Public Letter From Peter Christopher to Phil Hughes

September 18, 2008

(Slightly Revised November 20, 2008)

To the independent reader:

Libel was posted by Phil Hughes on nicaliving.com here (as user "admin") in an attempt to discredit me. While I'm not sure whether at this point Phil Hughes has probably lost most of his following after gueguense's expose blog phil-hughes.com, I nevertheless think I should set the record straight from my own perspective. I have quoted the passages below. This libel was posted, after I had shared information that encouraged caution be employed by potential investors in and residents of Nicaragua, in their personal and business relations in Nicaragua. Presumably, Phil Hughes attempted to discredit me because he saw the information I presented to threaten his ability to profit from his websites and realty in Nicaragua. [Additional libel at here and here and not quoted on this page]

After the quotation of the libel, on this very page, appears my resonse to Phil Hughes. Phil Hughes is a person with whom I formerly shared information about my experience in Nicaragua when I lived there. I spoke with him in person and corresponded online, in both cases in good faith, with the intention of sharing our perspectives on Nicargua so that we could both live there in the ways that contributed to the local community and also that were socially and ecologically sustainable and meaningful. His posts appeared on the forum nicaliving.com. I respond here because Mr. Phil Hughes has already distinguished himself with his inability to maintain administrative integrity on the website he manages, nicaliving.com. I encourage users to respond in the following forums: Central America Forum (central-america-forum.com) or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nicaraguaforum/ if they wish to respond publicly, or to me privately at CONTACT @At PETERCHRISTOPHER dot COM, and I encourage users to avoid any participation in the website nicaliving.com, by which they implicitly support its pattern of censorship, harassment, misinformation and libel.

-Peter Christopher

September 18, 2008

Hello Mr. Phil Hughes (and any readers in the general public).

Four years ago you presented Nicaragua on your website in an overly favorable light, and you convinced me with that representation and then in personal conversation to consider Nicaragua as a place for me to live. Later, I actually decided to move there myself. You and I continued to keep in touch. I contributed to your online forum. I wrote stories of my experiences in Nicaragua, suggestions on how to live there, and analyses of how to understand the local culture. You then condoned harassment that ensued when others broke your site rules and attacked me personally online. I took that in stride. However, when you or others began censored my posts, I recognized that to some extent through censorship - but even more so through misinformation and by condoning of harassment of critical perspectives - that you had been deliberately presenting a biased version of Nicaragua throughout the history of your website. I reconsidered my participation on your forum. I deleted those of my posts that I could delete. I would have deleted them all, but your configuration of the website did not allow the user to do so. I requested that you and/or one of your administrators delete my posts and/or replace the text with, "text deleted at author's request" and I even offered to pay a reasonable hourly wage for the inconvenience. You refused to allow that.

Then one year ago you allowed the user GranadaSherif to post libel about me on your website. You participated in the conversation. You did not even answer my contact attempts to you regarding the libel. Now you even have the following page written by your sub-administrator on your own website, Jon Berger, who actually got out of his armchair to ask around instead of listening to rumors as you had..

On November 11, in response to Mr. Berger's letter on your site indicating that he was unable to find any evidence to support Sherif's and your libel, I wrote a response to Jon Berger of San Juan Del Sur on your website nicaliving. You (or possibly your subadministrator?) deleted it and banned me from the website for good. And you have not removed any of the libel on your website.

Mr. Hughes, your actions have proceeded over five years from generous, to naively optimistic, to misleading, to self-serving, to delusional, to illegal. Please stop propogating untrue and hurtful information for your own self-interest.

Now let us take a look at the details of your recent entries from this past few months.

On your website nicaliving.com, here, you have misrepresented the conversation we had in Esteli several years ago (not to mention breaking the basic norm shared among civilized persons to refrain from publicly sharing the content of confidential conversations without permission). You have made several errors in your characterization of the conversation. Among them, you had asked whether we were planning to get an abortion (not "do anything"), and I said that we had no plans to.  As well, "They want to have a gringo get them pregnant" were your words.  I simply confirmed that she we wanted to proceed with the pregnancy and that I had not objected.

