led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel returned to Havana, after participating in the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). It also came soon after Cuba chaired a historic summit of the G77+China.
The attack was clearly an act of violent intimidation against Cuban diplomats, and a reaction to the powerful show of solidarity by hundreds of people in the US throughout President Díaz-Canel’s visit to New York.
An emotional moment as Cuban President joined our rally to #LetCubaLive
“Thank you for your solidarity, thank you for your support, and thank you for being here with us!” —@DiazCanelB
CUBA SÍ, BLOQUEÓ NO! pic.twitter.com/ttgWcEY0Bz
— The People's Forum (@PeoplesForumNYC) September 22, 2023

Following the second terror attack, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez announced that no embassy staff had been injured and an investigation was underway.
Initially, the US government was eerily quiet about the attack on a foreign embassy just blocks from the White House.
The night of September 25, a day after the attack – and hours after about 100 DC locals rallied outside the embassy in support of Cuba – US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan finally released a statement condemning the attack and agreeing to an investigation.
Speakers at the rally called not only for an investigation into the attacks, but also an end to the illegal, six-decade US blockade – which virtually every country on Earth votes against each year in the United Nations.
The UN General Assembly vote against the US blockade of Cuba, on November 3, 2022
Cuba is a victim of US-backed terrorism, yet the Joe Biden administration has continued Donald Trump’s designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism” (SSOT), as part of an economic war against 11 million Cuban people.
In a statement, Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put blame for this latest attack directly on the US government’s aggressive policy and hateful discourse:
Anti-Cuban groups resort to terrorism due to the moral bankruptcy of their hatred against Cuba and the impunity they believe they enjoy. On a regular basis, in the official exchanges between the Embassy and the Department of State, it has been warned that the permissive behavior of United States law enforcement agencies in the face of violent actions can encourage the commission of acts of this nature.
It is the second violent attack against the diplomatic headquarters in Washington, since April 2020. On the night of that day, an individual of Cuban origin, standing in the middle of the street in the US capital and using an assault rifle, fired a burst of thirty cartridges against the building. Fortunately, there were no injuries to the personnel inside the building on that occasion, but there were considerable material damages.
After three years, the perpetrator still awaits trial and the United States government has refused to classify the incident as a terrorist act.
…
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemns this terrorist action and hopes that the United States Government will act in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, in the interest of avoiding the repetition of these events.
…
It also warns against the double standards used by the US government’s supposed commitment against terrorism.
The CIA and FBI have created, financed, and trained hundreds of anti-Cuba terrorist groups since the triumph of the revolution in 1959.
At least 3,478 Cubans have been killed and 2,099 have been disabled by US-sponsored terrorism since the revolution.
This includes 581 attacks against the country’s diplomatic representations abroad, according to Cuba’s Center for Historical Investigations of State Security (CIHSE).
At their peak violence, in 1974, Cuban exiles accounted for 45% of all terrorist bombings on the planet.
The most notorious of these terrorists, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, bombed a Cuban plane and numerous hotels. They were trained by the CIA and exonerated by the US government for their crimes. They died peacefully in Florida, celebrated as local heroes by the extreme anti-Castro community.
As Cuban Foreign Minister Rodriguez wrote after the latest attack, “The anti-Cuban groups resort to terrorism when feeling they enjoy impunity, something that Cuba has repeatedly warned the US authorities about.”
The weak response to the April 2020 shooting on the embassy is exactly what enabled an attack to happen again, the Cubans say.
The perpetrator of that previous attack, 42-year-old Cuban immigrant Alexander Alazo Baró, has yet to be convicted.
“The author of that barbaric act that machine-gunned our diplomatic headquarters … is still awaiting sentencing,” wrote leading Cuban diplomat Johana Tablada, deputy director general of the Foreign Ministry’s US Division. “Cuba is awaiting condemnation from the US government, which did not even call this terrorist act by its name.”
Cuban journalist El Necio reported, “The defendant is expected to face a mandatory sentence of no less than 10 years in prison, a fine of $250,000 and up to three years of supervised release … However, the defense seeks to prove a clinical picture of schizophrenia. There is still no sentence for this case, but the attacker is in preventive detention.”
(+ detalles) ⤴
– Se produjeron daños materiales en la fachada y los interiores: paredes, columnas, ventanas, escalera y lámpara interior, el asta de la bandera, la reja y la estatua del Héroe Nacional de Cuba, José Martí, frente a la sede (ver fotos)
– El informe policial lo… pic.twitter.com/XIiV23Ih4p
— El Necio (@ElNecio_Cuba) September 25, 2023

