Current Events
Here are articles about key current events in Central America and about Central American immigration to the United States. The articles are not all from this year, however they provide detailed descriptions and analysis of current events. We also recommend Tim's El Salvador Blog and Democracy Now! news broadcasts on El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama.
March 5, 2024
Democracy Now!
Federal prosecutors in New York have rested their case against former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is accused of turning the Central American country into a narco-state. Hernández is on trial for cocaine trafficking and weapons charges and is the first former head of state to stand trial in the United States since Panamanian dictator and U.S. ally Manuel Noriega was also tried on drug charges after a U.S.-led ouster.
May 20, 2023
The Washington Post
Long-Hidden ruins of vast network of Maya cities could recast history
In Guatemala, scientists map well-organized network of 417 cities dating to circa 1000 B.C.
May 10, 2023
Democracy Now!
As President Biden ends Title 42, the Trump-era policy blocking asylum seekers, and plans stronger enforcement measures on the border, Democracy Now! speak with Salvadoran poet and writer Javier Zamora.
JAN / FEB 2023
Smithsonian Magazine
A New Discovery Puts Panama as the Site of the First Successful Slave Rebellion
By Melba Newsome
Deep in the archives, a historian rescues the tale of brave maroons.
July 4, 2021
The New York Times
Daniel Ortega and the Crushing of the Nicaraguan Dream
By Gioconda Belli
Will they come for me? What will it be like to be jailed by the same people I fought alongside to topple the 45-year Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, my country?
May 31, 2021
Jacobin
Ronald Reagan Made Central America a Killing Field
By Sasha Lilly
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration used Central America as a testing ground to rehabilitate US imperial "hard power" after defeat in Vietnam. The results were predictable: death squads, massacres, and murderous repression of left-wing movements.
December 14, 2020
The Hechinger Report
‘Backpacks full of boulders’: How one district is addressing the trauma undocumented children bring to school
By Kavitha Cardoza
The number of children crossing the southern border is on the rise again. Prince George’s County is helping them cope and learn.
NOVEMBER 2, 2020
Smithsonian Magazine
Researchers Uncover 2,000-Year-Old Maya Water Filtration System
By Livia Gerson
More than 2,000 years ago, the Maya built a complex water filtration system out of materials collected miles away. Now, reports Michelle Starr for Science Alert, researchers conducting excavations at the ancient city of Tikal in northern Guatemala have discovered traces of this millennia-old engineering marvel.
August 17, 2020
Democracy Now!
We Are in Danger Daily: Honduran Afro-Indigenous Garífuna Demand Return of Kidnapped Land Defenders
At least 212 land and environmental defenders were murdered last year — the highest number since the group Global Witness began gathering data eight years ago. Some 40% of those killed were Indigenous peoples. In this episode and article, we get an update from Honduras, where the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna community continues to demand the safe return of five Garífuna land defenders.
July 1, 2020
Yes!
What We Can Learn from Costa Rica’s Embrace of Migrants
By Katherine Stanley Obando
With darkness closing in around her in April 2018, Elizabeth, a 27-year-old Nicaraguan law student, clutched her 1-year-old baby in her arms as she waded through a muddy orange grove in northern Costa Rica. With only two changes of clothing for each family member and 2,000 córdobas — about $60 — in her pocket, she, her husband, and their two young children had caught the last bus out of the Caribbean town of Bluefields, Nicaragua, before government forces shut down all transit in and out of town and began a violent crackdown against peace marchers there.
March 30, 2020
Remezcla
Herstory: 10 Guatemalan Women Who Changed the Course of History
By Melissa Vida
Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples make up 60% of the country’s population, yet somehow Indigenous people — and especially Indigenous women — rarely made it into history books... Today, Indigenous and Black women in Guatemala have been more visible while gaining more ground. They are redefining feminism, questioning racist structures, transforming justice systems and making great art.
February 20, 2020
Hyperallergic.com
The Central American Diaspora and Stories of Coming of Age
By Colony Little
Artists reflect on migration, memory, and the cultural bonds that unite the first- and second-generation children of Central American immigrants who have fled civil wars, violence, and natural disasters.
February 18, 2020
Los Angeles Times
Central Americans have long migrated north. Today, their studies are getting their due
By Esmeralda Bermudez
It was a rare thing, a few decades ago, to hear anyone in academia talk about Central Americans. But on a recent afternoon, Menjívar, a native of El Salvador, stood inside a packed UCLA lecture hall introducing a notable lineup of professors invited to speak about Central American migration.
February 14, 2020
Migration Policy Institute
Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States article
By Jeanne Batalova, Brittany Blizzard, and Jessica Bolter
Seeking to inform conversations around immigration, this Spotlight offers answers to some of the most frequently asked immigration-related questions, drawing on the most authoritative, current data available about the 44.7 million immigrants residing in the United States as of 2018.
January 9, 2020
Yes! Magazine
How Educators Are Rethinking The Way They Teach Immigration History
By Anna-Cat Brigida
Teachers at Boston Latin School are rethinking their history classes, figuring out ways to incorporate Central America into their lesson plans for the first time.
