At least 17 people were killed in an armed attack on a bar in El Empalme, a small town north of Ecuador's port city of Guayaquil July 28—three days before US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Neom visited the country and signed a deal to fight organized crime and illegal migration. The deal includes training for Ecuadoran security forces in the US and collaboration on border security.

Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa says he is seeking assistance from Israel and the United Arab Emirates to combat the drug cartels that are terrorizing the South American country. In an interview in Paris on May 8, the hardline rightist who won re-election last month said Israel and the UAE have agreed to provide intelligence aid "to help" fight the narco gangs. (ToI)

Trump is pointing to Kilmar Abrego Garcia's tattoos to justify his indefinite detention without charge in the ultra-oppressive Salvadoran prison gulag. These notoriously include a cannabis leaf, demonstrating the continued propaganda utility of the "Reefer Madness" stigma, even as a multi-million dollar legal industry emerges. But the White House actually added the characters "MS13" (name of the notorious Salvadoran gang) to the shot of Abrego Garcia's knuckles in a crude photoshop job—despite transparent denials from Trump. Lubricating the emerging transnational mass detention program with this Orwellian post-truth stratagem, the Trump regime meanwhile moves toward actual deportation of US citizens. Bill Weinberg raises the alarm in Episode 277 of the CounterVortex podcast.

At an April 29 rally in Michigan to commemorate the first 100 days of his term, Donald Trump focused on his border crackdown and deportations above all else. While he touched on the economy and bragged of firing "unnecessary deep state bureaucrats" in his speech, his racist attacks on migrants took center stage. Those attacks accelerated and entered uncharted territory the following week: the administration launched massive immigration raids, targeted sanctuary cities in an executive order, prosecuted migrants for breaching a recently declared "military zone" near the border, separated families, and even deported US citizens.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on April 24 urged political candidates in Trinidad & Tobago (T&T) to reaffirm their commitment to press freedom ahead of the upcoming elections, following a sharp drop in the country's security ranking on RSF's World Press Freedom Index. Rising crime and the declaration of a state of emergency caused the country's security score, ranking the level of safety for journalists, to fall from 6th to 24th in 2024.

US-directed repression and counter-insurgency in El Salvador in the 1980s allowed the imposition of "free trade" or "neoliberal" regimes in the generations since then—ultimately culminating in the adoption of CAFTA. This, in turn, has exacerbated the expropriation of the traditional lands of the peasantry by the agro-export oligarchy. It also led to the hypertrophy of the narco economy and a new nightmare of violence, which Nayib Bukele has exploited to establish a new dictatorship. This dictatorship is now openly in league with Donald Trump, and has in fact become critical to his fascist agenda. In Episode 275 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks down El Salvador's historical role as a laboratory of genocide and police-state methods for US imperialism, and the imperative of trans-national resistance.

The Trump administration's deportation policies took center stage this week as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele visited the White House, courts continued challenging the legality of the deportations, and a Maryland senator travelled to El Salvador in an attempt to make contact with a man known to be wrongfully deported.

President Donald Trump's migration crackdown has been credited with reducing flows northward towards the United States, but it is leaving hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers trapped in limbo further south, unsure whether to take riskier journeys to try to reach the US and anxiously wrestling with what to do next.