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.

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.