Central America

Following a historic election victory by the progressive Semilla Party in Guatemala, Latino Rebels Radio producer Oscar Fernandez steps in as guest host to welcome Marco Fonseca, Instructor of Latin American and International Studies at York University in Canada, to discuss how this election almost didn’t happen.

Bernardo Arévalo of the progressive Movimiento Semilla won just 11 percent of the vote in the presidential election’s first round on June 25, but it was enough to give him the surprise second slot in the August 20 runoff ballot.

Guatemalan agents and police raided the offices of the Seed Movement of presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo on Friday as part of an investigation into alleged wrongdoing in the party’s formation.

Left-of-center opposition legislator Bernardo Arévalo shattered all forecasts, seizing second place in Guatemala’s presidential elections on Sunday and advancing to an August runoff. Arévalo will face political boss Sandra Torres.

This week, Latino Rebels Radio is proud to present the first episode of SOS Central America, hosted by Maria Martin, creator and founding team member of Latino USA.

After Zamora’s sentence, Brian A. Nichols, Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, stated that “This verdict threatens independent journalism and freedom of expression in Guatemala.”

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — A Guatemalan tribunal sentenced newspaper founder José Rubén Zamora to six years in prison Wednesday in a money laundering case, concluding a trial that press freedom groups decried as a political persecution aimed at silencing a critical voice.

Nelson Hernández, a North Carolina hip-hop artist who worked in the U.S. installing floors, was arrested in January while visiting El Salvador for his wedding.

Reporters from various newsrooms conducted a symbolic funeral and protest Monday morning in front of the Supreme Court after elPeriódico, the leading investigative outlet in Guatemala, was forced to close after 27 years amid the trial of publisher José Rubén Zamora.

Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador’s nods to Russia and China are often read as a jealousy game in the U.S. bilateral relationship. Regional leaders claim sovereignty and multipolarity as their mantra. Experts say that non-ideological short-term calculus and a search for impunity are instead guiding their actions.

As we continue the fight to prevent sexual violence, we also need to advocate for essential reproductive health care and services for survivors. This includes timely access to emergency contraception, which until recently was not available to women and girls in Honduras.

Beatriz, a woman diagnosed with lupus, was denied an abortion of an anencephalic fetus in 2013 in El Salvador despite 15 doctors’ recommendations that she do so to protect her health. Attorneys for Beatriz’s family —she died in 2017— are challenging El Salvador’s total ban.

The Bukele administration barred the International Monetary Fund from publishing its yearly report on the “economic situation and policy strategy” of El Salvador. It was striking, given that the country is looking to spur the negotiation of a debt program.

On April 4, ICE agents arrested Roberto Garay Saravia, a second lieutenant in the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion that carried out the 1981 massacre in El Mozote. His deportation trial could shed new evidence on the events, as the massacre trial in El Salvador came to a halt 18 months ago.

The president of Taiwan traveled today to Guatemala to shore up its last allies in the isthmus after Honduras decided to shift its support to China earlier this month. While the U.S. warns of Beijing’s growing influence in Central America, the region is not buying the Cold War framing.

After candidate registration for Guatemala’s June elections closed this weekend, electoral authorities, toeing the line for far-right political operatives, have spuriously excluded two presidential tickets, clearing the way for conservative Zury Ríos.

An Indigenous female farmworker leader hopes to become Guatemala’s next president. But Thelma Cabrera faces an uphill fight after the country’s Electoral Tribunal refused to allow her to register her candidacy.

By stripping 316 Nicaraguans of their nationality, the Ortega-Murillo regime borrowed a concept from George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and put into practice the unpersoning its enemies. They are now non-existent socially, politically and economically within Nicaragua.

Thousands of people demonstrated in Guatemala on Tuesday to protest a court’s decision not to allow an Indigenous candidate to register for the country’s June 25 presidential elections. Thelma Cabrera was to have been the presidential candidate for the leftist Peoples Liberation Movement

Last week Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega packed off 222 political leaders, priests, students, activists, and other dissidents to the United States. Shortly after, Ortega’s government voted to strip the former prisoners of Nicaraguan citizenship.

A wrap-up of the most important and interesting Latino news items from the past week