At 2:05am on April 30, 2020, Alazo Baró parked his truck 16th Street NW, in front of the Cuban embassy. He approached the fence, yelled and desecrated a Cuban flag, then proceeded to fire 32 shots from an AK-47 at the embassy.
None of the dozen staff inside were injured, but easily could have been. The outside and interior of the building are completely riddled with bullet holes. Now the embassy has bulletproof doors.
Upon his arrest, Alazo Baró claimed he was motivated by his hatred of Cuba and fear of assassination by the Cuban government and alleged criminal groups. At his trial, said he “hated Cubans” and would have shot the ambassador if he saw him, because he was the “enemy.”
After weeks of silence from the United States following the 2020 attack, Cuban Foreign Minister Rodríguez publicly denounced Washington’s lack of cooperation in the investigation, accusing the US of failing to “fulfill its obligation to prevent this attack, of which it received sufficient signals.”
US media and law enforcement dismissed Alazo Baró as a lone wolf, but he was a vocal Trump supporter linked to extremist anti-Cuba groups in Miami.
Alazo Baró had left Cuba in 2003 to settle in Mexico on a religious visa. He then immigrated to the US, crossing the southern border in 2010. He lived first in Florida, then in Texas, and later in Pennsylvania.
Like many Cubans permanently residing abroad, he maintained a normal relationship with Cuba, and visited eight times after leaving, last in 2015. He never exhibited any concerning behavior during his returns to Cuba or interactions with Cuban authorities.
However, during his time in Miami, Alazo Baró associated with the Doral Jesus Worship Center, a religious center and hot spot of aggression and violence against Cuba.
He befriended Pastor Frank López, a vocal extremist who has close relationships with anti-Cuba hawks like Florida Representative Mario Díaz-Balart and Senator Marco Rubio.
According to Facebook posts, Alazo Baró also befriended members of the congregation who advocated using drones to kill Raúl Castro and President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
In February 2019, a year before the AK-47 terror attack on the embassy, Vice President Mike Pence spoke at the Doral Jesus Worship Center alongside Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Senators Rubio and Rick Scott, and Representative Díaz-Balart.
Their remarks showed utter contempt for Cuba and Venezuela, which Díaz-Balart said were suffering from “the same cancer.”
President Trump also spoke at the church in July 2020.
#US President @realDonaldTrump will speak today at the Doral Jesus Worship Center, involved in instigation to violence and #terrorism against #Cuba, frequented by the attacker who shot  against our embassy in Washington with an assault rifle.
Will he condemn that action? pic.twitter.com/71EkgG802k
— Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) July 10, 2020

In March 2020, a month before the attack, Alazo Baró was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, diagnosed with delusional disorder, and prescribed medication. He already had a license to carry and, after being medically discharged, he acquired the AK-47 rifle.
Two weeks before the attack, Alazo Baró visited the embassy to scope out the target.
Cuba’s Foreign Affairs Ministry called for the US to investigate these links between the shooter and anti-Cuba leaders.
Cuba questions how Alazo Baró was able to purchase an assault rifle with such ease, and then travel around doing reconnaissance at the site of the attack.
After the shooting, the embassy repaired the shattered glass and installed bulletproof doors, but Cuban officials decided to leave most of the bullet holes in place, marking them with plaques, so that this act of violence and intimidation can never be forgotten.
Meanwhile, the US government and media remain disturbingly quiet about these acts of terrorism in the heart of the capital.
Cuba’s Foreign Ministry argued the attacks on the embassy could not be seen as separate, but rather as a direct result “of the permanent instigation of violence by American politicians and anti-Cuban extremist groups that have made this type of attacks their livelihood,” in a hostile political climate which heightened during the Trump administration.
Clearly this hostility against Cuba did not end with Trump, but rather continues under Biden, as shown by the second attack.
Biden has upheld nearly every one of the hundreds of additional sanctions Trump designed to strangle the Cuban economy, including by renewing the designation of Cuba as a so-called “state sponsor of terrorism.”
Despite US-Cuba cooperation on migration, drug-trafficking, and counter-terrorism, and despite Biden’s campaign promises to return to Obama-era rapprochement with Cuba, his administration has carried on Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” and continues to fund $20 million each year to groups that attack and destabilize the Cuban government.
Cuba has received messages of support from Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, and other allies.
Cuba also saw an outpouring of solidarity from the US people, following a week of actions against the blockade and in support of Cuba during the UNGA.
On September 23, the night before the attack, Cuban President Díaz-Canel rallied with 900 people in New York City for the solidarity event “Voices of Dignity: People vs Blockades”.
As a leader of Cuban-America solidarity group Puentes de Amor, Carlos Lazo, wrote after the attack, “It is sad and disturbing that while the Cuban president advocated yesterday, in front of hundreds of Americans, for the construction of bridges of love between Cuba and the United States, today, in Washington D.C., a terrorist launched two explosives against the Cuban embassy.”
On September 25, local supporters gathered outside the Cuban embassy to show solidarity with the country, calling for the US to investigate these attacks as acts of terrorism, and demanding an end to the US economic war against Cuba.
Against the hateful attack of two Molotov cocktails thrown at our Embassy in #Washington, a wall of love, affection and support from loyal friends in solidarity with the Cuban people was erected. Hate will never defeat noble and genuine love. #CubaIsNotAlone pic.twitter.com/tD5wL7t0U6
— Sandra Yisel Ramírez (@carantosan) September 26, 2023

(Editor’s note: This article was updated soon after it was published on September 25 to include the statement from the White House and the newly released video footage of the second attack.)


Instruction: Write an article about: In Cuba, Mexico’s AMLO calls for end to blockade, urges Latin American unity amid ‘US economic decline’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, blockade, Cuba, Latin America, Mexico, sanctions

Output:
Mexican President López Obrador took a historic trip to Cuba, where he called for an end to the US blockade and criticized right-wing “coup-plotters.” He said Latin America should form a union, amid “the economic decline of the United States.”

Mexico’s progressive President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took a historic trip to Cuba, where he called for an end to US sanctions and urged Latin America to form an economic union.
López Obrador, who is commonly referred to by the acronym AMLO, also stated that “the economic decline of the United States,” and the corresponding rise of China, has created both challenges and opportunities for the region. He argued Latin America should unite to mutually develop, take advantage of its natural resources, and fight poverty, immigration, and violence.
Criticizing right-wing “coup-plotters” and Washington’s aggressive foreign policy, AMLO went so far as to announce that he will not attend the conference of North, Central, and South American countries meeting in California in June, the Summit of the Americas, if the US government refuses to invite Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
In La Habana on May 8, López Obrador met with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. The Mexican leader thanked “the generous, supportive, and exemplar people of Cuba.”
Díaz-Canel presented AMLO the Order of José Martí, the highest award that the Cuban government gives to foreigners.
“I have never sought, do not seek, and will not seek the failure of the Cuban Revolution, of its idea of justice and its lessons of independence and dignity,” AMLO declared. “I will never join with the coup-plotters who conspire against those ideals.”
López Obrador criticized the suffocating US sanctions that have been imposed on Cuba since immediately after the triumph of its socialist revolution in 1959.
“I will keep trying to get the United States to lift the blockade,” the Mexican president said.
Las relaciones entre #México y #Cuba son históricas y entrañables. #CubaNoEstaSolahttps://t.co/8PLbpeKiEJ pic.twitter.com/rsz5hzPtTU
— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) May 9, 2022