In your blog entry as user 'admin' on nicaliving.com here, you further state that I, Peter Christopher, "liked to be with young daughters of the locals" and that this was the "a likely cause of some of those "management problems" ". You claim this "information" was told to you by "multiple people ... rather independently." One presumes that you fully intend for the reader to infer that you are politely refererring to sexual abuse of children, as the rumor is described elsewhere on the nicaliving.com website you control? How polite of you to tone down your discourse. However, the hypothoses you shared are factually incorrect.

Hypotheses must be verified in reality to know whether they are correct, Mr. Hughes. You've heard from authoritative sources? If you carefully trace the source of those supposedly independent accounts, you will find that they originate with the same individual or small group of individuals who were lying, transmitted through your very website and made by some appearances "acceptable" by your very acceptance of it and welcoming of the slander as if it were truth. But of course to investigate actual reality, you would have to leave your office chair. You are showing about as much cleverness as the stereotypical Americans you appear to hate, who sees the same thing on three news channels and thus assume that Obama and McCain are the obvious choices to lead their country.

Then you state, "certain patterns of behavior just don't work whether you are in Nicaragua [...]" |Unfortunately, by your treatment of the subject over the past two years, you have entirely lost the connection to what behaviors those were, and what behaviors those weren't, that don't work in Nicaragua. The behaviors that don't work in Nicaragua are to place too much trust in locals, to be optimistic at all economically of even breaking even using honest business relations, to believe that the same societal rules apply to locals and foreigners, to live alone, to stay outside in the countryside past late afternoon, and to place disproportionate hope in the mantra that being generous, open and kind to locals will be reciprocated by them. Have you become distracted by a personal vendetta you have against me? Should I have paid more careful attention the first time we met in person, when you told me, "Oh, it's YOU. I know from your nicaliving profile that you are a Sagittarius, and me being a Scorpio: ooh, we'll never get along" ? I had thought that had been a joke. Or do we need to add another caution to the list - to be cautious of the expatriates who present optimistic perspectives on the civility of Nicaragua and also have some land to sell ?

In spite of (and perhaps due to) your fictitious conversations and circular "fact" finding proofs, you know precious little of the history or present of my relationship with Yasmina and Gloria.  Perhaps you should stick to commenting on topics where you know something (misinformation by wealthy and partial American media perhaps?)

Do you hope that by fraudulently discrediting me and the analyses I have made of the unsuitability of the Nicaraguan culture as a context for doing business, that you will be able to find a buyer for the properties for which you overpaid? (I read the escritura for the property you bought east of the Esteli hospital -- it's a public document in the registro -- it states clearly in simple Spanish how you paid for two properties and only got one, while the agent -- who you thought was the owner -- got the other -- all of which is denied here in another instance of misinformation by you.) Or is it true after all that you cannot advance beyond your astrological sign?

I cannot imagine what else might be at the heart of your systematic abuse of the priviledge of website ownership.

You wrote in your site's motto, "Make information on Nicaragua available, particularly to English-speaking people who have or will move there". When you wrote to make information available and when you personally made misleading, incorrect, libelous information available; when you then wrote "Content is a cooperative effort from this same community" and then were responsible for the deletion of relevant analyses I and others had made about the caution one must employ when interacting with Nicaraguan culture, whose interest did you have in mind? Was it Eric Volz's? Was it Ken Kinzel's Was it Lemon Grove's? Was it Jeremy Harrison-Smith's? Was it the interest of the multitude of un-named visitors to Nicaragua and residents of the country whose stories we do not even know?

It's a shame, that with a mission like your stated mission on nicaliving.com, with financial resources like yours, and a community of willing online contributors like you have had at your website, that you have still managed to put your own profiteering motives ahead of journalistic integrity. As a result, people are dead, who might still be alive had they not been misinformed by your distortion of the reality that Nicaragua is not a civil society. As a result, people are physically and emotionally wounded, who might have taken more careful measures to protect themselves. As a result, people who don't have the deep pockets you do have lost thousands and thousands of dollars of hard-earned money in fraud and robbery in Nicaragua, when they could have been better-prepared, or not gone to Nicaragua at all.

