RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-coronavirus-spreads-in-nicaragua-official-denials-amplify-risk-11590246000

Nicaragua has become a coronavirus hot spot in Latin America but its authoritarian leader is endangering public health by ignoring the threat and hiding infection data, according to doctors and relatives of victims.

President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have refused to introduce quarantines or limits on commerce. “Staying at home is the way to the country’s destruction,” Mr. Ortega said at a rare appearance to deliver a May Day speech.

As of Monday, Nicaragua, with a population of more than six million, had recognized only 25 coronavirus cases and 8 fatalities—and Mr. Ortega declared: “We have been able to counter the pandemic.”

The following day, under pressure from doctors and activists, and facing an overwhelmed health system, the Health Ministry updated its numbers to 254 cases and 17 deaths, without explanation.

That was well short of the count by the Citizen’s Observatory, a watchdog group of doctors and experts, which said on Tuesday it had verified 1,594 cases of Covid-19 in Nicaragua and 351 deaths. Videos posted on social media, local news reports and accounts from relatives of victims suggest the country’s health system is overwhelmed, with hospitals crammed with victims.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-young-country-in-the-coronavirus-age-11590188813?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

A fanfare of flutes and drums. A line of waiflike children clapping in rhythm. Former fighters with white beards singing in unison the anthem of free Bengal. And, stretched between bamboo poles, yellow banners proclaiming: “Welcome Back to Jessore, Veteran Bernard-Henri Lévy!”

I was here almost 50 years ago. I had answered André Malraux’s call to French youth to form an international brigade similar to that of the Spanish Civil War, this time to oppose the crimes of the Pakistani army in what was known as East Pakistan until it declared independence in March 1971. I landed in Kolkata, crossed the border in Satkhira, and ended up 45 miles north in Jessore, which was being pounded by bombs and machine-gun fire.

Then, it hardly qualified as a city. The airport is new. So is the tangle of colonial-era houses, unfinished new buildings and mud huts, and the population of ragged children, zebu cattle dealers, and discouraged beggars. But I recognize the pale sky and the tangy fragrance commingled with cooked coconut oil—and, on leaving the bazaar, the same bleak plain of rice paddies. This is the Bangladesh of my 20s.

Akim Mukherjee was the young Maoist leader who picked me up in Satkhira. Half a century later, I gave his name to Mofidul Hoque of the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, the capital. He passed it along to the police, who had some trouble finding Akim—the underground Communists of the time went by a dizzying number of noms de guerre. But now here I am at the village house where Akim and I spent a few nights before taking off over marshes of rice and blood in search of Marxist-Leninist brochures, of which Bangladesh was a major producer—research for my first book, later published as “Les Indes Rouges.”