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Hilary Goodfriend is a postdoctoral researcher with the Geography Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. She is a member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) editorial committee, an editor at the journal Latin American Perspectives, and a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.
Both Donald Trump and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele style themselves successful businessmen with an affinity for social media, cryptocurrency, and criminalizing poor Salvadorans. And each stands to gain from the relationship with the other.
The end of the bloody, US-backed civil wars across Central America led to a brutal neoliberal economic restructuring near the turn of the century — which then helped produce the 21st-century authoritarianism of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele.
There is a direct line in Central America stretching back more than a century from US-backed military intervention, to support of reactionary oligarchies, to devastating neoliberal restructuring, to the migration crisis now exploited in US politics.
The tenuous liberal democratic frameworks established in the 1990s after the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador are long exhausted. What will come next in both countries is uncertain.
Donald Trump’s cruel border policies sparked an outpouring of popular compassion for migrants, which Democrats made central to their 2020 platform. Now the Biden administration and the Kamala Harris campaign have embraced Trump’s xenophobic premises.
Labor has the power to halt the war machine. Dockworkers have often exercised this power, and a new novel by Herb Mills tells a tale, rooted in his own experiences, of stevedores refusing to load US weapons for the brutal El Salvador dictatorship in 1980.
This month, incumbent Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele seemed poised to easily win reelection and sweep the legislature with his New Ideas party. But when his legislative supermajority appeared in doubt, Bukele and his supporters resorted to outright fraud.
With Central America in flames, Henry Kissinger’s challenge was to portray local revolutionary movements as foreign conspiracies more alien than the United States’ own violent interventions. Where democracy failed, capitalism flourished.
From Chile to Honduras, Latin American governments are recalling ambassadors, severing diplomatic relations, and openly condemning Israel — a country with a history of propping up dictatorships across the region — for its crimes against humanity in Gaza.
A new comparative study of left-wing governments in Latin America shows that left governance can create strong local participatory democracy, even in hotbeds of opposition.
Immigration from Ecuador to the US has spiked as political and economic instability shake the country. The culprit: right-wing policies, which have reversed the massive gains made under “pink tide” president Rafael Correa.
If the Biden administration wants to stop the mass displacement that is leading enormous numbers of Cuban and Venezuelan migrants to the US-Mexico border, it should end the sanctions that have made life in those countries all but impossible for average people.
The United States has repeatedly intervened in Latin America to overthrow democratically elected governments and install right-wing dictatorships. But homegrown far-right forces in Latin America itself have often proved just as important as US meddling.
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.
After many years as a close US ally in Central America and over a decade of corrupt dictatorship, Honduras has a left government. Jacobin spoke to Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Gerardo Torres about the political transformations Honduras desperately needs.