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 […]

Nelson Hernández, a North Carolina hip-hop artist who worked in the U.S. installing floors, was arrested in January while visiting El Salvador for his wedding.

After candidate registration for Guatemala’s June elections closed this weekend, electoral authorities, toeing the line for far-right political operatives, have spuriously excluded two presidential tickets, clearing the way for conservative Zury Ríos.

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.

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.

On Thursday, El Salvador’s Independence Day, President Nayib Bukele announced that he will seek re-election when his five-year term ends in 2024, defying a constitutional ban on consecutive re-election. Earlier that day, as the government held a military parade, thousands marched in the capital against Bukele and his policies.

Amid multiple corruption and misconduct probes muddling his first three months in office, President Rodrigo Chaves has lashed out at the press. In July, authorities shuttered a business financing the operations of leading newspaper La Nación.

Leaked court documents reveal that wrongful arrests in El Salvador are on the rise as the country courses its fifth month in a state of exception that suspended multiple constitutional rights.

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.

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.

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.

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.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly has approved legislation making the cryptocurrency Bitcoin legal tender in the country, the first country to do so, just days after President Nayib Bukele made the proposal at a Bitcoin conference.

“Nayib Bukele is no longer bound by law. And to the extent there are laws, they will be disregarded, eliminated or rewritten. He is the law. Perhaps millions of Salvadorans haven’t yet realized it, but this is how a republic dies and a dictatorial regime is born.”

MIAMI (AP) — The Biden administration turned down a meeting request with El Salvador’s president on an unannounced trip to Washington last week, as criticism of the Central American leader mounts among Democrats, three people with knowledge of the decision said Monday.

While physical violence is one of the elements that prompts reporting domestic violence, there is another, more subtle type of violence that constrains women and inhibits their actions—and often goes unreported

It is the first time that both of Puerto Rico’s major parties received less than 40% of the vote.

MIAMI (AP) — A senior U.S. official quietly told El Salvador’s government that anti-poverty assistance from Washington is at risk over President Nayib Bukele’s defiance of his country’s supreme court and congress, The Associated Press has learned.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — For months, the strictest measures confronting the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America seemed to keep infections in check in El Salvador, but a gradual reopening combined with a political stalemate has seen infections increase nearly fourfold.

El Salvador is considered to have the most extreme abortion ban in the world and is one of the only countries known to prosecute and imprison women in cases of obstetric emergencies.