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.

Honduras’ first woman president, Xiomara Castro, was sworn in on Thursday at the national soccer stadium in Tegucigalpa. During her inaugural address, Castro expressed disdain for the outgoing administration’s “economic catastrophe.”

Honduras’ ruling party conceded defeat Tuesday in presidential elections held two days earlier, giving victory to leftist opposition candidate Xiomara Castro and easing fears of another contested vote and violent protests.

El fascismo es una de las más brutales expresiones del capitalismo.

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.

As we continue the fight to prevent sexual violence, we also need to advocate for essential reproductive health care and services for survivors. This includes timely access to emergency contraception, which until recently was not available to women and girls in Honduras.

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 a 13-year total ban, on Wednesday, International Women’s day, Honduras’ first woman president, Xiomara Castro, legalized the use and distribution of the emergency contraceptive pill, also known as the morning-after pill —or PAE, in Honduras— for everyone in the country.

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.

This week’s wrap-up comes to you from the cozy confines of quarantine, as senior editor Hector Luis Alamo has managed to catch COVID for only the second time this year.

Honduras is the only country in Latin America where access to emergency contraception is banned and one of the few countries in the region where abortion is prohibited under any circumstances, including in cases of rape or incest.

The first of a weekly column by senior editor Hector Luis Alamo in which he gives an overview of the most interesting and important things he’s read, seen, or heard during the past week, providing his thoughts on them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden plunged into this week’s Summit of the Americas aiming to push for regional progress in addressing economic development, climate change and migration despite the absence of some notable counterparts from Latin America.

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.

The government on Monday repealed a law that authorized self-governing economic zones known as “ZEDEs.” This decision forced foreign investors in Honduras to pause plans to develop in these zones. President Xiomara Castro said that Monday’s repeal was “historic” and the country was “recovering its sovereignty.”

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.

An anti-corruption team from Honduras’ Attorney General’s Office visited presidential offices a week after President Juan Orlando Hernández stepped down and found paper shredders and none of the financial documents they were looking for, the chief of the investigators said Thursday.