Laura Fernández, a 39-year-old political scientist and right-wing populist, will be Costa Rica's next president. Fernández secured nearly 50% of the vote in last week's election, becoming the first candidate in more than a decade to clear the threshold needed to win outright in the first round. She did so by promising to respond forcefully to the country's exaggerated yet real insecurity crisis linked to the drug trade—the overwhelming concern for most voters. On the campaign trail, Fernández drew openly from the playbook of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose brutal anti-gang crackdown has inspired conservatives across the region. She called for a "state of exception" to combat crime, promised to complete the construction of a massive Bukele-inspired prison, and spoke with Bukele before any other foreign leader after her win. Her Sovereign People's Party won a majority of congressional seats but fell short of the supermajority necessary to guarantee the constitutional or judicial reforms she promised on the campaign trail. (NACLA Update)

Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo declared a 30-day nationwide "state of siege" on Jan. 19 following a spree of gang violence that left nine police officers dead in the nation's capital. The declaration was made unilaterally and currently awaits congressional approval. However, it will remain in place until a decision is reached.

It has been a tumultuous few days in Honduras. Since voting in elections on Nov. 30, former president Juan Orlando Hernández—convicted in the US last year of drug trafficking and bribery—was pardoned by President Donald Trump and subsequently released. The country has remained on tenterhooks as the results of the presidential election have still not yet been finalized, and Trump has threatened reprisals if his favored candidate fails to win. Adding to the unease is the country's deeply flawed vote-transmission system, which has crashed twice.

Venezuelan nationals deported to El Salvador by the US government earlier this year were tortured and ill-treated, advocacy groups reported Nov. 12.

According to an 81-page report jointly released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Cristosal, a Salvadoran advocacy organization, members of a group of 252 Venezuelan deportees sent to El Salvador’s notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) were subjected to torture, arbitrary detention, and in some instances sexual abuse, while held incommunicado in inhumane conditions. The organizations found a pattern of coordinated abuse rather than isolated incidents. One former detainee told the investigators: "I'm on alert all the time because every time I heard the sound of keys and handcuffs, it meant they were coming to beat us."

Guatemala's Congress on Oct. 21 passed a law designating the Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs as "terrorist organizations." The move came days after 20 Barrio 18 convicts broke out of the maximum-security Fraijanes II prison outside the capital. So far, only four have been recaptured. The new "Ley Anti-pandillas" provides for heavier sentences for gang members convicted of crimes such as extortion or recruitment of minors, and calls for the construction of more-maximum security prisons. 

United Nations human rights experts called on Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government on Oct. 3 to clarify the fate and whereabouts of more than 120 individuals who appear to have been forcibly disappeared after the violent suppression of anti-government protests in 2018. The experts also urged the state to cease using arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance as tools of political repression.

Kilmar Abrego García, released from extrajudicial detention in El Salvador, now fights deportation to Uganda. Hundreds of the Venezuelans sent by the US to the Salvadoran prison gulag have now been returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap. But El Salvador remains on the growing list of human rights offendors cultivated by the Trump regime as surrogate detention states. The Trump State Department's farcical "Human Rights Report" seeks to sanitize dictator Nayib Bukele's anti-crime police state. And adding to the Orwellian nature of the Trump-Bukele axis, the US Justice Department has dropped charges against MS-13 leaders who collaborated in the consolidation of the new Salvadoran dictatorship. In Episode 293 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg exposes the perverse charade.

Panamanian construction workers, teachers' unions, and popular organizations launched an indefinite strike April 28 to protest the government's proposed reforms to the pension system and to demand an end to US interference in the country. Protestors, led by the construction union SUNTRACS, were met by police repression in various parts of the country, including tear gas aimed directly at students. In addition to fears that reforms to the country's social security system will lead to its privatization, the country's grassroots organizations believe that President José Raúl Mulino has undermined Panamanian sovereignty by not being firm enough in his negotiations with the Trump administration over control of the Panama Canal.