Mexico and Cuba signed various bilateral agreements concerning trade and immigration.
After the global Covid-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, Cuba provided Mexico with some of the vaccines it developed. In one of the new agreements, Cuba will send the Abdala vaccine, which is designed for children between ages 5 and 12.
AMLO used his trip to Cuba to call for the unity of Latin America.
“We should build something similar to the European Union, but based on our history, reality, and identities,” López Obrador said.
“In that spirit we should not rule out the elimination of the Organization of American States for a truly autonomous organization that is not a lackey of anyone,” he added, condemning the US-dominated OAS.
While in La Habana, AMLO also met with Raúl Castro, the former army general and revolutionary leader.
El General de Ejército, Raúl Castro Ruz, sostuvo un fraternal encuentro con el presidente de #México,  @lopezobrador_ durante su visita de trabajo a #Cuba. ?? ?? pic.twitter.com/ZtFGXD6uyI
— Presidencia Cuba ?? (@PresidenciaCuba) May 10, 2022

AMLO’s trip to Cuba was part of a tour of numerous countries in Latin America.
On May 7, López Obrador met with the prime minister of Belize, John Antonio Briceño. There, the Mexican leader reiterated his calls for Latin American unity.
“I maintain that it is necessary to move forward in an integration of all of America, in the construction of a model similar to that of the European Community, a model that preceded what is today the European Union,” AMLO said.
“Only in that way can we confront the turbulence of the global economy and the geopolitical danger that the economic decline of the United States represents for all of the world, as opposed to other regions, especially Asia, and in particular I am referring to the economic advance of China,” he explained.
“In addition to halting this course of undesirable events, the union of America would develop our natural resources, tourism, and our financial systems to provide well-being and justice for our populations, to jointly confront problems like poverty, immigration, insecurity,” López Obrador added.
Its truly an honor to welcome the Mexican President, @lopezobrador_ on his first official visit to Belize. Our delegations will hold high-level bilateral talks on issues of mutual interests and partnerships.#Belize #Mexico pic.twitter.com/9v1sycqqSH
— John Briceño (@JohnBricenoBZE) May 7, 2022

AMLO then criticized the Summit of the Americas, which will be held by the US government and OAS in California from June 6 to 10.
The US State Department has refused to invite the socialist governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to this meeting.
AMLO said he would pressure US President Joe Biden to not exclude anyone from the summit.
“I have insisted in the necessity that no government in the hemisphere and no country in America be excluded from the upcoming summit that will be taking place in Los Angeles, in the United States, that no one excludes anyone. It should be a meeting that allows us to resolve our disagreements without hegemonies or arrogance,” the Mexican leader said.
López Obrador took the extraordinary step of declaring that he will not attend the summit if Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are not invited.
President @lopezobrador_ wont attend the Summit of the Americas in an act of protest if countries are excluded— but @m_ebrard will. pic.twitter.com/dBqzxTm2Ll
— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) May 10, 2022

López Obrador’s trips to Cuba and Belize were part of a larger tour of the region.
AMLO also visited Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, where he met with new left-wing President Xiomara Castro.
Socialists in Latin America did however criticize López Obrador for skipping Nicaragua on his trip to Central America.
Nicaragua has a leftist government, run by the democratically elected Sandinista Front and its revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega.
Socialists in the region have criticized Mexico’s Foreign Ministry for sometimes joining with the United States in voting against Nicaragua in the United Nations and OAS, although on occasions Mexico has abstained from these votes.
While AMLO did not travel to Nicaragua, he did meet with the corrupt right-wing president of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, as well as the increasingly authoritarian neoliberal president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who in April alone detained more than 20,000 people, in what he claimed was a crackdown on gangs but also included brutal suppression of his political opponents.
Visita Oficial del Presidente de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, @lopezobrador_, a El Salvador ???? pic.twitter.com/WquD9PTQ2o
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) May 9, 2022

AMLO skipping over Nicaragua on his trip was rather ironic given his calls for unifying the region and his opposition to the US refusal to invite its leftist Sandinista government to the Summit of the Americas.
But López Obrador has still at times maintained an independent foreign policy.
The Mexican leader refused to impose sanctions on Russia over its war in Ukraine, for instance. And he criticized the US government for claiming his country is hosting more Russian spies than any other.
AMLO is Mexico’s first left-wing president in decades. He was elected in 2018 on a promise to end the neoliberal economic policies of the administrations that had governed since the 1980s.
Although it was only founded a decade ago, AMLO’s progressive Morena party quickly broke the two-party dictatorship that had controlled Mexican politics for decades.
The two establishment parties, the neoliberal PRI and right-wing PAN, have been thoroughly discredited among the Mexican population.
A poll this May found that 64% of Mexicans said Morena manages social programs better, and 59% said the party is more concerned for the people.
On the other hand, 58% of Mexicans said the PRI has done damage to their country, and 52% said it robbed the people when it governed.
López Obrador consistently has an approval rating of between 60 and 70%, making him one of the most popular leaders of large countries on Earth.
It's amazing how Mexico's left-wing Morena party, only founded a decade ago, so quickly and completely discredited the neoliberal parties that controlled politics for decades.
64% of Mexicans say Morena manages social programs better. 59% say it is more concerned for the people pic.twitter.com/en2eYaFUoD
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 10, 2022


Instruction: Write an article about: AMLO says Mexico is more democratic than oligarch-run USA, condemns State Dep’t ‘meddling’ against electoral reform. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Enrique Peña Nieto, Felipe Calderón, INE, Mexico, PAN, PRI

Output:
Responding to State Department criticism of Mexico’s popular electoral reform, President AMLO denounced US “meddling”, support for coups, and the Monroe Doctrine. He said, “There is more democracy today in Mexico than in the United States… because here the people govern, and there the oligarchy govern”.

Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) gave a fiery speech condemning the US State Department’s “bad habit” of “meddling” in other country’s “internal affairs”.
“There is more democracy today in Mexico than in the United States”, López Obrador said, “because here the people govern, and there the oligarchy govern”.
AMLO lamented that politicians in Washington “still will not abandon the two-century-old policy, the Monroe Doctrine, of thinking of themselves as the world’s government”, calling it a “centuries-old habit of the US government and US elites”.
As an example, López Obrador pointed to Peru, where he said “the US ambassador is the advisor of the coup-mongers, who trampled on the liberties and democracy in that country, unjustly overthrowing the President [Pedro Castillo] and imprisoning him”.
AMLO also denounced US corporate media outlets for spreading propaganda against his government, supporting Mexico’s right-wing opposition, and “protecting the mafias of economic power in the world”.

López Obrador is Mexico’s first left-wing president in decades. When he came to power in 2018, he broke a decades-long cycle of bipartisan rule, which he blasted as the “neoliberal period” in which the “oligarchy” ruled the country.
In addition to expanding social programs, a key part of AMLO’s political agenda has been electoral reform.
For decades, Mexico has faced rampant corruption and very reputable accusations of electoral fraud. López Obrador has vowed to change that.
His government proposed legislation to reform Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE). The plan is to simplify the country’s voting system, cutting funding to highly overpaid executives, while making it easier to vote for people living in rural areas, those with disabilities, and Mexicans abroad.
Numerous INE executives already get paid more than the president himself, and the huge sums of money in and around the institution has made corruption a systemic problem.
A survey from late 2022, which was conducted by the INE itself, found that the vast majority of Mexicans support electoral reforms, with 74% to 93% of people agreeing with proposed reforms, such as cutting funding and creating elections for electoral magistrates.
In fact, the poll found that 52% of Mexicans support replacing the INE with an entirely new institution called the National Institute of Elections and Consultations (INEC), while just 40% of people oppose this.
Although electoral reform is widely popular among the Mexican people, it has angered the country’s political and economic elites, as well as their backers in Washington.
On February 26, Mexico’s right-wing opposition parties – many of which are closely linked to drug cartels and have benefited from decades of systemic corruption – held a march against the Mexican government’s proposed electoral reforms, calling for the INE to be left alone.
Major US media outlets showered the protests with support. The US State Department expressed its approval as well, criticizing the electoral reforms.
CIA official turned State Department spokesman Ned Price applauded the demonstrations as part of a “great debate” to “support healthy democracy” in Mexico.
Responding to US gov't criticism of Mexico’s popular electoral reform, President AMLO denounced US “meddling” and support for coups:
“There is more democracy today in Mexico than in the US… Here the people govern; there the oligarchy govern”
Full video: https://t.co/A75h7mmmpv pic.twitter.com/6ThH7gY7xU
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 9, 2023