I don't claim that you weren't brave to go to Nicaragua. You were brave to go there. I don't say you haven't had some good accomplishments there, like meeting a woman with whom you can share responsibilities and, one assumes, more. But your success with Ana is dependent on the learning you had with many others. Likewise, you've made some property purchases that you can be proud of. But your increasing success is built on many errors you have made in business in Nicaragua that cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. You may have some business contacts you can depend on somewhat now, but how many dozens of people stole from you in the process of building that network when you were trying to rely on them? You haven't been forthright about your learning process on your website. You haven't been honest about just how much money you've had to risk, and how little of it is left in even semi-liquid equity that you control. Most people who are considering going to Nicaragua don't have the substantial wealth you have, to be able to afford to blow a half million dollars and, if it doesn't work out, shrug it off. Nicaragua isn't only cheap: it's expensive. Nicaraguan reality isn't only sincere: it's sinister. Nicaraguan women and workers are not only naive: they're sophisticated. It's somewhat excusable if you never have been able to accept your own losses, on your own or in public, and somewhat excusable if you have not fully understood the difficult cultural conditions in Nicaragua that led to those losses. But to have condoned the harassment of me when I did present information on those cultural complexities was wrong of you. Condoning libel of me was wrong of you. And libeling me yourself was wrong of you.

Your mischaracterization of me on your website nicaliving.com is not a testament to the inaccuracy of my thesis of the indemic social breakdown of Nicaragua. Your mischaracterization of me is a testament that shows that I was right. Perhaps, like Sherif El-Dibani, you were unknowingly relying on and spreading rumors that some bitter local people generated, giving their barbaric fabrications a reach that the originators of those stories could not imagine. That's the optimistic scenerario. Or perhaps, it is even worse than that: perhaps not only is it the local Nicaraguans who are predatory, but you and the other expatriates who hope to make a buck off the next gringo who finds your websites and wants to invest his hard-earned savings to make a difference.

--

I believe I did make some statements on nicaliving.com that were aggresive, and slight overgeneratlizations or slight exaggerations. Partly I made them in hopes to shake people up enough to employ caution using their expectations of behavior from civil society in (uncivil) Nicarargua. Mostly I made those statements in the flame war started by Pete and Moskito Alan (site administrators employed by you, Phil Hughes), and I am ashamed of having been caught off my guard in that way. Yes, I was offended by Pete; yes, I did challenge him to a machete duel; no, he did not show up. Since Alan is now dead, it's only you and Pete left, should either or both of you be interested in giving me the satisfaction I asked for then.. Yes, you and your fellow website administrators pushed me off guard. I hope that I am now centered enough that it won't happen again. Now you've had almost two years to acknowledge your mistakes. Are you ready to do so?

I have never misled anyone on nicaliving.com or in any public forum.  I have never censored opinions in that forum or any other forum for my own self-interest, financial or otherwise.  I have never promulgated or condoned lies to attempt to excuse and justify physical violence. I have never condoned personal attacks or defamation of anyone on this forum or any forum, or ever libeled or slandered anyone in any public forum.

Based upon my analysis and those of others who have witnessed your five years of managing the website nicaliving.com, you can't truthfully say the same thing.

I have also never related the contents of any conversations I had with anyone that were conducted in accordance with the norms of civil confidentiality.

(I request the independent reader to remember the bottom line: Phil Hughes is an individual who seeks to make a profit with his Nicaragua-related websites (http://nicaplaza, http://re.nicaplaza, and http://nicaliving) , as a real estate agent (click and scroll down to Phil Hughes) and through resale/lease of his Nicaraguan properties (click for one of them). When he saw that I was posting information about Nicaragua that was leading people to question the fictitious, self-serving representation of Nicaragua that he and others had crafted online, he condoned online harassment of me by others on his supposedly civil supposedly collaborative website, condoned libel of me by others, and proceeded with his own attempt to intimidate and discredit me with his own libel. This wasn't the only example of censorship and banning by Mr. Hughes: On October 31 of this year, I also received news from another nicaliving member who, after articulately expressing caution about Nicaragua, was immediately censored and banned from nicaliving - is what I received from that banned member.)

Peter Christopher