NPR Should ask Where Nicaraguan Non-Profits’ Money Comes From

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By John Perry – May 24, 2021
Imagine what would happen if the US media discovered that a candidate in the mid-term elections was under investigation by the FBI for receiving money from a foreign government. Then, suppose it was one thatâs hostile to the US, perhaps Syria or Iran, and that the same government was also covertly funding election coverage in, say, Fox News. How would the rest of the media respond? By claiming that the candidateâs democratic rights were under threat from the FBI? Or by expressing shock and horror at foreign interference in US elections and urging the FBI to arrest the culprits?
The answer is obvious, but why arenât the shock and horror also evident when US media identify foreign meddling in an election somewhere else? If the meddling is by the US government, ever quick to accuse Russia if thereâs any suggestion that itâs interfering in US politics, then there is also gross hypocrisy to be exposed. As a Scottish minister of justice once said (in relation to the USâs contorted involvement in Libya), âthe US sadly often adopts a position of seeking to enforce standards on others that it will not accept or abide by itself.â Yet time and again the US media also fail to hold the government to the standards they apply to other countries.
Take the case of Nicaragua. It has elections coming in November and has just introduced reforms to make its electoral process clearer and improve the tracking of the results so that any scope for fraudulence is further minimized. Another reform is a âforeign agentsâ law which prohibits foreign funding of politicians and obliges NGOs receiving money from abroad to show how it is being used. It is similar too but less stringent than the USâs own Foreign Agents Registration Act (known as FARA), passed originally in 1938 and now accompanied by at least four other related laws. Despite these precedents, the US State Department, in full hypocrisy mode, said in February that the new law âdrives Nicaragua toward dictatorship, silencing independent voicesâ. It has also criticized Nicaragua for suppressing political demonstrations when it merely requires organizers to get police permission, even while the US has itself been criticized recently by a United Nations expert for âthe wave of anti-protest lawsâ that is âspreading through the countryâ.
RELATED CONTENT: Nicaraguan Opposition Candidate Chamorro Received USAID Money
This week, a budding presidential election candidate and head of an NGO, Cristiana Chamorro, was under investigation by Nicaraguaâs interior ministry for incorrect use of foreign funding. Chamorro was head of a non-profit, the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, which she closed in February saying that she refused to comply with the foreign agents law. The US State Department cited this as evidence that Ortega intends to âtake the country further away from free and fair elections in Novemberâ, describing the Chamorro foundation as a âbastion of free expressionâ. The Chamorros, one of Nicaraguaâs richest and most influential families, also control the only daily newspaper, La Prensa, as well as the digital newspaper Confidencial; both are deeply hostile to the Sandinista government and are widely quoted by the international press.
The Chamorro foundation is being investigated because it has received over US$6 million from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) since 2015, of which US$3.7 million is specifically to influence this yearâs Nicaraguan elections. The funding is passed on to some 25 opposition media outlets, several owned by the Chamorro family itself. For example, Confidencialand Esta Semana, both owned by Cristiana Chamorroâs brother, Carlos Fernando Chamorro who is also under investigation, received about US$2 million. The Chamorros have received US money from other sources too: for example, both Confidencial and their think tank Cinco received funds from the National Endowment for Democracy (another US government agency) in the run-up to the violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018. Even in 2021, USAID money has been distributed to opposition media which were important players in the violence three years ago.
How was the announcement of the Chamorro investigation handled by the US media? NPR led the way by immediately following the State Departmentâs line. Its report from Mexico by correspondent Carrie Kahn, headed Ortega Targets Opposition Figures, called the investigation âthe latest move by President Daniel Ortega to crackdown on criticsâ ahead of the elections. Kahn seems to have written little about Nicaragua before except, ten days earlier, when she claimed that âcitizens are working to expose Covidâs real toll in Nicaragua as leaders claim successâ, without making it clear that the âcitizensâ are small opposition political groups, or that her co-writer on that story, Wilfredo Miranda, also writes for Confidencial.
In her latest piece, Kahn found no reason to mention that in the United States a similar NGO to Chamorroâs would have to comply with similar legislation. Nor did she point out that the US government has made numerous recent investigations of foreign funding under FARA and related regulations, while this is believed to be the first use of Nicaraguaâs new law. The US government has also been accused of using these investigations to âattackâ non-profit bodies whose work appears to challenge government policies, for example on environmental issues. In other words, Nicaragua is simply making the same checks on foreign influence on its elections that would be made in the United States and in many other countries.
Even more bizarrely, NPR never thought to ask where the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundationâs money actually comes from. Unsurprisingly, when the State Department praised the foundation, it failed to mention that the US government gives it millions of dollars each year. Yet an independent journalist such as Kahn should surely have asked this very basic question, especially as this was the reason for the interior ministryâs investigation and the funding sources can be found in public documents.
Instead of investigating the source of Cristiana Chamorroâs money, NPR unquestioningly repeats her claim that âshe has always been honest and transparent in her foundationâs accountingâ. NPR goes on to say that âthe police raids and the allegations of money laundering against Cristiana Chamorro are the latest moves by Ortega to quash the opposition and close avenues for valid candidacies in the upcoming presidential raceâ. It gives no credence to their being legitimate investigations of the kind that might be carried out in similar circumstances in the US: instead, it is taken for granted that Nicaraguaâs interior ministry is simply up to no good. NPR is committed to âaccuracyâ, âfairnessâ and âcompletenessâ in its reporting. Yet its failure to ask basic questions in this case has produced a one-sided picture that reinforces the false image of Nicaragua portrayed by its opposition politicians and by the US State Department.
Featured image: Cristiana Chamorro is seen outside Nicaraguaâs Ministry of the Interior after being accused of money laundering on Thursday. Inti Ocon/AFP via Getty Images.
John Perry is a writer based in Masaya, Nicaragua whose work has appeared in the Nation, the London Review of Books, and many other publications.
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