López Obrador denounced the US government’s “meddling” in a press conference on February 28.
“The US State Department [has] the bad habit, always, they meddle in affairs that don’t involve them”, he said.
This contradicts the attitude of “President Biden, who always talks about equality, rhetorically”, AMLO added.
Condemning this “bad habit” of the United States, the Mexican president lamented, “They still will not abandon the two-century-old policy, the Monroe Doctrine, of thinking of themselves as the world’s government”.
He continued: “What do I say, with all due respect, to Mr. Blinken of the State Department? That there is more democracy today in Mexico than in the United States”.
“Instead of meddling, acting in an interfering way in our internal affairs, if they want to continue with the same policy, they should take care of what is happening in Peru”, AMLO said.
In Peru, he warned, “the US ambassador is the advisor of the coup-mongers, who trampled on the liberties and democracy in that country, unjustly overthrowing the president [Pedro Castillo] and imprisoning him“.
“But this is nothing more than the State Department. It is its nature”, AMLO argued, denouncing the “centuries-old habit of the US government and US elites”.
“When I say that we have more democracy than they do, it is because here the people govern, and there the oligarchy govern, nothing more”, AMLO added.
The Mexican president also criticized the Wall Street Journal, which had a front-page story praising the right-wing opposition protest against his government.
AMLO said the newspaper was promoting “the march of the corrupt”. He quipped that the Wall Street Journal “and other newspapers in the United States protect the mafias of economic power in the world”.
The leaders of the march were “corrupt” and “hypocritical”, López Obrador argued. He noted that it featured many of the same politicians who voted against his proposed policies to support pensions for elderly Mexicans and scholarships for students.
“That is their mentality. They are very conservative and very hypocritical”, he said.
AMLO likewise made fun of the hyperbolic media outlets and opposition activists who “say that we are dictators”.
He also lampooned right-wing politicians who claim, “You are either with me or against me”. Instead, AMLO countered, you are “either with the people or with the oligarchy”.
López Obrador is one of the most popular heads of state in the world. He has consistently enjoyed an approval rating of between 60% and 70% since he came to power in 2018.
His proposed electoral reform is very popular as well.
The main goal of the reform is to simplify Mexico’s electoral system, and trim down the National Electoral Institute (INE), which is notorious for its massive bureaucratic bloat, and which provides a lot of room and money for corruption.
President AMLO has often pointed out that some high-level INE officials make more money than he does.
By streamlining the system, López Obrador hopes to make it much more difficult for Mexican elites to steal elections.
Throughout his career, going back decades, AMLO has campaigned against the rampant corruption in Mexico’s political and electoral system.
A progressive outsider, López Obrador ran against the two parties that dominated Mexican politics: the center-right neoliberal PRI and the hard-right conservative PAN. Both are infamous for their documented involvement in corruption.
The PRI governed the country (under various names) from 1929 until 2000, and then returned in 2012. The PAN reigned from 2000 to 2012.
AMLO came very close to winning the 2006 presidential election, losing by a fraction of a percentage point. He accused his right-wing opponent Felipe Calderón of stealing the election through fraud.
Calderón, who served as president from 2006 to 2012, is well known to have close links to drug trafficking and corruption. Former officials in his government said he oversaw a “death squad” that killed civilians.
Calderón’s chief of security, Genaro García Luna, was found guilty in a US federal court in February of having collaborated with the bloody Sinaloa Cartel and protected drug lord El Chapo Guzmán.
In the 2012 presidential elections, the neoliberal PRI returned to power. López Obrador once again came in second place.
AMLO accused the PRI of buying 5 million votes. And there was ample evidence for his accusations – these are not at all like Donald Trump’s baseless allegations.
In the wake of the 2012 elections, numerous videos went viral on social media showing long lines of Mexicans who received payment cards to vote for the PRI.
A diehard right-wing Colombian hacker who is currently in prison, Andrés Sepúlveda, told Bloomberg in 2016 that he helped PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto rig the 2012 elections, by stealing data, hacking phones, installing spyware, manipulating social media, spreading fake news, among other dirty tricks.
Bloomberg wrote (emphasis added):
When Peña Nieto won [in 2012], Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory.
…
Sepúlveda’s team installed malware in routers in the headquarters of the PRD candidate [AMLO], which let him tap the phones and computers of anyone using the network, including the candidate. He took similar steps against PAN’s Vázquez Mota. When the candidates’ teams prepared policy speeches, Sepúlveda had the details as soon as a speechwriter’s fingers hit the keyboard. Sepúlveda saw the opponents’ upcoming meetings and campaign schedules before their own teams did.
Money was no problem. At one point, Sepúlveda spent $50,000 on high-end Russian software that made quick work of tapping Apple, BlackBerry, and Android phones. He also splurged on the very best fake Twitter profiles; they’d been maintained for at least a year, giving them a patina of believability.
Sepúlveda managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to shape discussion around topics such as Peña Nieto’s plan to end drug violence, priming the social media pump with views that real users would mimic. For less nuanced work, he had a larger army of 30,000 Twitter bots, automatic posters that could create trends. One conversation he started stoked fear that the more López Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew the currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the candidate’s own internal staff memos.
Just about anything the digital dark arts could offer to Peña Nieto’s campaign or important local allies, Sepúlveda and his team provided. On election night, he had computers call tens of thousands of voters with prerecorded phone messages at 3 a.m. in the critical swing state of Jalisco.
As an alleged victim of voter fraud, AMLO has insisted on the importance of electoral reform, to make the country’s corruption-ridden system more equitable.
In February, Mexico’s Senate approved “Plan B” of the proposed electoral reform. This version is much less ambitious than the overhaul that was proposed in 2022 (Plan A), but which did not get enough votes to pass.
Despite the law being watered down, Mexico’s right-wing opposition – which is notoriously corrupt and unpopular – has capitalized on it to try to portray AMLO as a would-be “autocrat”.
This is despite the fact that López Obrador is only going to be in power for one term, and has made no efforts to change Mexico’s law restricting presidencies to a single term.
Mexico’s conservative opposition has powerful friends in Washington, and particularly in the US press corps.
The editorial board of the Washington Post, which is owned by billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos, blasted AMLO’s electoral reform as “a knife stabbing at the heart of Mexico’s democracy”.
Reuters cited anonymous “critics” who “warn it will weaken democracy“, while the Los Angeles Times did the same to portray it as a “threat to democracy“.
Neoconservative activist David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and accomplice in the illegal US invasion of Iraq, claimed in The Atlantic that “liberal democracy in Mexico is under assault”, demonizing democratically elected President AMLO as “erratic and authoritarian”.
Not one of these media outlets mentioned the 2022 INE survey that found that 74% to 93% of Mexicans support AMLO’s proposed electoral reforms, or that the president has consistently had an approval rating of between 60% and 70%.


Instruction: Write an article about: Inside Nicaragua’s free socialized health-care system. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: FSLN, Health Care, Nicaragua, public health, Sandinistas

Output:
An inside look at the free universal health-care system created by Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, which has saved countless lives.

Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.
(This piece was originally published by the Casa Benjamin Linder.)
We’re settling in to our daughter Orla’s sixth night in the hospital. Visiting hours are over and only 10 of the beds in our 32-bed pediatric ward are occupied tonight, down from 20 a few nights ago.
The patients – mostly young teens in our room – are tucked in under mosquito nets. Their caretakers – mainly grandmas, aunts and moms – are slouched in chairs or curled around their patients on the beds. A few of us stretch out on unoccupied beds to get some rest before the nurse turns on the lights for the next regular blood pressure and temp check.
Our 14 year-old was admitted to the pediatric ward with dengue fever on July 19th, Revolution Day in Nicaragua. Poor Orla sobbed in disappointment that she wouldn’t be able to celebrate the holiday.
After two days of fever, I had taken her to the emergency room in our local Ciudad Sandino Primary Hospital where the blood work they ordered indicated dengue and showed that her platelet count was low enough to be of concern.
“She’ll be staying here with us,” the doctor announced. Since then, either my husband Paul or I have been with her in the hospital, tasked with making sure she’s kept hydrated and informed of her progress via blood test results each day.
Dengue fever is a virus transmitted by mosquitoes that propagate in the tropics during the rainy season and it affects 50 million people annually worldwide.
Nicaragua works to control outbreaks through regular house-to-house fumigation and eliminating stagnant water – the epidemiology department of the health services visited our house shortly after Orla was hospitalized to get kill any mosquitoes or larvae.
There is no cure for dengue, just symptom management over its eight-day cycle. The virus attacks the body and can cause leakage in vessel walls, resulting in water loss in the circulatory system and rapid dehydration.
Much rarer severe cases can cause internal bleeding and for blood platelets to drop to dangerously low levels. Hemorrhagic dengue is particularly dangerous because patients can go into shock and die before they can get the blood transfusion they need.
Because of this risk, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health’s policy is to hospitalize anyone with dengue who shows signs of possible complications, including low blood platelets. Thanks to this prudent policy and quality care, Nicaragua is the country with fewer deaths from dengue than any other country in the region – in a normal year, zero deaths.
Treatment for the 12 pediatric patients we’ve seen come through our room has been intravenous rehydration fluids and ultrasounds upon being admitted; blood pressure, temp and blood oxygen level checks every two hours; daily blood tests; and constant monitoring of liquid intake and outflow.
Patients with fevers get acetaminophen; patients with suspicious pain are taken for another ultrasound; patients not getting enough fluids are put back on IVs.
Although the staff has been concerned about possible complications for at least four of our patients, including Orla, no one on our ward has been transferred to a larger Managua hospital for emergency transfusions; but the ambulance is standing by outside if its needed.
Knowing that gives me incredible peace of mind – at home, how could I possibly have known what Orla’s platelets were doing?
Growing up in the U.S., I never had a close family member admitted to the hospital; in fact, visits to the doctor were rare. As a kid, I remember knowing that if I got sick over the weekend, I’d have to tough it out until Monday when we could see the doctor during office hours.
A trip to the emergency room at the hospital – the only after-hours option in my rural county – was too expensive. For the most part, everyone I knew only went to the doctor if they’d been sick for more than a week – their families simply couldn’t afford more frequent care.
By contrast, Nicaraguans seem to go to the doctor all the time. If my neighbor’s kid gets diarrhea, they bring her straight to the emergency room. I used to think this was because people were afraid – in the 1990s and early 2000s, child and infant mortality rates were high in Nicaragua and many kids really did die of preventable diseases.
But as child health has improved – infant mortality down by 61% and chronic malnutrition reduced by 66% over the past 15 years – I have finally begun to understand that Nicaraguans take their kids to the hospital because they can.
Back in Idaho where I’m from, Orla’s emergency room visit alone would have cost $2,159 and her six nights in the hospital would have totaled more than $60,000.
In the United States, medical debt cripples 41% of all U.S. adults and they scramble to pay outrageous bills: more than a quarter of all fundraisers on crowdfunding sites are for health-related costs.
My mom has been telling her friends in Idaho of our woes. “My granddaughter in Nicaragua has spent the week hospitalized with dengue fever.”
“Oh dear!” Her friends all exclaim (dengue fever does sound awfully dramatic).
“Guess how much their hospital bill is so far?” She asks. They frown and shake their heads, already anticipating that my mom is about to hit them up for donations for a GoFundMe campaign to help cover our bills.
“How much?” They ask.
“Nothing at all!” My mom gleefully reports. “Nicaragua has free universal health care!”
Her friends’ shock is palpable. “How,” they ask, “can a poor country like Nicaragua afford to give free health care to its people?”
The answer, of course, is because Nicaragua chooses to make free health care a priority for its people.
Nighttime in the pediatric ward means little sleep for caretakers. In the morning I wake at 3, holding a sleepy Orla upright while the lab tech gets a blood sample from her arm, and then try to coax a bit more fluid down her throat. I crash back into sleep until the nurse comes to collect the papers where we write down our patients’ intake and outflow and do the consequential math: are more fluids going in than coming out?
Next the doctors arrive with the lab results for the day: who gets to go home and who has to stay. The hopeful have their bags packed, waiting. The feverish ones stay wrapped in restless sheets, in and out of consciousness, knowing they’ll be here another night.
On our third morning, I start awake at 10 minutes to 7 and rush to shower and change before my husband Paul arrives – bless him – with strong coffee and the car keys. I kiss Orla goodbye and drive straight from the hospital to interpret for a delegation that is in Nicaragua to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, when the Nicaraguan people overthrew the cruel Somoza dictatorship.
Our first meeting is with Nicaragua’s Finance Minister Iván Acosta. It’s my first time interpreting for him and I soon realize that even with a full-night’s sleep I couldn’t do him justice with my interpretation.
He has an obvious grasp of details – quoting figures off the top of his head and speaking for two hours with no notes – but above all else, Minister Acosta is a Big Picture person. He connects the dots for us between policy, action and results, giving perspective to Nicaragua’s entire revolutionary project.
“When we came into office in 2007, following nearly 17 years of neoliberal governments,” he says, “we found the country in chaos.”
Minister Acosta explains that the period from 1990 to 2006 when Nicaragua had followed structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund led to extreme inequality, seriously deteriorated infrastructure, and deep poverty, particularly in Nicaragua’s countryside.
“There was no magic solution for any of this. What could we do?” he asks.
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government decided on a blend of social responsibility and economic principles. They began restoring rights – to free health care, free public education, and land tenure.
