Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) told the Biloxi Sun Herald July 2 he witnessed a confrontation between John McCain and a Nicaraguan Sandinista leader—a lieutenant of President Daniel Ortega—during a 1987 diplomatic mission in which the Arizona senator "got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him." In a tense atmosphere, as the US was pressing Nicaragua "pretty hard," Cochran noticed a disturbance at the meeting table in a room lined with armed personnel:

Taking a tip from their counterparts in Colombia, young opponents of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua used Facebook to launch a protest campaign—under the slogan "Democracy yes, dictatorship no." A June 20 protest brought out some 4,000 in downtown Managua in support of former Sandinsita commandante Dora María Téllez, who ended a 12-day public hunger strike four days earlier at the request of her doctors. (Miami Herald, June 22) Téllez led a new march of several thousand through Managua June 27, accusing Ortega's government of a "totalitarian vocation." (Nuevo Diario, Managua, June 28)

On May 28, a court in Salamá, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, sentenced five former members of the Civil Patrols, a paramilitary network established by the army during the counter-insurgency war, each to 780 years in prison for the killing of 26 indigenous Maya villagers in the 1982 Río Negro massacre, in which 177 women and children lost their lives. The five, former Civil Patrol members from the hamlet of Xococ, will serve 30 years, the maximum allowed by law, and will have to pay damages to the families of the victims. Arrest orders have also been issued for army captain José Antonio Solares, who oversaw the patrol and remains at large.

From Reuters, May 22:

Tito Santana, one of the last tribal kings in the Americas, has been driven into exile from his lands deep in the Panamanian jungle by a fight over a hydroelectric project that has divided his tiny kingdom.

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega is under scrutiny for supposed links to Colombia's FARC guerillas. In one "partially decoded" February e-mail supposedly recovered from the computer of late FARC commander Raúl Reyes, fellow FARC director Iván Márquez wrote that Ortega could send via Venezuela's Hugo Chávez "some old caucheras they are keeping there [in Nicaragua], and he believes still function." Cauchera is said to be code for rifles.

May 5 marked the beginning of an intended thirty-day strike, with public transport workers and truckers in Nicaragua protesting rising fuel costs and the lack of government impetus to do anything about it. With road blockades in several places in Managua and almost no public intercity transport allowed whatsoever, Nicaragua is at an effective standstill. Containers full of goods sit stalled on the sides of highways, and even sports teams have canceled weekend matches. When baseball is put on hold in Nicaragua, you know it is serious.

From ElSalvadorSolidarity.org via Upside Down World, May 8:

On Friday May 2, Hector Antonio Ventura was assassinated in the community of Valle Verde, Suchitoto. Ventura was the youngest of the 14 political prisoners captured in Suchitoto on July 2, 2007. According to preliminary reports, Ventura was stabbed to death. Another victim, who was with Ventura, was attacked but survived. Reports say that the assailants were at least two men, who entered the back room of the house where Ventura and his friend slept and attacked them.

At an emergency food-security summit held May 7 in Managua, 14 Latin American and Caribbean nations convened under the umbrella of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega called the food crisis an "epic problem" caused by the "tyranny of global capitalism." At the conclusion of the summit, all but two participating nations signed a joint resolution that incorporated specific language supporting ALBA. Costa Rica and El Salvador abstained from signing. (CSM, May 8)