CENTRAL AMERICA IN MINUTES, Ep. 1: After spending 813 days in prison and facing a slate of procedural irregularities, leading Guatemalan newspaperman Jose Rubén Zamora will await retrial under house arrest.

In El Salvador, the anti-mining environmentalists known as the ‘Santa Marta Five’ are vindicated as a judge dismisses the case against them mounted by the Bukele-controlled Attorney General’s Office.

With under two weeks until the U.S. election, Alianza Américas executive director Dulce Guzmán warns of the effects of the rightward swing of U.S. immigration politics for Central American diaspora communities.

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President Xiomara Castro has answered scathing new evidence of drug ties against her husband and brother-in-law by accusing the military, opposition, and U.S. Embassy of plotting a coup d’état. Rixi Moncada, the leading presidential pre-candidate for the ruling party, has been named minister of defense, portending a wider crisis given that the military, which she will oversee, is the guarantor of the November 2025 elections.

In the chaotic first week of the Covid pandemic, El Salvador paid a Virgin Islands company $27 million USD to provide milk powder for its hungry citizens — but the shell firm overcharged and under-delivered, pocketing $7 million, a government audit found.

Nayib Bukele’s Saturday inauguration was an ironclad display of his control of the military and the obedience he expects from Salvadorans. The Biden administration completed its diplomatic U-turn and received applause from San Salvador, who also flirted over the weekend with a delegation of far-right figureheads featuring Donald Trump Jr.

The now de facto president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and his family clan have risen above our laws to assume the throne, without any institution capable of imposing limits to their constitutional trampling. The authoritarian regime has become a dictatorship.

June 1 marks the inauguration of Nayib Bukele’s unconstitutional second term. Senior diplomatic delegations including from Argentina, Ecuador, Spain, China, and the United States are arriving in San Salvador. But underneath the expected fanfare is an ever-thickening atmosphere of fear among families upended by the state of exception and tensions following dubious police allegations of a bomb plot by former FMLN leaders.

If Bukele, his attorney general, and his police truly had fighting corruption on their agenda, the government would be purged from bottom to top. On the contrary, the function of El Salvador’s top prosecutor is to protect the corrupt and enable corruption for the home team.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine will also affect the global fight on climate change: the fighting has increased greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and damaged Ukraine’s renewable energy infrastructure.

In the municipal vote on Sunday, just one mayor’s office out of 44 fell out of Bukele’s control. After an election season where legislative and municipal gerrymandering proved far more effective for the president than his overwhelming popularity, opposition representatives are again preaching unity and, above all, the need to recover their contact with Salvadoran society.

During a private meeting on Tuesday with delegates from political parties, TSE President Dora Martínez suggested that the failure of the vote-count process on Sunday could have been intentionally provoked. She said she will file a complaint to the Attorney General.