Iranian in Nicaragua studying the banana industry

I am pretty sure that I remain the only American reporter to have traveled to leftist President Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua to find out what the Iranian government is doing there. (WoW!)

I apologize if I missed something out there. While I appreciated having the exclusive at the time, more than a year after my travels I continue to wonder why there there is such a persistent lack of curiosity from my mainstream press corps colleagues.

The press, quite rightly, has swarmed like migrating wildebeest all over the the Islamic Republic of Iran’s burgeoning economic and diplomatic ties to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and, to a certain degree, Iran’s spread to other anti-U.S. countries in South America, such as Bolivia. But with the exception of my own coverage, there’s been hardly a peep about the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planted the Iranian flag so far north in Nicaragua as soon as the time-tested American nemesis Daniel Ortega took office in January 2007. In fact, Ahmadinejad considered Ortega’s ascension so important that he was in Nicaragua to attend the inauguration. Within months, Iran was promising hundreds of millions in economic projects — and quickly set up a diplomatic mission in a tony Managua neighborhood where it could all supposedly be coordinated. Now Iran is extending its reach even further north, right into Mexico City with equally under-covered proposals to vastly expand tenuous ties to America’s immediate southern neighbor. More crap?