In less than a decade, a dark aspect of Central America’s recent political history has resurged: Like last century, when civil wars raged and dictators crushed dissent, this region is again dominated by despots who have forced critics and opposition leaders, journalists and businesspeople, environmentalists and human rights defenders into an ignominious checkmate: prison, death, or exile.

After dedicating our June issue of Central America Monthly to political prisoners, including some who died in regime custody, we now look at the flip-side of that coin: the growing ranks of political refugees in Costa Rica, Mexico City, Spain, and the United States. From Nicaragua to Guatemala to El Salvador, a new Central American exile is upon us.

For the first time in El Faro’s almost three-decade history, we produced this issue on exile as a team in exile, even if the news organization has kept its legal incorporation in Costa Rica —indeed, in exile— for over two years. Since May, dozens have fled El Salvador under threat of political arrest; among them, most of El Faro, and many of our colleagues, too. Along the border between chronicle and collective essay, Óscar and Carlos Martínez tell the story of these last two months: the interview on Nayib Bukele’s gang negotiations that lit the fuse, the warning that pulled us back from the precipice of years in prison, and the cloud of uncertainty that installed itself in the minds of each person compelled to leave.

A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus is the product of insisting on pulling out the notebook, and turning on the recorder, as everything collapses — for journalist and source alike. In an accompanying photo essay, Shards of a New Salvadoran Exile, Carlos Barrera puts his camera in focus, too. This month’s special dispatch of Central America in Minutes rounds out our regional reporting, dedicating most of the podcast episode to the exiles of Nicaragua and Guatemala.

In The Tertulia, a monthly space for academia to investigate and debate Central America, we translated an essay from 2018, by Mexico-based academics Kristina Pirker and Omar Núñez Rodríguez, on how Mexico City became a hub for Salvadoran exiles —and political-military revolutionary activism, from the 1970s until the 1992 Peace Accords— with the explicit but delicate permission, and espionage, of Mexican authorities.

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Crucially, this issue includes four letters from exile around the world: Nicaraguan journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the director of the country’s news outlet of reference Confidencial; Guatemalan journalist Julia Corado, the former director of Jose Rubén Zamora’s now-defunct daily elPeriódico; Chilean journalist Mónica González, head of the Fundación Gabo, who reflects on her past exile from Augusto Pinochet’s Chile; and political cartoonist Nzé Esono Ebalé, who departed his native Equatorial Guinea, a Central African country where his own father is a member of the longest-standing dictatorship in the world.

Finally, in From the Archive, our series of translated stories from the past still ringing true in the present, we bring you The Last Voyage of Emmanuel Ngu, a 2019 chronicle by El Faro director Carlos Dada and part of a collaboration with Spanish newspaper El País which won a 2020 Gabo Award for Best Coverage. While searching off the Guatemalan coast for migrant boats, Dada came across the remains of three Cameroonian men who had drowned.

Blurring any rigid line between political exile and other motives for migration, in months when the first caravans from Central America had also taken to the well-trodden migrant trails of Guatemala and Mexico, these men had traveled thousands of miles, across an ocean, to flee the murderous Anglophone Crisis in their home country and seek refuge in the United States.

In dedicating this issue to the new Central American exile, far from overlooking the millions of migrants who in recent years have departed or been expelled from Central America in search of safety or prosperity —the subject of extensive reporting by El Faro— we hope that this third issue of Central America Monthly gathers the pieces and, in the process, reveals to you a crisis of different dimensions brewing beneath our collective noses.

There is somber poetry to the fact that El Faro is telling this perpetual story of Central America, one of political persecution and refuge, from outside the country that birthed it.