Nicaragua’s First Black Presidential Candidate George Henriquez visits the Hall.
George Henriquez the first black Presidential Candidate from Nicaragua paid a visit to the Cricket Hall of Fame on Sunday February 27. He was here to attend the Cricket Hall of Fame’s Economic Investment Conference sponsored byBlue Mahoe Capital Partners Inc. Speakers included Chair and CEO of Blue Mahoe Capital Mr. David Mullings. Edwin Vargas Connecticut State Rep. Barbados Consul General Honorable Mackie Holder and Consul General Howie Prince from St Vincent.
Moderators were Hartford’s very own Donnavon Longmore , Jasson Walker from Atlanta Georgia and Tisha Thompson Talent queen from Toronto Canada. Program coordinator was Claudette Graham Question of the day was “Is the Next Investment Nirvana.Caribbean
George Henríquez is making history as he fights for the rights of marginalized Black and Indigenous populations of the Atlantic Coast.
May 25, 2021, 12:01am
On May 25th a reckoning with systemic racism was reignited. It’s still here — and so are we.
The small town of Bluefields on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast is over 3,000 miles from Minneapolis, but when the video of George Floyd’s murder was first shown on local television, a group of Black Nicaraguans began to cry.
“All of us put ourselves in that position, thinking, you know, this could have been me just because of the way I look, and where I come from,” said George Henríquez, recalling the day he and his friends initially saw the footage. “It really had an emotional effect on us Blacks living in the diaspora.”
It hit Henríquez especially hard, not only because of the color of his skin, or the fact that he and Floyd share the same first name, but because he has become a police target himself as a prominent organizer and activist in the growing opposition movement to Nicaragua’s authoritarian president, Daniel Ortega.
“I have the police constantly by my house, during the morning, during the evening, during the night,” he said in a telephone interview with VICE World News, speaking in English inflected with the cadence and syntax of Nicaragua’s Afro-descendants. “And they line up these shotguns and AKs, they are standing in front of my house guaranteeing that I don’t come out to assist in some meeting or whatnot.”
That police harassment might have scared him away from his activism. Instead, he plunged in further.
In January, he announced that he would compete against other opposition leaders in the race to select a single candidate to challenge Ortega in the November 7 general election. His quest is quixotic, but the visibility his ambition brings to Nicaragua’s long-marginalized Afro-descendant population may help to shatter long-held prejudices against his community.
Some of the initial reactions to his candidacy suggested just how difficult that may be.