But they also worked to find ways to ensure that Nicaragua’s poor majority became active participants in the economy as a solution to improve the country’s struggling economy.
“We realized that we need to lower the cost of doing business to be competitive; in order to achieve that, we needed to increase public spending.”
To that end, Nicaragua set about building state-of-the-art roads – now the best in the region – to ensure that products could get to market cheaply and easily.
Nicaragua improved access to basic services: now reaching 99% electrical coverage up from just 53% in 2006; ending 12-hour a day rolling blackouts and diversifying to generate clean energy. Today 80% of the electricity produced is from renewables;
Nicaragua also trained new teachers and made new schools. And it has built 24 new hospitals since 2007.
Over just 10 years, Minister Acosta explains, social spending went from being 10% of overall spending to making up 57% of the country’s budget.
But have these policies been effective?
“We have these pro-poor policies, but in many countries only lip service is paid to political policy and it isn’t followed by action,” explains Minister Acosta. “So we do the math – all the various quotients and formulae recommended by international experts – to ensure that our policies are being translated into results: real improvements in the lives of the poor.”
The numbers show that not only has Nicaragua’s economy turned around – sustained GDP growth of 5% to 10%, historic international investment, and 90% food sovereignty have all been achieved – but also the lives of the country’s poor majority have improved. In 2006, GDP per capita was at $990, but by 2018 it had risen to $2,300.
“We don’t have a significant middle class yet,” Minister Acosta cautions, but progress is being made.
Nicaragua’s policy could be described as “trickle up economics” – ensure the poor access to health care, education, land, markets, financing, and the economy will follow.
This is the inversion of “trickle down economics,” the U.S. policy made famous by Ronald Reagan which gives tax breaks and benefits to corporations and the wealthy on the theory that it will stimulate economic growth from the top down.
The problem with the U.S. policy is not only a moral one; in economic terms, it just plain doesn’t work.
Under four decades of “trickle down” policy, income inequality in the U.S. has grown to shocking levels: the wealthiest 0.1% have become rich beyond all comprehension, while most U.S. workers now earn less than half of what they would have been earning if incomes had continued to grow equitably.
In other words, tax breaks and benefits to the richest simply don’t trickle down: U.S. families now work longer hours for less pay while struggling to cover skyrocketing costs.
Currently, 22% of the U.S. population can’t access health care due to lack of adequate insurance, 12% experiences hunger and more than half a million people are homeless –many living under the country’s collapsing bridges – one in every five of which are in need of reconstruction.
Given what we know about how stability and quality of life for the majority can improve the overall economy, perhaps instead of asking, “How can a poor country like Nicaragua afford to give free health care to its people?”, we should really be asking, “How can a wealthy country like the United States afford NOT to?”
“Dengue is treacherous,” the doctor explains to me. “A patient can suddenly experience internal bleeding and become critical in the blink of an eye.”
Orla’s platelets have dropped, and she is in the most crucial day in the virus’ cycle when signs of hemorrhagic dengue can appear.
As I sit on the edge of her bed urging her to drink more rehydration fluid, a woman who has been visiting another patient comes over to Orla’s bed carrying a Bible.
“Would you like me to pray for your daughter?” she asks. Orla agrees and the woman asks, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”
I stop her, not wanting her to get the wrong idea. “We’re not Pentecostals,” I say, “but Orla believes in God.” The woman nods and holds her hands out, palms up.
We close our eyes as she begins praying in a soft singsong voice, asking God to look after my baby and heal her. When she finishes, she surprises me by saying, “It doesn’t matter which religion we belong to, it’s all the same God.”
That day, Orla turns a corner – her fever drops and her health begins to improve. I’m grateful to all those responsible – as we say here in Nicaragua, “Thanks to God and the Revolution.”
Why the Revolution? Because it has restored Nicaraguans’ rights to free quality health care.
Our entire delegation gets to see the quality of this health care up close. After our talk with Minister Acosta, we visit one of the best-equipped hospitals in the country, Velez Paíz, built new and opened in 2018.
Director Dr. Virginia Garcia tells us that patients with non-urgent emergencies wait a maximum of 30 minutes to be seen by ER doctors, and that patients wait a maximum of one month for non-emergency surgeries.
“We have four laparoscopic towers performing gall bladder surgeries all day every day,” she says. That surgery would cost $54,000 in my home country, but is free in Nicaragua.
I interpret for Minister of Health Dr. Martha Reyes when she describes to the delegation the advances made in public health over the past 15 years. As she talks, it is easy for me to chart that path from policy to action to results that Minister Acosta talked about.
When she finishes speaking, I thank Dr. Reyes personally for the quality care that Orla is receiving in our hometown public hospital. “Not so long ago,” I tell her, “that wouldn’t have been possible.”
When I moved to Ciudad Sandino 20 years ago, our hospital was literally an empty shell, unable to provide even the most basic services to our community of 180,000. Not only did patients in “public” hospitals have to pay for everything from gloves to sutures, but a dengue patient in Orla’s condition would have actually been safer at home – hospitals were in such appalling conditions with lack of staff, beds and even basic sanitation that it was commonly said that hospitals were where patients went to die.
Thanks to public investment in health infrastructure, increase in personnel, improved and specialized training, and tireless work to involve communities and families in their own health care, Ciudad Sandino now has seven health centers and a hospital which includes outpatient, inpatient and emergency care, a maternal wait home, rehabilitation and physical therapy services, a natural medicine center and a center for cataract surgeries – all services offered free of charge.
Comparable improvements have happened all over the country – the change in people’s lives is palpable and the results in overall health are measureable: maternal mortality rates have dropped by 70%, deaths from cervical cancer are down by 25% and average life expectancy has increased.
On the morning of Orla’s seventh day in the hospital, the doctor tells us that her platelets count is high enough to safely send her home.
We leave the hospital with nothing more than her official diagnosis paper, a stamped doctor’s excuse for missing school, and a follow up appointment.
We owe no money. There is no itemized bill showing how many nights (6), how many sheets were washed (3), how many cafeteria meals she ate (17), how many full blood tests (10), urine tests (1), ultrasounds (1), IVs (1), or how much oral rehydration fluid she drank (53 liters).
Orla and I walk out into the sunshine of a new day, ready to rest and recover, secure in the knowledge that the Nicaraguan government has made a choice to look after us … recognizing that it is a privilege to have access to free quality health care.


