With Donald Trump back in the White House, Nayib Bukele offers sweeping deportation cooperation while asking the U.S. to send back MS-13 leaders awaiting trial. Trump says Panama is not going far enough in shunning China’s Belt and Road initiative, while Guatemala has agreed to accept regional deportees in exchange for support for infrastructure projects. Each Central American country is forging its own path.

On Wednesday the Bukele-controlled legislature changed the Salvadoran Constitution to allow for express constitutional changes in a nearly single-party state. A week earlier, the Inter-American Court found Nicaragua guilty of permitting the 2011 unconstitutional reelection of Daniel Ortega, who is currently radically rewriting the Nicaraguan constitution and since 2007 has changed it a dozen times.

In December, two-thirds of Congress approved an anti-monopoly law proposed by legislators aligned with President Bernardo Arévalo, marking a significant improvement of their negotiating power in the legislature while sparking debate over whether the new rules will in fact curb market concentration — or create insider loopholes.

In the genocide trial against retired military commander Benedicto Lucas García, initially expected to end three weeks ago, the defense has attempted to recuse the court to delay sentencing. Last-minute tension is affecting proceedings: A judge is now on medical leave, and Attorney General Consuelo Porras removed five prosecutors from the case. Victims asked for international support to achieve the justice they have sought for more than 40 years.

Eleven years after the genocide trial of ex-dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, that of General Benedicto Lucas García, a former chief of the General Staff, began this April. In over 85 hearings, witnesses, victims, and experts have testified about the scorched-earth campaign Lucas oversaw in the Ixil region in the early 1980s. A ruling could be issued as early as the first weeks of November.

Conservative administrations and legislators are seeking to roll back what limited progressive health and education policies have been implemented in the region in favor of LGBTQ+ people. Sex education is facing possible curtailing in Guatemala and El Salvador and access to HIV treatment is being challenged by doctors' “conscientious objection” in Costa Rica. Meanwhile, the Honduran state was found responsible in July for the death of trans woman Leonela Zelaya, the second such ruling in four years.

An Air Force helicopter crash on Sunday killed eight members of Nayib Bukele’s security cabinet who were transporting an accused embezzler with financial ties to the ruling party, detained in Honduras under unclear circumstances. Bukele will receive U.S. help to investigate at a delicate political moment: The Salvadoran president was the first to insinuate possible foul play, despite possible flight protocol violations.

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.