This election was the first test for the Nuevas Ideas party, which was founded by Bukele in 2018 but didn’t obtain official status in time for the election of that year.

In an Instagram LIVE, Residente asked Bukele about the ways in which he is combating the spread of COVID-19 in El Salvador.

“Nayib has the capacity to makes us dream of a different country,” one of his supporters told Latino Rebels on Sunday.

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.

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.

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.

Senior editor Hector Luis Alamo gives a review of some of the most interesting and important things he saw, read, and heard over 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.

The announcement, made on Friday, is part of the Biden administration’s effort to directly address the disproportionate impacts of pollution that have existed for decades in many low-income communities and communities of color.

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.

On Thursday, El Salvador’s Independence Day, President Nayib Bukele announced that he will seek re-election when his five-year term ends in 2024, defying a constitutional ban on consecutive re-election. Earlier that day, as the government held a military parade, thousands marched in the capital against Bukele and his policies.

A defining moment has come for President Xiomara Castro, who must decide how much free rein to grant a future U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission that could end up investigating her own government.

Leaked court documents reveal that wrongful arrests in El Salvador are on the rise as the country courses its fifth month in a state of exception that suspended multiple constitutional rights.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has accused the United States of violating the sovereignty of El Salvador—this time, following the U.S. State Department’s sanctioning of officials engaged in corruption or undermining democracy across four Central American countries.

The “Engel List” adds five dozen names to the U.S. State Department’s corruption map, and the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras won’t be happy, as now banned from U.S. soil are many officials and business people linked to the Central American leaders.

Bukele’s government told Wall Street investors in March that it hasn’t totally ruled out a deal with the IMF to avoid default, offering backup plans. All scenarios involve massive credits from regional development banks and somehow squeezing more tax revenue.

Central American leaders are averting their gaze from Nicaragua’s Ortega-Murillo regime, aware that picking a fight with the most consolidated autocracy in Central America would give more oxygen to criticism of corruption and human rights violations in their own countries.