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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.
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.
The news of at least 53 deaths of migrants in San Antonio is heartbreaking — particularly because it is the inevitable result of the monstrous immigration policies that Joe Biden has done little to change.
Mario Gómez is one of El Salvador’s most prominent critics of the government’s recent embrace of Bitcoin — which may explain why he was recently arrested by Salvadoran police, he told Jacobin in an interview.
Nayib Bukele has overseen multiple violent crackdowns on basic civil liberties across El Salvador during his time as president. With his recent declaration of martial law against gangs, it’s only getting worse.
Today marks 30 years since the end of El Salvador’s civil war, which claimed over 75,000 lives. Nidia Díaz, a leftist guerrilla tortured by state forces during the conflict, discusses the war and how the democratic gains of that struggle are being undermined.
Between the growing authoritarianism of his government and the massive popular pushback to his absurd new Bitcoin law, the honeymoon for El Salvador’s young, self-styled “disrupter” president Nayib Bukele is over.
Latin America is not the United States’ “backyard.” It’s the training ground, historian Greg Grandin argues, for periods of imperial retrenchment and regroupment. But it’s also a region where radical movements have consistently refused to be crushed by US imperial power.
Under the Obama administration, millions of people were ripped from the United States and deported to countries they hadn’t known for years or even decades. The Biden administration needs a plan to bring those deportees back home to the United States.
An attack on El Salvador’s main opposition party has left two people dead and amounts to one of the worst acts of political violence since the peace accords signing in 1992. The country’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, should be held responsible for helping to stoke the violence.
In his recently released memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama has neatly removed Central America from his narrative of the first years of his presidency. Perhaps he thought no one would notice.
There’s a brutal history of US intervention in Central America, culminating in the cruelty of today’s border regime. Salvadoran journalist Roberto Lovato speaks to Jacobin about the amnesia that is taking root, and the need for a militant excavation of personal and collective stories.
Left governments in Latin America have successfully nationalized much of the mining sector, reclaiming foreign profits for social spending. The next step is to get beyond extraction altogether, taking cues from indigenous movements that have long been fighting for a green future.
Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered in 2016 during a fight against a hydroelectric megaproject. In a Honduras characterized by corruption and impunity after the 2009 US-backed coup, the murder was the grand finale of a campaign of terror and violence against activists like Cáceres.
A full investigation into the murder of Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres doesn’t just uncover the story behind her assassination. It also provides a glimpse into the US-backed militarized narco-state of post-coup Honduras.
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.