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.

After almost nine months in office, Bernardo Arévalo's decisions regarding his cabinet have shown that they did not really expect to govern. The inexperience of the party in public management, systematic persecution by the attorney general, and focus on their online image seem to be some of the causes for dismissal of senior officials, and the difficulty to execute an agenda.

Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and AG Consuelo Porras in Guatemala each carved domestic messaging from their denunciations of the election-shaping assassination attempt against Donald Trump. With the GOP candidate rising in the polls, his power brokers show signs of how they would read Central America in a possible second Trump term.

Following the arrest in June of “Greñas”, as many as 11 members of the Ranfla Nacional are thought to still be in custody in El Salvador despite a lack of official transparency. Experts reaffirm that the gang is in disarray, with the rank and file scorning their own historic leaders amid a mutation of no certain result.

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.

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.

The de-facto house arrest of Daniel Ortega’s brother Humberto takes the purge of historic Sandinistas to a new extreme. Seven months after the Nicaraguan dictatorship purged one-tenth of the politically obedient judiciary, including the Supreme Court president at odds with VP Rosario Murillo, the high court is two-thirds vacant.

Four months into office, Arévalo has presented a reform bill proposing performance-based grounds to sack election-interfering Attorney General Consuelo Porras. But Congress has posed a frontal challenge to Semilla, refusing to either hold a session or condemn the bill while accusing the governing party of not meeting them halfway in constructing a broader legislative agenda.

From his refuge in the Nicaraguan Embassy, convicted money launderer and former president Ricardo Martinelli is pulling the strings of the Sunday election in Panama. His party candidate, three-time government minister José Raúl Mulino, leads the polls despite popular frustration with traditional corruption in politics and social decay. But the chance of a judicial decision affecting his candidacy could inject a last-minute surprise.

Honduras’ withdrawal from the World Bank investor dispute forum could have a limited practical effect, but it is already read along ideological lines. The Biden administration has avoided a dustup, receiving top Castro officials last week to discuss an “interoceanic highway” as the U.S. competes with China for leverage in Tegucigalpa.