This is the transcript of episode 64 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
PABLO: Our lives here are unhappy. We put food on the table, but we can’t say we live well. No. This is surviving. It’s surviving on the little we can obtain.
GRESSIER, HOST: That’s Don Pablo. He lives in Cayos Cochinos, a series of Garifuna fishing villages off the Honduran coast. This week, a ray of hope: The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the Honduran state to protect them from threats and aggression for defending their land.
“A hellscape for islanders”
On Wednesday, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the state of Honduras for trying to uproot the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna community from Cayos Cochinos along the Caribbean coast.
The Garifuna nation spans 65 peoples of mixed African and Carib-Arawak descent. They live along the coasts of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, as well as displaced communities in places like New York.
They arrived in Central America at the end of the 18th Century after their expulsion from the Caribbean island St. Vincent.
In 1995, Honduras ratified ILO Convention 169, granting Garifuna and Indigenous peoples the right to ancestral land, which was a historic debt to these communities.
Podcast: Honduran Campesinos Under Siege in Bajo Aguán
But in Cayos Cochinos, at the behest of a tourism conglomerate and a European TV spinoff of Survivor, authorities banned hook-and-line fishing and gill nets, in the name of ecological preservation. The Honduran Army became the enforcers.
The Garifuna people brought the case to defend their right to survival on ancestral territory. They denounced land theft, criminalization, physical violence, and enforced disappearances.
It’s not the first time the Inter-American Court has heard a case from Honduran Garifunas. And their rulings are no guarantee of compliance from the state.
In 2015, the Inter-American Court issued unequivocal protections for Garifuna land in Punta Gorda and ordered the Honduran state to make reparations for dispossession and other violence. And then nothing happened.
El Faro English published a multimedia special in 2022: The Survivors of Cayos Cochinos, with a documentary, photo essay, and written chronicle.
The opening goes like this: “The islands are an Eden for tourists, a goldmine for big business, and a hellscape for islanders struggling to survive.”
High court elections in Guatemala
Next, to Guatemala, for this week’s chapter in the battle over the country’s top courts — which in recent years have been plagued with allegations of corruption and insider dealing.
Every five years, all five seats on the Constitutional Court are up for grabs again, all at once. And different sectors of the country each choose a magistrate. Even this process itself has been investigated for favor-swapping to stack the courts.
By Thursday morning, three out of five had already been chosen. The Supreme Court of Justice, Bar Association, and council of universities each made their picks.
So far, a mixed bag. For example, Astrid Lemus, a candidate who ran on promises to fight impunity, is one magistrate. Another is sitting magistrate Dina Ochoa, who voted in favor of cancelling the ruling party Semilla, now on to her third straight term.
Interestingly, current attorney general Consuelo Porras —who has been internationally sanctioned for corruption and lawfare— failed to get a single vote — despite her friends in high places.
Quick parenthesis. As we said last week, the attorney general is shopping around for a new position. The current constitutional magistrates ordered authorities to include her bid for a third term as top prosecutor. So she’s still in play. Somewhere.
Okay, so back to the high court. On Thursday, it was Congress’s turn to pick the fourth magistrate out of five.
In the eye of the storm was candidate Roberto Molina Barreto. As a current magistrate, he voted to move up the selection date to yesterday in an election in which he himself was competing.
The magistrate has swung the vote in some of the most controversial cases in Guatemala, like overturning the genocide conviction in 2013 of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.
In his camp are longtime congressmen, some of them sanctioned by the U.S. in recent years, like Álvaro Arzú Jr., from Guatemala’s arch-conservative family dynasty. Mind you, last year Trump gave him his visa back.
And all sides of the selection process are claiming to be Trump-whisperers. President Bernardo Arévalo claimed his enemies were lying that the U.S. Embassy was secretly supporting Molina Barreto.
Arévalo gets to make the fifth and final pick for magistrate.
Meanwhile, a quote-unquote “anti-embassy lobby” —that’s what some news outlets are calling it, in shorthand– is claiming the opposite.
The outlet Plaza Pública reports that one group newly registered to lobby the Trump administration is led by businessman Rodrigo Arenas, who has his own media outlet, República.
Arenas publicly claims the Trump administration is not looking favorably on President Arévalo or his criticism of the attorney general or constitutional court selection process.
That much is really unclear. But the anti-Arévalo lobby has caught Roger Stone’s ear. He’s the Trump advisor and lobbyist who pushed for the pardon of convicted Honduran narco-president Juan Orlando Hernández last year.
Roger Stone has shown his Guatemala cards. He wrote on X in January, providing no evidence, “Narco-Controlled Election Fraudster Bernardo Arévalo Emerges as the Maduro of Guatemala.”
Political persecution in El Salvador
On Thursday in Guatemala City, the human rights organization Cristosal found that at least 245 people have been persecuted for dissent in El Salvador since Nayib Bukele came to power.
This is the most comprehensive investigation to date. They include trade unionists, environmentalists, journalists, judges, opposition politicians, human rights activists, academics, and former officials.
Many of whom enjoy special protection under international law because of the public importance of their work.
Three-quarters involved some form of criminalization to bring them before the courts. Of these, 86 percent remain in detention. Only seven have been convicted. Cristosal says their trials followed patterns similar to Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Podcast: El Salvador: No Country for Human Rights
Cristosal also points to a combined strategy of intimidation, surveillance, and stigmatization carried out by public officials and institutions like the Attorney General’s Office. In El Salvador, Bukele controls all the branches of government.
“Far from being isolated incidents, the documented cases reveal the existence of a sustained strategy of political repression (...) to silence dissent, punish criticism, and neutralize pluralism,” says their report.
In May 2025, the National Civil Police launched a wave of persecution against opposition figures, journalists, and human rights defenders. Dozens were exiled for fear of reprisals.
In the following months, four organizations and two media outlets closed up shop and moved abroad.
“What the regime seeks is to ensure its own impunity to violate the rights of the population,” René Valiente, head of research at Cristosal, told El Faro.
He added, “which is why it directs its machinery with greater cruelty against those who’re dedicated to protecting others.”
This episode was produced with support from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. It was written by Yuliana Ramazzini, Gabriel Labrador, and Roman Gressier, with sound design by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart, and YouTube.