John Perry

Ten years ago Berta Cáceres, a campaigner against dams and mining projects that were displacing rural communities in Honduras, said that death threats had forced her to lead a ‘fugitive existence’. Most of the threats came from a company, Desarrollos Energeticos SA (DESA), that was planning a hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River, sacred to Cáceres’s Indigenous Lenca community.

Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its head of state have overshadowed his less brazen but possibly more effective regime-change operation in Honduras. No one can be sure if the National Party’s Nasry ‘Tito’ Asfura really won the presidential election on 30 November, but he was Trump’s endorsed candidate and will almost certainly assume office on 27 January.

El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) opened in 2023. It has capacity for up to forty thousand prisoners, although is said to be only half full. CECOT was built to incarcerate members of violent gangs, who by 2015 had made El Salvador the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous country. Dispensing with warrants and court hearings, in 2022 the government jailed almost 2 per cent of the population, many on the basis only of their tattoos. The official murder rate fell from 18 per day to one every three days. In early February, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, toured Central American capitals. In San Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the ‘world’s coolest dictator’, offered to make his prisons available, for a fee, to hold ‘criminal’ migrants deported from the US.

When armed Ecuadorian police gathered outside the Mexican embassy in Quito last Friday evening, a casual observer might have thought they were there to protect it. Instead, they launched an attack: brandishing assault rifles, police climbed the walls, entered the building by force and kidnapped Ecuador’s former vice-president, Jorge Glas, who had that day been granted political asylum by Mexico. Within ten minutes Glas was being driven away.

Prosecutors in New York this month claimed they had cracked ‘the largest drug trafficking conspiracy in the world’.