For democracy, it’s a time of swimming against the tide
Tim Sullivan, 12 July 2021
The old Nicaraguan revolutionary, with his receding hairline and the goatee that he had finally let turn grey, spoke calmly into the camera as police swarmed toward his house, hidden behind a high wall in a leafy Managua neighborhood. Surveillance drones, he said, were watching overhead.
Decades earlier, Hugo Torres had been a revered guerrilla in the fight against right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza. In 1974, he’d taken a group of top officials hostage, then traded them for the release of imprisoned comrades. Among those prisoners was Daniel Ortega, a Marxist bank robber who would become Nicaragua’s elected president and later its authoritarian ruler. Continue reading “Article: For democracy, it’s a time of swimming against the tide”
It was a bleak moment for the oil industry. U.S. shale companies were failing by the dozen. Petrostates were on the brink of bankruptcy. Texas roughnecks and Kuwaiti princes alike had watched helplessly for months as the commodity that was their lifeblood tumbled to prices that had until recently seemed unthinkable. Below $50 a barrel, then below $40, then below $30.