Nica, Cuba Briefs - Wkly Update 11/4/01 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Weekly News Update Weekly News Update on the Americas - #614 - Nov 4, 2001 NICARAGUA: VOTERS CHOOSE PRESIDENT Nicaraguan voters went to the polls on Oct. 4 in the country's fourth presidential election since the overthrow of dictator Anastasio ("Tachito") Somoza Debayle in 1979. As in the previous three elections, the leftist Sandinistas National Liberation Front (FSLN) was represented by Daniel Ortega Saavedra, who won the presidency in 1984 but lost the two subsequent elections in 1990 and 1996. This year the opinion polls show Ortega in a virtual tie with former vice president Enrique Bolanos Geyer of the ruling rightwing Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC). [El Diario-La Prensa (NY) 11/4/01 from wire services; New York Times 11/4/01] Ortega and the FSLN have pulled together a broad electoral coalition that ranges from former Sandinistas like Dora Maria Tellez to conservatives who were jailed at various times during the 1979-1990 FSLN government, including Miriam Arguello and vice presidential candidate Agustin Jarquin. The main recent addition is Antonio Lacayo, a business person who is well-connected in the Conservative Party, the third largest party after the FSLN and the PLC. Lacayo was presidency minister in the 1990-1997 administration of his mother-in-law, the still-popular Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, and was instrumental in imposing neoliberal economic policies--which were strongly opposed by the FSLN at the time. Ortega has promised to make Lacayo foreign minister if the FSLN wins, apparently in the hopes of appeasing the US government, which has been openly siding with Bolanos [see Update #612]. [Boletin Informativo de Nicaragua de la Fundacion Popol Na 10/28/01; Associated Press 11/1/01] Several Ortega supporters waved US flags at Ortega's closing campaign rally in Nindiri on Oct. 31. [NYT 11/4/01] The conservative Nicaraguan daily La Prensa carried reports on its website on the evening of Nov. 4 saying the government and international observers agreed that the elections had taken place in "relative calm"; the main problems reported were late openings of polling places. No voting results were given. [LP 11/4/01] CUBA: GUATEMALANS IN TERRORISM TRIAL Three Guatemalan nationals charged with attempting to bring bomb- making materials into Cuba were to go on trial in Havana on Nov. 1. Maria Elena Gonzalez Meza de Fernandez, Jazid Ivan Fernandez Mendoza and Nadel Musalam were caught entering the international airport in Havana on Mar. 20, 1998 with plastique explosives, detonators and electronic cards in their baggage. Cuba charges that they were connected to a Central American terrorist network that is responsible for a series of bombings of Cuban tourist locations between 1997 and 1999 that resulted in the death of one Italian. They could receive sentences of between 20 and 30 years in prison. [La Nacion (Costa Rica) 11/1/01 from AP] Guatemala's rightwing president Alfonso Portillo told the press Oct. 31 that he has confidence in the impartiality of Cuban justice. [El Diario-La Prensa (NY) 11/1/01 from AFP] [In July 1998 Cuban rightwinger Luis Posada Carriles, a longtime US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) "asset" now in prison in Panama, told the New York Times that he had masterminded the bombings of tourist locations in Cuba; see Update #441.] ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-11.05.01-06:33:49-3905