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.
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.
El Salvador president Nayib Bukele has been in office eight months, and his post-ideological pretenses on the campaign trail have quickly veered to the right. In an interview, Salvadoran economist Julia Evelin Martínez assesses Bukele’s first eight months in office, the sad state of the Salvadoran left, and why she’s fervently hoping for a Bernie Sanders presidency.
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.
The New York Times recently attacked Bernie Sanders for opposing US intervention in Latin America in the 1980s. We should set the record straight on what the US was doing in Central America — and why Sanders was right to oppose it.
Honduras has been under a decade of dictatorship, its 2009 coup heralding a reactionary tide throughout Latin America. Internationalist, anti-imperialist solidarity is desperately needed.
If we want to fight capitalism, the US left has to figure out how to confront US empire. Generations of internationalist struggles in Latin America can help us do just that.
With its loss of the presidency in El Salvador’s recent elections, the gains of the revolutionary project launched by the FMLN in 1980 are in serious jeopardy.
Among the migrants amassed at the southern border are thousands of victims of the 2009 Honduran coup — a coup legitimized and shored up by the United States.
Luis Posada Carriles, an anticommunist militant who popped up throughout Latin America over the past half-century, died recently. He won’t be missed.
In the wake of an electoral rout and growing internal divisions, El Salvador’s left is facing its starkest crisis in decades.
Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans will soon be at risk of deportation — just the latest injustice they’ve suffered at the hands of the US state.
El Salvador’s far right is using Trump’s war on migrants for political gain.
Behind the heartwarming photo ops, USAID’s projects in El Salvador are stealthily advancing the interests of the Salvadoran corporate class.
US policy in Central America under Trump appears to be shifting from bad to worse.
Lorena Peña and a generation of FMLN militants adjust to the promise and limits of state power.
Catholic activists like Maura Clarke, an American nun assassinated by a Salvadoran death squad in 1980, transformed missionary work into anti-imperialist solidarity.
As Trump’s threats to immigrants grow, we should look back to the 1980s Central American sanctuary movement’s victories.