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Hilary Goodfriend is a doctoral student in Latin American studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is a contributing editor for Jacobin and Jacobin América Latina.
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.
The grisly violence in El Salvador has social and political origins. It is neither inevitable nor insuperable.
El Salvador president Nayib Bukele has been in office eight months, and his post-ideological pretenses on the campaign trail have quickly veered to the right. In an interview, Salvadoran economist Julia Evelin Martínez assesses Bukele’s first eight months in office, the sad state of the Salvadoran left, and why she’s fervently hoping for a Bernie Sanders presidency.
Today marks thirty years since the massacre of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter by US-trained forces. But US brutality in Latin America isn’t a thing of the past: top military officials involved in the coup against Bolivian president Evo Morales were trained by the United States, too.
The Supreme Court recently jeopardized the asylum claims of tens of thousands of Central American, Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants. It’s the latest in an escalating effort to fence off the US from the world’s poor — at a time when, more than ever, we should be letting them in.
President Nayib Bukele is El Salvador’s Donald Trump. His hard-right bluster and media-centric populism threaten to deal a devastating blow to the country’s once-mighty left.
The New York Times recently attacked Bernie Sanders for opposing US intervention in Latin America in the 1980s. We should set the record straight on what the US was doing in Central America — and why Sanders was right to oppose it.
Honduras has been under a decade of dictatorship, its 2009 coup heralding a reactionary tide throughout Latin America. Internationalist, anti-imperialist solidarity is desperately needed.
If we want to fight capitalism, the US left has to figure out how to confront US empire. Generations of internationalist struggles in Latin America can help us do just that.
With its loss of the presidency in El Salvador’s recent elections, the gains of the revolutionary project launched by the FMLN in 1980 are in serious jeopardy.