The following is a transcript of episode 35 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes, released on Friday, July 18.
BULLOCK: The regime has arrested one of our key members of our leadership team, Ruth López, and has threatened others. And on top of that, they’ve approved a Russian-style foreign agents law that is clearly going to be used to target and deepen the crackdown on human rights organizations like ours.
GRESSIER, HOST: On Thursday in Guatemala City, Cristosal, a leading human rights organization in Central America, announced it is shutting down operations in El Salvador — a clear sign that documenting government corruption or evidence of crimes against humanity is unwelcome in El Salvador under Nayib Bukele.
A university purge
We will return to Cristosal’s departure from El Salvador at the end of today’s show. But first we turn to Nicaragua, where university autonomy no longer exists.
Under the pretext of carrying out an “institutional reorganization,” in May, Nicaraguan co-dictator Rosario Murillo announced the elimination of the National Council of Universities, or CNU. That’s the regulatory body for public universities. They also got rid of the governing body of quality assurance in higher education.
A new National Council of University Rectors will be composed of 12 rectors from public universities aligned with Sandinismo, all appointed without internal elections or transparent criteria.
On the private side, there is the fact that the regime has cancelled dozens of universities since 2021, occupying their facilities, confiscating their academic archives, and converting some of their campuses —like Central American University, or UCA— into official indoctrination centers.
“Academia is the new political battlefield in Central America”
In Nicaragua it is no secret that student movements were key to the 2018 uprising against the regime. That year, state forces killed at least 350 people.
On Wednesday, three days before the 46th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, the regime renamed the UCA’s iconic historical archive of Nicaragua and Central America as the “Institute of History of Heroes and Heroines of the Revolution.”
The sweeping changes announced by Rosario Murillo also included the appointment of Bismarck Santana as chief university regulator. Ironically, Santana is known to the university movements for his own involvement in the 1995 student protests for public funding for universities. In later years, as Confidencial reported, he strengthened his ties with the FSLN party and secured leadership positions at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, or UNAN.
The announcement of these two new governing bodies of the public university came after the dismissal of Ramona Rodríguez in May as president of the CNU. She was one of the key figures behind the confiscation of private universities and state-imposed political indoctrination.
Under her tenure, a review by Confidencial reveals that the Ortega-Murillo regime quietly dismissed rectors, vice-rectors, and general secretaries from seven state universities.
Nearly 70 years after Nicaragua became the last Central American country to gain university autonomy, nowhere in the region has the independence of higher education been as brutally dismantled as under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
The new Central American exile
On Wednesday, we published the third issue of our digital magazine Central America Monthly, Letters on Exile: From Central America to Chile and Equatorial Guinea.
In the last seven years, more and more anti-corruption prosecutors, judges, public figures, journalists, and human rights defenders have fled Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This is an echo of the region’s past, when civil wars and military dictators pushed their critics and opposition to flee or face stiff punishment at home.
Issue No. 3 - July 15, 2025
For this issue, we invited three journalists and one political cartoonist from three continents to recount how doing their job led them to emigrate overnight with a few belongings and a suitcase full of uncertainty. They also describe their attempts to continue their work from abroad.
Also included is a first-hand chronicle by brothers Óscar and Carlos Martínez of the recent exodus of Salvadoran journalists fleeing the regime of Nayib Bukele. In The Tertulia, our monthly section for academic essays, two investigators in Mexico wrote about how Salvadoran refugees continued their revolutionary activism in Mexico City starting in the 1970s.
Blurring the lines between political exile and other motives for migration, you will also find the story of Emmanuel Ngu. How is it that he and two other migrants from Cameroon, fleeing a brutal conflict in their home country, traversed half the world in the hopes of reaching the United States, only to drown in two thousand nineteen off the coast of Mexico?
Human rights monitor in exile
Cristosal, the leading organization documenting corruption and human rights abuses in prison under the Bukele administration in El Salvador, announced on Thursday, July 17, that they will suspend operations in El Salvador.
After working for 25 years in the country, more than half their Salvadoran staff left the country to relocate to their offices in Guatemala and Honduras. This is part of a trend of human rights advocates fleeing the country identified in this month’s magazine.
Like other leading critical voices in the country, Cristosal has denounced state attacks including police profiling, “illegal procedures” against them, and illegal Pegasus spyware.
But the turning point for the organization was the capture in May of renowned attorney Ruth López, who was the head of their Anti-Corruption and Justice Unit. López had written dozens of reports on corruption in the Bukele government and helped victims of human rights abuses seek relief from a judicial system co-opted by Bukele since 2021.
Cristosal called her arrest a sign that staying in El Salvador means the risk of political persecution and arbitrary detention without due process. This is Cristosal director Noah Bullock:
BULLOCK: Without the right to defend ourselves we’re forced to choose between exile and prison. And our organization has decided that we’re not any good to our colleagues who are now imprisoned unjustly or the victims in El Salvador if we end up in prison as well.
GRESSIER: Cristosal said they will not forfeit their legal incorporation in El Salvador, and that they will enroll with the Foreign Agents Registry. But they view their operations as unviable under a new law allowing the government to impose arbitrary restrictions, taxation, and state surveillance.
El Faro’s editorial board struck a similar tone this week: Like others in the region, the regime in El Salvador is “bent on eliminating all obstacles to absolute power. It can only achieve this by death, prison, exile, or fear.”
Leyrian Colón Santiago, Victoria Delgado, and Yuliana Ramazzini wrote today’s episode, with editing and hosting by Roman Gressier and production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.