Clinic Closing

[Ashley_y_Emerson]

Nicaragua orders expulsion of U.S. nurse who runs clinic
BY GLENN GARVIN
ggarvin@herald.com

MANAGUA -- For the second time in two years, President Arnoldo Alemán's government has ordered the expulsion of an American after a political clash.

Dorothy Granada, a 70-year-old nurse from Santa Cruz, Calif., will be deported if she doesn't leave Nicaragua voluntarily, government officials said late Wednesday.

The officials accused Granada, who runs a small medical clinic in a jungle village 150 miles northeast of here, of treating wounded members of a leftist paramilitary group and performing illegal abortions. They also shut down her clinic.

Granada has been in hiding since last Friday, when she learned a warrant had been issued for her arrest. But friends and supporters both here and in the United States denied the charges and said the deportation order is Alemán's revenge for a public snub aimed at him by a member of the women's cooperative that operates the clinic.

``This is so unjust, and the people who are really losing are the villagers who depend on Dorothy's clinic,'' said her friend María Eufemia Woo. ``It was the only medical care for 30,000 people in that region.''

Granada is the second American woman expelled from Nicaragua after a political confrontation with Alemán. A West Palm Beach woman was deported in November 1998 after an e-mail message she wrote accusing Alemán of stealing supplies intended for victims of Hurricane Mitch was circulated on the Internet.

The U.S. Embassy here was quiet about that deportation. But American officials have complained that the Nicaraguan government has failed to offer any explanation for the order to expel Granada.

Granada originally came to Nicaragua in 1985, at the height of the country's civil war, as part of a leftist anti-war group. She returned in 1990 to open the clinic in Mulukukú, a village in a remote jungle area suffering grinding poverty and violent bandits.

Her problems with the government began on Nov. 14, when Alemán flew to Mulukukú with Taiwanese diplomats to inaugurate a housing project built with Taipei's aid. Local officials there told him Granada's clinic refused to treat patients unless they swore allegiance to the leftist Sandinista party, the conservative president's archenemies.

When Alemán mentioned the complaints during his speech and said the government would investigate them, it triggered an exchange of insults with the vice president of the women's cooperative that operates the clinic. Later she conspicuously delivered a thank-you present to the senior Taiwanese diplomat at the ceremony, but nothing to Alemán.

Granada was not present during the snub, but government investigators who poured into Mulukukú the next day accused her of performing abortions -- illegal here -- and treating wounded members of a leftist group that robs banks and carries out kidnappings in the region.



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