{"id":193,"date":"2006-11-07T07:57:11","date_gmt":"2006-11-07T06:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=193"},"modified":"2006-11-07T07:57:11","modified_gmt":"2006-11-07T06:57:11","slug":"forgotten-world-42-nicaragua","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=193","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten world (42): Nicaragua"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nicaragua\">Nicaragua<\/a> was ruled by the Somoza family with US backing between 1937 and the Sandinista revolution in 1979. By 1990, the Sandinistas were defeated in elections held as part of a peace agreement with the US-sponsored counter-revolutionaries known as the Contras.<br \/>\nToday Nicaragua is the second poorest country in Latin America. The average annual income is $750 (\u00a3398), around 75% of the population lives on less than $2 a day, unemployment is close to 50%, and income inequality is pronounced. Although nearly 80% of its foreign debts were cancelled, its internal debt is more than $6.5bn.<br \/>\nThe country has faced devastating natural disasters and massive political corruption, but has made great strides to improve health and education standards. Disasters, such as Hurricane Mitch, and population growth have undercut economic gains: according to the EU, more people are living in poverty now than in 1993.<br \/>\nThis has led to the astonishing idea [more information <a href=\"http:\/\/environment.guardian.co.uk\/conservation\/story\/0,,1887182,00.html\">here<\/a>] that Nicaragua should build a rival to the Panama Canal enabling huge container ships to pass between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. This mega-engineering project would cost some $20 billion and take 10 years to complete. Meanwhile Panama has voted in a referendum to widen its canal  [more information <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/international\/story\/0,,1929714,00.html\">here<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nicaragua was ruled by the Somoza family with US backing between 1937 and the Sandinista revolution in 1979. By 1990, the Sandinistas were defeated in elections held as part of a peace agreement with the US-sponsored counter-revolutionaries known as the Contras. Today Nicaragua is the second poorest country in Latin America. The average annual income [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}