Instruction: Write an article about: Fewer than 15 countries recognize US-appointed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Bank of England, Britain, Canada, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Juan Guaidó, Julio Borges, Justin Trudeau, Leopoldo López, Nicolás Maduro, PSUV, Spain, UK, United Kingdom, Venezuela

Output:
A right-wing Venezuelan opposition leader and former top Juan Guaidó functionary admitted a maximum of 15 countries recognize the unelected coup leader as “interim president.” The Joe Biden administration is one of them.

(Se puede leer este artículo en español aquí.)
January 23, 2022 marks the third anniversary of the US government’s ongoing coup attempt against Venezuela’s only constitutional government, that of democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro.
On that day in 2019, the Donald Trump administration appointed little-known Venezuelan opposition politician Juan Guaidó, who had never received a single vote in a presidential election, as supposed “interim president” of the Caribbean nation.
At the peak of the US-led coup attempt, fewer than 60 of the 193 UN member states recognized Guaidó. And that number has dropped precipitously since then.
One of Guaidó’s top former functionaries, the right-wing Venezuelan opposition politician Julio Borges, has admitted in an interview that a maximum of just 15 countries still recognize Guaidó as of January 2022.
Major Western media outlets have acknowledged that Guaidó does not actually control anything inside Venezuela, other than what the United States stole for him.
Yet the Joe Biden administration has maintained Trump’s policy of support for Guaidó.
This recognition has continued despite November 2021 regional elections in Venezuela, which were observed by the European Union, in which Guaidó’s party faced a crushing defeat, and the United Socialist Party (PSUV) of President Maduro won in a landslide.
Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó in the White House with US President Donald Trump in February 2020 (Photo credit: public domain)
The nations that still refuse to recognize Venezuela’s constitutional President Maduro consist primarily of the United States and its right-wing allies in Latin America, including Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Ecuador, along with the Washington-controlled Organization of American States (OAS).
The Liberal Justin Trudeau government of Canada still backs Guaidó as well.
Britain is one of the only remaining European countries that refuses to acknowledge Maduro – partially because, by continuing to formally recognize Guaidó, it provides a judicial excuse for the Bank of England to steal nearly $2 billion worth of Venezuelan gold.
Guaidó’s coup regime in fact used money illegally seized from Venezuela’s Central Bank to pay legal costs in the UK, in its efforts to control these billions of dollars worth of looted Venezuelan gold, journalist John McEvoy revealed.
Even Spain, which harbors Venezuelan fugitives from justice who organized violent coup attempts against the Chavista government, no longer really recognizes Guaidó.
Perhaps the most powerful member of Venezuela’s political opposition, Leopoldo López, a right-wing extremist from an ultra-wealthy oligarch family, lives in Madrid, where he has enjoyed the support of the Spanish government. This is despite the fact that López admitted to orchestrating violent coup attempts and plotting a failed invasion of Venezuela in May 2020, known as Operation Gideon.
In an implicit admission that all of these efforts at overthrowing Venezuela’s legitimate government had failed, the European Union stopped recognizing Guaidó as of January 2021.
Julio Borges, the Venezuelan opposition politician who said a maximum of just 15 countries still recognize Guaidó, knows from firsthand experience.
Borges previously served as so-called “foreign minister” for Guaidó’s parallel coup regime, which has never exercised power inside Venezuela and was never voted on by the Venezuelan people.
Borges resigned from Guaidó’s coup regime in December 2021, saying the unelected “interim government has been deformed,” and “it should disappear.”


Instruction: Write an article about: Inside Cuba’s socialist health system, with journalist Rania Khalek. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Input: Covid-19, Cuba, public health, vaccines

Output:
Journalist Rania Khalek discusses her reporting trip to Cuba, where she got a firsthand look at its socialist health system, under the brutal US blockade.

Journalist Rania Khalek, of BreakThrough News, discusses her reporting trip to Cuba, where she saw how US sanctions, which are illegal under international law, have caused hardship and shortages.
She interviewed medical experts and describes Cuba’s socialist health system, which has produced multiple Covid-19 vaccines, despite being under a suffocating blockade imposed by the United States.
“People are dealing with a lot of difficulties because of the blockade,” Khalek recalled. “And that’s in combination with all kinds of US schemes to undermine the socialist revolution in that country, you know whether it’s hundreds of assassination attempts, attempted invasions, actual terrorism sponsored by the United States, and so many other ways the US has tried to undermine the Cuban government, through various NGOs, and NGO money, and using the internet, and on and on.”
Former US President Donald Trump added 243 new sanctions measures against Cuba, many in the middle of the Covid pandemic. And the Joe Biden administration has maintained those illegal unilateral coercive measures, while adding even more.
Yet despite these enormous difficulties, Cuba has an “incredible medical system,” Khalek explained.
“It’s free, and it all revolves around preventative care, in a really holistic way, where you have layers of medical care, from your local neighborhood doctor – whose house you can go to for easy visits, who goes and actually checks on disabled and elderly people in the neighborhood, to make sure their vitals are good, their blood pressure is good, they’re getting what they need – to neighborhood clinics, to bigger hospitals that they’ll send you to if the neighborhood clinic can’t help you. And then there are various specialties they’ll send you to if you need really serious care, for a really serious problem.”
“And so their medical system inside the country is incredible, because it exists across the country, even in the countryside, which was a huge accomplishment of the revolution in Cuba,” Khalek said.
“But more than that, Cuba has these international medical brigades, and they send their doctors to provide basically free medical care to areas around the world, particularly the developing world. And they’ll serve in very poor areas of like Brazil, and Venezuela, and Bolivia, and various countries in Africa, in order to provide care to people who otherwise don’t have access to medical care.”
You can watch or listen to the interview below: