The following is a transcript of episode 29 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
CASTRO: If you want to keep paying for buses, mobilizations, and for those journalists-for-sale to keep making their novelas, which are more like cartoons or fantasies, like they like to do, then keep doing it. Who will stop you?
GRESSIER: That’s top Salvadoran regime operative and Legislative Assembly President Ernesto Castro on Tuesday night defending the newly approved Foreign Agents Law, which imposes a 30 percent tax on many payments to civil society. Those affected will have 90 days to enroll with a newly created foreign-agents registrar with the power to exempt organizations or request their cancellation.
Cristosal wrote that the law violates both the Salvadoran constitution and international treaties. Castro sidestepped article 9 of the new law, written by de-facto President Nayib Bukele, which prohibits activities “altering the public order or threatening national security or the social and political stability of the country.”
Much in common
GRESSIER: In Antigua, the Guatemalan tourist hub, Bukele’s attorney general Rodolfo Delgado and his Guatemalan counterpart, Consuelo Porras, drew closer in recent weeks. In a presser on April 28, they pledged their mutual support and close cooperation on transnational organized crime, defending the “autonomy and independence of the prosecutors’ offices of our region.”
PORRAS: Justice cannot be stopped. Anyone obstructing it must assume the consequences of their actions. Any statement attempting to delegitimize our work and falsely point to a supposed persecution of Indigenous leaders and human rights defenders constitute an intolerable twisting of reality.
GRESSIER: Five days earlier, on April 23, Porras’ office arrested Luis Pacheco, a prominent Maya K’iche’ leader in the mass mobilizations in defense of the 2023 elections who had since taken a vice-minister post in Arévalo’s cabinet. They arrested another leader, Héctor Chaclán, and charged both men with terrorism — a move widely denounced internationally.
Porras, for her illegal attacks on the 2023 electoral process, shielding of allies from corruption probes, and prosecution of a growing list of perceived adversaries, has been sanctioned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, OAS Permanent Council, the United States, Canada, and the European Union.
Delgado and Porras have much in common: In 2021, both chased into exile their teams of specialized corruption investigators: In Guatemala, Porras purged the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity, or FECI, which was looking into bribery of Giammattei; in El Salvador, Delgado dismantled and raided the Special Anti-Mafia Unit, which was on the trail of pandemic corruption and Bukele’s gang negotiations.
In Guatemala, the Public Prosecutor’s Office has threatened to investigate USAID funding to news outlets and leveraged money-laundering and anti-femicide laws to censor, imprison, or exile some two-dozen journalists. In El Salvador, from where a number of journalists are also exiled, Bukele is now taking an aim at international grants to civil society. Just this week, authorities arrested renowned human rights defender Ruth López.
But they differ in one chief respect: The Bukele regime is a close ally of Donald Trump, while Porras has courted a political bailout from the MAGA sphere but has been snubbed. “Companies will not invest in a country where there is a coup,” said top Trump diplomat Marco Rubio in a February visit to Guatemala City, delivering a clear rebuke of the attorney general and backing Arévalo one year before Porras’ term ends.
That appeared to be the backdrop when, at the press conference, the top Salvadoran prosecutor offered his most public display of support to date for an embattled Porras.
DELGADO: Often our actions can be misinterpreted, but they always seek to be just and adequate, according to the law and, logically, the principles that govern our moral order.
GRESSIER: This Wednesday, Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves —a regional ally of Bukele— called Porras corrupt and claimed in a press conference that persecution had led Guatemalan First Lady Lucrecia Peinado to become a “political refugee for months” in Mexico — an assertion that Arévalo partly rebuffed, stating she was in Mexico on official business.
CHAVES: I say it in those words: The Public Prosecutor’s Office of Guatemala is corrupt, and he had to send his wife, the First Lay, to seek political asylum, so that they could not attack him that way.
GRESSIER: In Costa Rica, the clouds continue to gather over Rodrigo Chaves. Since he took office in 2022, prosecutors have opened three-dozen corruption probes into the president and his administration. In early April, in their newest case file, they accused the president and Minister of Health Jorge Rodríguez of mounting an alleged influence-peddling scheme with funds from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration.
Nicaraguan migratory repression
Last, we turn to Nicaragua, where the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo continues to rewrite the constitution that they just rewrote earlier this year, declaring the couple “co-presidents”, creating an official para-security force, and eliminating the separation of powers. As digital outlet Confidencial reported on May 16, the legislature urgently erased the right to double-citizenship in a single legislative session.
Now, before one becomes a citizen of Nicaragua, they must renounce their passport by birth; and if those born in the country acquire a second nationality, the regime will no longer consider them legally Nicaraguan. The exception is for Central American residents in Nicaragua, who may continue to opt for citizenship.
The loss of citizenship rights and passport retention are key angles of political repression. In mid-April, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported that 452 Nicaraguans have been stripped of their nationality, among them prominent political figures, journalists, priests, and dissidents.
At least 290 people —including Miss Universe 2023, Sheynnis Palacios— have been denied entry. The Commission identified 348 acts of migratory repression, including forced displacement and collective expulsions. As a means of coercion and intimidation, the regime routinely confiscates the passports of government officials, dissidents, and their relatives still in Nicaragua.
National Assembly President Gustavo Porras claimed the stripping of double-citizenship is “absolutely democratic.” Ortega and Murillo wrote that citizenship is a “sacred pact of loyalty,” and that “the Fatherland demands exclusive commitment.”
April 18 marked seven years since the start of the mass uprising in Nicaragua. That day, we published a poem by poet, novelist, and exile Gioconda Belli, a call to resist compulsory obedience of despots. She writes:
Do not accept
committing acts of cruelty
in the name of the Fatherland
Do not accept one sole truth
in the name of the Fatherland
Do not accept restrictions on freedom
in the name of the Fatherland
Read the rest of Belli’s poem by going to the inaugural issue of Central America Monthly, our digital magazine.
Roman Gressier wrote today’s episode, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.