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Hilary Goodfriend is a postdoctoral fellow with the Latino and Latin American Studies Research Center at the University of California, Riverside. She is a contributing editor for Jacobin and Jacobin América Latina.
This Easter, we remember the life of Father Luis Olivares, a leader in the sanctuary movement of the 1980s and a proponent of liberation theology. To him, Christianity was a call to stand with the poor and oppressed of the world.
The Biden administration’s recently announced change to border policy effectively resurrects Donald Trump’s asylum ban. It will cause harm or suffering to thousands or millions of migrants seeking survival in the US.
The Salvadoran civil war didn’t just see US-trained-and-financed far-right forces commit endless war crimes — it also ripped children from families, an unknown number of whom never found their way back to their parents.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, had a mandate for change. He used it to build a police state and buy coin.
The wealthy young Salvadoran Ana Margarita Gasteazoro decided to give up her privileges for struggle against a far-right dictatorship — leading to her jailing and torture. That dictatorship is gone today, but El Salvador’s undemocratic crackdowns are not.
Honduras's new leftist president, Xiomara Castro, was inaugurated in January. In her first few months in office, she's prioritized dismantling the decade-long right-wing dictatorship’s anti-labor, pro-capital agenda.
The news of at least 53 deaths of migrants in San Antonio is heartbreaking — particularly because it is the inevitable result of the monstrous immigration policies that Joe Biden has done little to change.
Nayib Bukele has overseen multiple violent crackdowns on basic civil liberties across El Salvador during his time as president. With his recent declaration of martial law against gangs, it’s only getting worse.
Between the growing authoritarianism of his government and the massive popular pushback to his absurd new Bitcoin law, the honeymoon for El Salvador’s young, self-styled “disrupter” president Nayib Bukele is over.
Latin America is not the United States’ “backyard.” It’s the training ground, historian Greg Grandin argues, for periods of imperial retrenchment and regroupment. But it’s also a region where radical movements have consistently refused to be crushed by US imperial power.
Under the Obama administration, millions of people were ripped from the United States and deported to countries they hadn’t known for years or even decades. The Biden administration needs a plan to bring those deportees back home to the United States.
An attack on El Salvador’s main opposition party has left two people dead and amounts to one of the worst acts of political violence since the peace accords signing in 1992. The country’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, should be held responsible for helping to stoke the violence.
In his recently released memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama has neatly removed Central America from his narrative of the first years of his presidency. Perhaps he thought no one would notice.
Left governments in Latin America have successfully nationalized much of the mining sector, reclaiming foreign profits for social spending. The next step is to get beyond extraction altogether, taking cues from indigenous movements that have long been fighting for a green future.
A full investigation into the murder of Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres doesn’t just uncover the story behind her assassination. It also provides a glimpse into the US-backed militarized narco-state of post-coup Honduras.
Nayib Bukele has worked hard during his presidency to cultivate an image as a Silicon Valley–style disrupter fighting corruption. But his recent use of the Salvadoran military to physically occupy the national legislature shows he's unafraid to use authoritarian tactics reminiscent of the country's brutal right-wing dictatorship.
The grisly violence in El Salvador has social and political origins. It is neither inevitable nor insuperable.
Today marks thirty years since the massacre of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter by US-trained forces. But US brutality in Latin America isn’t a thing of the past: top military officials involved in the coup against Bolivian president Evo Morales were trained by the United States, too.
The Supreme Court recently jeopardized the asylum claims of tens of thousands of Central American, Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants. It’s the latest in an escalating effort to fence off the US from the world’s poor — at a time when, more than ever, we should be letting them in.
President Nayib Bukele is El Salvador’s Donald Trump. His hard-right bluster and media-centric populism threaten to deal a devastating blow to the country’s once-mighty left.