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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (Routledge) is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The April 2018 protests in Nicaragua inaugurated the Latin American protest wave that subsequently spread across the region in 2019. The protests and their governmental suppression ushered Nicaraguan politics into a regime crisis. Yet, despite international pressure, the harsh reality of a serious economic downturn, low and diminishing public support and the continued opposition resistance throughout 2019, the orteguista regime has proven to be remarkably resilient to change. In fact, it has tightened its grip on power and managed to deflect demands for change during negotiations with the opposition which eventually failed. Focusing on the main opposition and regime actors and strategies, the article argues that the neopatrimonial characteristics of the regime explain this surprising resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Latin American Policy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses indigenous peoples of Nicaragua, particularly the territories of the Pacific, Central and Northern Regions of Nicaragua (PCN), ownership rights for indigenous Nicaraguans, and governmental violations of the autonomy of indigenous peoples. It also examines the impact of deforestation and displacement of indigenous Nicaraguans.

In Nicaragua almost half of the population lives in substandard housing conditions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this paper examines three housing projects constructed in the same rural community between 1997 and 2010. These case studies illustrate how global trends in international development influence the implementation of local development initiatives. In the case of housing, this is seen in the shift from programs that train individuals in construction skills to build their own homes, to an emphasis on providing credit to finance the construction or improvement of a house. This transition, from a focus on empowerment though training to the right to credit, reflects broader shifts and trends within international development. Acknowledging the increasing role of credit in housing programs, four additional strategies are outlined to help governments meet the housing needs of their citizens: flexibility in housing plans and strategies, state level government support, local government participation and comprehensive partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with the regional trend, the Nicaraguan prison population exceeds the capacity of its penitentiary system by on average twice its capacity, with the sharpest increases occurring over the past five years. Considering that those are the years over which the traditionally socialist Sandinista government has consolidated its control of the presidency and institutions of crime control, this may seem to be a paradox, especially as the Nicaraguan penitentiary law has a clearly rehabilitative take on the function of prison for society. Contrary to the regional punitive trend, ‘re-education’ is advocated throughout the penitentiary system, sentences are relatively low, and participation in reeducational programmes, which range from schooling to cultural and church activities, is often rewarded with considerable sentence reduction. Yet daily life in Nicaraguan prisons is still very much governed through (the threat of) violence. In this paper, I explore how convicted prisoners deploy both ‘violent’ and ‘reeducational’ scripts to survive their prison time. I draw from an in-depth ethnographic engagement with a small group of prisoners from a large city police jail, who are part of a special ‘rehabilitation programme’. For them, survival entails both aiming for early release through participation in re-educational activities, and negotiating a place in the prison hierarchy from the get-go. Inside the overcrowded cells of the city police jail, where the surveillance practices realised by authorities do not provide the level of security required by the prisoners, the latter negotiation often overpowers the reeducational promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nicaraguan autonomous regime has confronted important challenges in the promotion of multi-ethnic citizenship, as it has been hindered by successive national administrations. This contribution reviews the performance of the autonomous regime by exploring the ongoing contentious reform process of what has become a hybrid model of subnational governance. The argument suggests that the FSLN ( Sandinista Front for National Liberation) has continued to press forward its vision of national integration for the Caribbean Coast, and has promoted a political agenda which ultimately aims at subduing autonomy as an avenue for realising the right to self-determination of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous territorial governments in Nicaragua's North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region experience ongoing land and resource contests, in many cases building from longstanding disputes or problems, even after titling. I argue that it is naïve to expect that granting titles - a supposed territorial fix - will resolve conflicts created across decades as a result of ineffective policies and economic pressures. As shown with three demarcated Miskitu territories, tenure insecurity arises from challenges with the state, private firms, non-indigenous colonists, and even from the activities of territorial leaders. These cases suggest the need to move beyond perceptions of Miskitu territories as simple bounded remnants of the past and acknowledge they are complex, porous, trans-local, and transgressed by processes such as migration, urbanisation, and neoliberal economic integration. Indeed, new territorial governments are encouraged by foreign donors and state laws to mirror government agencies and prioritise market linkages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews historical forms of localised government on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and contrasts them with the contemporary struggle to attain a communal form of autonomy undertaken by the region's indigenous population. It suggests that the contemporary autonomy process shares few features with the historical precedents of localised government which are commonly invoked to legitimise it. Instead, its roots can be located in the emergence of a Moskitian nationalism amongst the Miskitu which occurred to counter the assimilating impulse of an increasingly developmentally determined national state during the 1960s under the Somoza dictatorship, and then more thoroughly during the Sandinista revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Nicaragua's process of de-democratization focusing on three events: the gradual emergence of authoritarian elections after 2007; the constitutional reform of 2014, by means of which the political system became in legal terms once again hyper-presidential; and Ortega's capacity to establish a broad policy of alliances through a strongman logic with hegemonic intentions. The conclusions aim to identify the type of regime that has become consolidated in Nicaragua and how its authoritarian tendencies have sought to remove any uncertainty regarding the elections of 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1985, Maxine Molyneux, a famous feminist analyst, asked about the ability of socialist governments to achieve the emancipation of women. On the basis of the case of Nicaragua in the 1980s, and distinguishing between strategic and practical interests, she argued that there can be mobilization without emancipation. With this starting point in mind, thirty-five years after the Sandinista Revolution, this article compares similar municipalities in Brazil, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to investigate how governments that define themselves on the spectrum of the left contribute to "emancipating" women. To do this, I look at the inclusion of women in classical electoral politics, especially in the new spaces of local participation that have been the central axis of the various political projects of the Latin American left in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2009, Nicaragua promotes a specific interinstitutional food safety structure. Out of all instances proposed in said law only municipal committees have been created, which have become the main arena of local politics. By means of social networks analysis, we analyzed the impact level of actors on local politics. The results show government actors with greater impact on initiative prioritization and approval. Although decision taken is not fully decentralized, these spaces replace the technical and economic weaknesses of local governments and avoid overlapping between actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Before the 1980s, LGBT groups in Latin America were largely (though not entirely) excluded from the state. This article argues that a combination of factors-democratization, social movement demands, neoliberal globalization and its accompanying discourse of modernity-has led many state actors to seek to incorporate LGBT groups into the state. Considering two cases of self-proclaimed revolutionary parties, Mexico's PRI and Nicaragua's FSLN, the article examines how and why these parties incorporated LGBT organizations and what impact such incorporation had on the LGBT groups themselves. In both countries, LGBT groups benefited from clientelistic resources at the same time that they found themselves deradicalizing, often forced to accept visibility without rights. But in Nicaragua, a more recent revolutionary experience and ties to a combative, autonomous feminist movement have allowed some LGBT activists to resist the state's efforts to co-opt their movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]