Nicaragua talks hangs in limbo:
Lat/Am
Masaya, a city battling at the front lines of Nicaragua’s heated anti-government protests, once again became the scene of fierce street battles that a rights group said saw one man die of a bullet wound to the heart.
Firearm bursts rang out on Saturday in the city home to 100,000 people, where riots that started midday grew increasingly violent as masked demonstrators wielding homemade mortars and slingshots fought to fend off armed security forces.
Alvaro Leiva, head of the Nicaraguan Association for the Protection of Human Rights (ANPDH), said at least one sexagenarian had died after a bullet struck his heart.
Leiva said the gunman was a sniper — implying a member of Ortega’s security forces or government-backed vigilantes.
The mortal wound came hours after the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) had raised to 137 the death toll in the Central American country, where demonstrations demanding President Daniel Ortega’s ouster have raged since April 18.
Meanwhile, dozens of roadblocks set up on Nicaragua’s highways by protesters opposing President Ortega’s government have stranded about 6,000 transport trucks carrying goods to other Central American countries, a transport official said Saturday.
Raul Alfaro, president of the Salvadoran Association of International Freight Carriers, called on protesters to let the trucks pass and urged countries in the region to not send more cargo vehicles through Nicaragua, which has seen a wave of anti-government demonstrations starting in mid-April. (Agencies)
Ortega
Colombia sentences 28 ex-fighters: A Colombian court has sentenced 28 former paramilitary fighters to “alternative penalties” for acts committed from 1997 to 2006 that claimed some 6,000 victims, the public prosecutor’s office said Saturday.
The 28 were convicted of acts including homicide, forced disappearances and displacements, and gender-based violence, “in patterns of systematic, widespread and repeated criminality,” said a statement from the prosecutor’s office.
This, it went on, was “part of an established directive aimed at violently gaining territory, regardless of the impact on the civilian population, especially of women, Afro-Colombians and indigenous people.” (AFP)