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.

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.

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

The Network of Central American Journalists hopes to protect independent news media from state-sponsored attacks, spur regional collaboration, and increase the international visibility of press freedom strained by criminalization and public and private-sector censorship.

Nine months before the presidential election, the country’s right-wing regime is fracturing into rivaling projects as progressive groups discuss the elusive idea of a united candidacy. Meanwhile, electoral authorities are indulging the pre-campaigning by the ruling party and top conservative Zury Ríos.

“¡No nos callarán!” —They will not shut us up!— chanted dozens of concerned citizens and journalists outside the Palace of Justice in Guatemala City on Monday morning as they waited for the hearing of prominent journalist José Rubén Zamora.

Guatemalan authorities arrested more than a dozen alleged members of a migrant smuggling network near the shared border with Mexico early Tuesday, including four sought by the United States in connection with the death of a migrant in Texas in 2021.

The Huehuetenango-based crime ring Los Huistas is trafficking cocaine produced by Colombian FARC dissidents for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel through the turf of its rival, the Sinaloa Cartel. The arrests of colluding Guatemalan military officers and the Huistas’ family ties to legislators beg the question of just how far the drug trade has penetrated the government and politics.

Central America, in Brief: After the no-show of the Northern Triangle presidents at the Summit of the Americas, their foreign ministers gave strident speeches defying Joe Biden and named their countries’ terms for U.S. and regional engagement.

Four days before the Summit of the Americas begins on June 6 in Los Angeles, the U.S. is short on friends in the Northern Triangle. Even Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, once President Joe Biden’s ally of last resort, said he will not attend.

The judge in possession of incendiary testimony accusing President Alejandro Giammattei of illicit campaign finance announced she has left the country for exile in the United States, saying she feared an assassination attempt from the Guatemalan government.

Guatemala marked International Women’s Day by voting to increase sentences for abortion and outlaw sex ed. El Salvador announced plans to repeal the violence against women law. There was no 8M march in Nicaragua and key feminist leaders remain in prison. Only Honduras’ first female president stepped up this week by proposing a law against gender violence and weighing lifting a ban on emergency contraception.

A leak of more than eight million company documents revealed how a mining company operating illegally in a Maya Q’eqchi’ town near the Caribbean coastline bought local police and Indigenous leaders, spied on journalists, classified residents as allies or enemies, and sought to expel communities from ancestral land.

An El Faro investigation revealed that a former confidant of President Alejandro Giammattei testified under oath that the Guatemalan leader negotiated a bribe of $2.6 million USD from construction firms to fund his 2019 campaign.

As world leaders met for Biden’s Democracy Summit, the U.S. delivered a major blow to the Bukele administration by sanctioning senior officials for leading covert gang negotiations and accusing his chief of cabinet of spearheading a “multiple-ministry, multi-million dollar corruption scheme.”

Central America, in Brief: Presidents and lawmakers in Guatemala and El Salvador have pivoted toward religious rhetoric and policymaking in response to increased public scrutiny. The Salvadoran legislature cited the Bible while striking down a partial decriminalization of abortion this week, following the footsteps of Ortega’s alliance with conservative Nicaraguan churches since returning to power in 2007. The phenomenon may also spread to Costa Rica, set to hold presidential elections in February.

Central America, in Brief: Persecution of judges and prosecutors, expulsion of international anti-corruption monitors, and cooptation of courts have spread in the region.

A Latino Rebels Radio exclusive en español.

A national strike shook Guatemala last week following the removal of a top anti-corruption prosecutor. In El Salvador, while walking a precarious fiscal tightrope, Nayib Bukele handed a rare olive branch to civil society groups critical of his administration.