December 31, 2019
Los Angeles Review of Books
The Deadly Myth of the Border
By Casey Walker
In my memories, the US-Mexico border is always seen at night. I’m crossing home — how many times in my life? — through San Ysidro, Otay Mesa, Tecate, Mexicali… And suddenly there’s that border; bracing and somber; garishly lit; with its war-zone fencing and humorless guards. It does not exist in order to threaten me — I’m an American man, white, and with documents. Allegedly, it is my protection. But who, I have often wondered, takes comfort in the presence of razor wire?
September 9, 2019
The Conversation
How Climate Change Is Driving Emigration From Central America
By Miranda Cady Hallett
As a cultural anthropologist who studies factors of displacement in El Salvador, see Rubén’s situation of a much broader global phenomenon of people leaving their homes, directly or indirectly due to climate change and the degradation of their local ecosystem. As environmental conditions are projected to get worse under current trends, this raises unresolved legal questions on the status and security of people like Rubén and his family.
August 15, 2019
Truthout
The US Has Driven Central Americans to Flee “the Northern Triangle”
By Rebecca Gordon
Today, a number of push factors are driving Central Americans from their homes, especially in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Key among them are political corruption and repression, the power of the drug cartels, and climate change — all factors that, in significant ways, can be traced back to actions of the United States.
APRIL 9, 2019
Education Week
Teaching Migrant Children
By Kavitha Cardoza, Illustrations by Matt Huynh
Tens of thousands of children have fled chaos in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, surviving dangerous journeys and confinement in shelters in a quest to get to the U.S.-Mexico border. Now, many are living in communities and attending schools across the United States and face new risks and ominous questions about their futures. This series of articles includes How Schools Are Responding to Migrant Children, Brothers Who Fled Dangers in Honduras Face New Menaces in U.S., A Migrant Daughter’s Reunion With a Mother She Barely Knows, Longing for His School, Grandmother, and Friends in Guatemala, Working 50 Hours a Week and Trying to Understand What's Happening in School
April 1, 2019
Democracy Now!
Why the Real Migration Crisis Is in Central America, Not at the Southern U.S. Border
John Carlos Frey and Amy Goodman
President Trump has announced the United States will cut off funding to the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that are the primary source of a wave of migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, including caravans of families with children. He is also threatening to close the border with Mexico. This comes after Trump declared a national emergency to justify redirecting money earmarked for the military to pay for building a wall at the border. We speak with John Carlos Frey, award-winning investigative reporter and ”PBS NewsHour” special correspondent who has reported extensively on immigration and recently traveled with the first migrant caravan from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
April 1, 2019
NBC News
Slashing Central American aid could drive more migrants to the U.S.
By Suzanne Gamboa and Carmen Sesin
Cutting off assistance to Central America "would be counterproductive" and "will not in any way better the situation of migrants who are fleeing," a former Trump adviser says.
November, 26 2018
Antipode
Narco‐Cattle Ranching in Political Forests
By Jennifer A. Devine, David Wrathall, Nate Currit, Beth Tellman, Yunuen, Reygadas Langarica
In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected areas through a process known as narco‐ganadería, narco‐cattle ranching. Drawing on the case study of Laguna del Tigre National Park, this article argues that narco‐cattle ranching is a key driver of deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Using ethnographic and remote‐sensing methods, we describe narco‐cattle ranching's money‐laundering practices, its territorial dynamics, and its environmental impacts. We draw on theorizations of “political forests” to explain how drug trafficking organizations transform land use in the reserve, and along the way, remake its ecology, territories and subjects. Our work illustrates that drug policy is inextricably linked to conservation policy in the Americas. More specifically, we argue that community‐based resource management improves forest and protected area residents’ abilities to resist drug‐trafficking related land use change by strengthening local governance and land tenure regimes.
July 5, 2018
NJ.com
The families we're caging at the border are fleeing disasters we helped create
By Anne Manuel
President Donald Trump recently vowed to cut off aid to Central American countries that "abuse us by sending their people up" to the United States to seek asylum. Trump is apparently unaware of, or impervious to, the irony behind the notion of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras abusing their neighbor to the north, but the rest of us might want to bear a little history in mind.
JUNE 21, 2018
The New Yorker
We Owe Central American Migrants Much More Than This
By Eric Levitz
There is now a broad, bipartisan consensus that ripping infants from their mothers — and then putting both in (separate) cages — is not a morally acceptable way of treating families who cross our southern border. After weeks of deliberation, our nation has concluded that Central American migrants do not deserve to have their children psychologically tortured by agents of the state. But what they do deserve remains in dispute.
June 14, 2018
Yes! Magazine
Farming as Resistance
By Trina Moyles
Threatened by a mining company, indigenous women in the remote highlands of Guatemala are marching, increasing productivity, and planting trees.
March 2, 2018
Latin America Working Group
¡BERTA VIVE! Act NOW to uphold her legacy!
