El Faro English

A trail of images and videos published on social media expose what journalistic publications have shown for months: that the senior leader of MS-13 was illegally freed last year by the government of El Salvador despite 40 years remaining on his prison sentence and a U.S. extradition request.

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 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.

Global financial duress is pummeling cryptocurrencies including Tether, an important piece of Nayib Bukele’s bitcoin project.

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.

Guatemala, in Brief: The persecution of independent judges and prosecutors pressed onward with the order to put former top state attorney Virginia Laparra on trial. The shady Foundation against Terrorism, lead architect of the legal attacks that have already pushed two-dozen anti-corruption operators into exile, has named among its next targets the human rights ombudsman and three of the country’s most influential judges.

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.

A Supreme Court magistrate appointed by the ruling party was years ago the attorney of “Diablo de Hollywood,” the head of the Mara Salvatrucha. The detail, undisclosed when he was appointed last year, was revealed when the judge recused himself from ruling on the gang leader’s pending extradition to the United States.

El Faro obtained audio files of conversations between a senior Bukele official and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), revealing that the covert negotiations with the gangs fell apart after MS-13 considered the surprise arrest of a group of its leaders a violation of the agreement they brokered in 2019 for a reduction in homicides.

The falling price of bitcoin underscores El Salvador’s precarious debt crisis, financial experts say. President Nayib Bukele, nevertheless, perseveres: On Monday, May 9, he announced a new $15 million state bitcoin purchase and boasted about his mockup of the megaproject Bitcoin City.

Despite unprecedented peacetime policing operations that led to 27,000 arrests in two months, gangs continue to extort businesses as an expression of their territorial control. Human rights groups and the press have also documented at least five in-custody deaths during President Nayib Bukele’s state of exception.

El Salvador, in Brief: The government not only extended the politically popular state of exception for another month on Sunday; it also seized the moment to temporarily exempt security spending from legal oversight. Despite widespread flak from human rights groups as evidence accumulates of police abuses and arbitrary detentions, Bukele’s party passed legislation to allow […]

On the fourth anniversary of protests in 2018 and the ensuing brutal repression, the opposition seems unable to find a response to the imprisonment of its key leaders and the kidnapping of the electoral process. But the Ortega-Murillo government’s weaknesses are also evident, as shown by recent internal divisions in the Sandinista party.

On Tuesday, President Nayib Bukele ordered changes to the Penal Code that press advocates warn censor journalism about gangs and would impede news outlets from questioning the official narrative on issues such as security policy and the government’s secret negotiations with the gangs.

After a tense run-off election marked by personal invective and mass voter abstention, the controversial conservative economist Rodrigo Chaves will take office as the next president of Costa Rica in May despite past sexual harassment and an open investigation for illicit campaign finance.

Amid an ongoing state of exception in El Salvador, the Bukele-controlled legislature held its second emergency session in five days to approve sweeping increases in criminal sentences for gang leaders and underage members alike.

A number of civil liberties will be suspended for 30 days in El Salvador as a government response to the alarming spike in gang-attributed homicides. The violence casts further doubt on the efficiency of President Bukele’s security policy, already under scrutiny because of revelations of secret gang negotiations.

Nicaraguan Ambassador Arturo McFields denounced the Ortega-Murillo government as a “dictatorship” in an unexpected statement to the Organization of American States on Wednesday, announcing his departure from the administration. McFields urged other public servants to overcome their fear and do the same.

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.

The U.S. suspects that a top MS-13 leader known as “Crook” was freed from prison despite an extradition request on transnational narco-terrorism charges. Salvadoran courts have for months refused to extradite senior MS-13 leaders to the U.S.

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.