BREAKING NEWS: REALLY GOOD PIZZA

Finally a restaurant has opened in Tegucigalpa with really good pizza!!  Piola (***/$$, tel. 243.0645/42, www.piola.it) recently opened at the new Novo Centro mall behind Los Proceres.  It's a franchise restaurant with locations in the USA and several Latin American countries.  I won't hold being a franchise against it in this case since the quality of the pizza more than compensates.  The key here is that the restaurant has a authentic wood burning pizza oven and the pizza's quality reflects it.  The crusts are thin and slightly charred, and the ingredients are all premium quality.  The list of pizza options is extensive.  I had a pizza with shrimp and mushrooms, and my children had one with artichokes, olives, and feta cheese.  Both were delicious.  The small pizzas (four slices) run in the L.180-230 range and the medium pizzas (six slices) are around L.300.  The menu also has pastas, etc., but really, this the place to come for pizza!  The service was good, and my only complaint is that I found the music a little too pulsating for my taste.

Piola's is now on my list of Don Godo's favorites.

Rapidly going downhill

In the July/August issue of 'Foreign Policy' (FP) magazine, the cover story is 'Failed States'.  There is a smaller article within the main feature called 'Watch List' in which Honduras and Guatemala are cited as two of four countries in 'big trouble'.  The other two are Nigeria and Iran.

The article states: "A mere 1 percent of South American cocaine went through Central America as recently as 2007; today, somewhere between 60 and 90 percent does.  Cartels from Mexico,...have moved south, while Columbian traffickers have moved north."

It goes on to say that the only place where the violence may be worse than Guatemala is neighboring Honduras where "the country of just 7.3 million sees 15 murders per day...the state has very limited control over entire chunks of the territory...they are very weak states by almost any indicator."

One authority is cited as saying that the task is daunting because "a lot of people in the Honduran Elite are doing business with drug traffickers."

This says a lot and paints a very pessimistic picture, but I truly hope our future in Honduras will not be so bleak...

Pepe wake up!!!

The more things change, the more they stay the same

I was in Managua a couple of weeks ago on business, and couldn't help thinking about while some things change, they are still the same...There's a sad consistency to history repeating itself.

You may remember that the Sandinista revolution was all about change...The dictator Somoza was corrupt and had his hand in every business.  Now it seems that Daniel Ortega (and the Sandanistas) has become quite the businessman.  He owns a hotel, bank, oil company, and the list goes on and on.  He seems to have his hand in everything.  And guess what?  Just like good ole Somoza didn't want to give up power, Ortega doesn't  want to give up power either...so the Sandanistas rigged the last municipal elections, and had the Surpreme Court rule that the constitution didn't mean what it said regarding the president's ability to run for reelection.

At least one local has seen the irony in all this.  There is ton of FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional) graffiti everywhere.  It seems someone has been busy with a paint brush turning the S in FSLN into a $ sign, so that now much of the graffiti reads F$LN.

VIVA F$LN!