By Andrea Fernández Aponte
Two years have passed since beloved environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home in La Esperanza, Honduras. To this day, the intellectual authors of her killing have not been brought to justice. Unfortunately, the human rights situation in Honduras has only gotten worse since Berta’s passing. Help put a stop to the violence and repression.
March 2018
Latin America Working Group Education Fund
Between a Wall and a Dangerous Place: The intersection of Human Rights, Public Security, Corruption & Migration in Honduras and El Salvador
By Lisa Haugaard, Daniella Burgi-Palomino, and Andrea Fernández Aponte
This report is a series of blog posts written from October 2017 through March 2018 about the dangers and challenges faced by Honduran and Salvadoran citizens in their home countries, even as the Trump Administration moves to deport more Honduran- and Salvadoran-born people in the United States back to home countries they may no longer know and restrict protections to those fleeing.
June 21, 2017
LA School Report
Commentary: Central American and Salvadoran American literature is invisible in public schools
By Randy Jurado Ertll
When I was growing up in California, I never read a book in LAUSD schools by a Latino or Latina author. And until college, I never had a Latino or Latina teacher.
May 30, 2017
NPR
Former Panamanian Dictator Manuel Noriega Dies At 83
By Colin Dwyer
Military commander, drug trafficker, CIA informant, dictator, convicted murderer: The strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega wore many labels during his tortuous path to — and fall from — the heights of power in Panama. Announcing Noriega's death at age 83 Tuesday, Panama's president said it "closes a chapter in our history."
May 26, 2017
FAIR
Five Years Later, US Admits Lies About Deadly Honduran Shooting
By Janine Jackson
A Justice and State Department review reveals that top Drug Enforcement Administration officials lied repeatedly to Justice and to Congress about deadly shootings in Honduras in May 2012—including an incident off the Mosquito Coast in which a boat was fired on, killing four passengers, among them a 14-year-old boy.
May 8, 2017
PRI's The World
A brother and sister flee gang violence in El Salvador and start over in the US
By Deepa Fernandes
Kevin Alvarez Mejia spent his tween years trying to avoid running into gang members up in the remote El Salvadoran mountain village where he was born and raised... But one day, they got him.
April 5, 2017
Institute for Policy Studies
How An International Grassroots Campaign Beat Metal Mining Corporations
By John Cavanagh, Robin Broad
Against overwhelming odds, El Salvador won its long battle for water.
March 7, 2017
Jacobin
February 16, 2017
The World Post
Remembering Sandino
By Jonah Walters
The Nicaraguan nationalist was assassinated eighty-three years ago last month.
Drought And Climate Change Are Forcing Young Guatemalans To Flee To The U.S.
By Lauren Markham
What’s happening in Guatemala is, in many ways, a harbinger of what’s to come throughout the world.
October 31, 2016
The Conversation
How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s mass migration
By Joseph Nevins
The mainstream narrative often reduces the causes of migration to factors unfolding in migrants’ home countries. In reality, migration is often a manifestation of a profoundly unequal and exploitative relationship between migrant-sending countries and countries of destination. Understanding this is vital to making immigration policy more effective and ethical.
August 2016
Latin America Working Group & Center for International Policy
El Salvador's Violence: No Easy Way Out
By Sara Kinosian, Angelika Albaledejo, and Lisa Haugaard
El Salvador closed out 2015 with 6,657 murders, replacing Honduras as the murder capital of the world. That averages out to over 18 murders a day, a 70 percent increase compared to the previous year, making it the highest murder rate for any country in the world in almost 20 years.
July 27, 2016
The Nation
Eat, Pray, Starve: What Tim Kaine Didn’t Learn During His Time in Honduras
by Greg Grandin
An overview of the political situation in Honduras at the time Tim Kaine volunteered with the Jesuits.
April 20, 2016
Truth-Out
Berta Cáceres Lives On, and So Does Violence by Honduran Government and Dam Company
by Beverly Bell
The assassination of award-winning Honduran environmental activist Berta Caceres.
March 2015
Latin America Working Group & Center for International Policy
Honduras: A Government Failing to Protect its People
By Lisa Haugaard and Sarah Kinosian
In December 2014 the Latin America Working Group Education Fund (LAWGEF) and Center for International Policy (CIP) traveled to Honduras to investigate how the country is responding to the needs of its citizens.
July 8, 2014
In These Times
Debunking 8 Myths About Why Central American Children Are Migrating
By David Bacon
While politicians point to the need for stronger enforcement at the border, the push factors of U.S. trade and immigration policies bear the great responsibility.
December 2014
Smithsonian Magazine
A New Canal Through Central America Could Have Devastating Consequences
By Matthew Shaer
The environmental ramifications of the proposed canal route through Nicaragua.
June 25, 2014
Foreign Policy in Focus
The Fight to Ban Gold Mining and Save El Salvador’s Water Supply
By Julia Paley
Gold-digging multinationals are fueling political violence and environmental devastation in El Salvador, but communities are fighting back.
June 19, 2013
Pew Research Center
Diverse Origins: The Nation’s 14 Largest Hispanic-Origin Groups
By Mark Hugo Lopez, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, and Danielle Cuddington
This report examines the Hispanic population of the United States.