Central America

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

A roundup of the week’s top Latino news from around the world, written by Latino Rebels senior editor Hector Luis Alamo.

Senior editor Hector Luis Alamo gives a rundown of some of the facts, bits of news, real histories, and actual lies he came across during the past week.

Why is military-grade spyware being used against journalists? Latino Rebels Radio host Julio Ricardo Varela searches for answers by speaking with El Faro reporter Nelson Rauda to discuss the use of Pegasus spyware in El Salvador and why it should matter to journalists in the United States.

The same day that Nayib Bukele staged a military siege of the gang bastion Soyapango, Xiomara Castro deployed police and military in 162 of Honduras’ most marginalized urban communities after decreeing a state of exception. The suspension of constitutional guarantees goes even further than in the Salvadoran model.

This week’s wrap-up comes to you from the cozy confines of quarantine, as senior editor Hector Luis Alamo has managed to catch COVID for only the second time this year.

A group of 16 municipalities filed a lawsuit on November 22 against multiple Big Oil companies for downplaying the risks of their fossil-fuel products on climate change.

Honduras is the only country in Latin America where access to emergency contraception is banned and one of the few countries in the region where abortion is prohibited under any circumstances, including in cases of rape or incest.

Founded in 2017, the Latin American Movement of Mothers of LGTB+ Children lobbies governments to eliminate prejudicial laws and better enforce existing bans on violence and discrimination.