Podcast: Trump’s Invasion of Venezuela Polarizes Central America

The following is the transcript of episode 56 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

MADURO: Rest assured, people of El Salvador, that no pipsqueak, no puppet of imperialism like Bukele, will separate the peoples of El Salvador and Venezuela. We will remain united. Bukele will dry up.

GRESSIER, HOST: That’s an old video of Nicolás Maduro, who was deposed in Venezuela just days ago in a U.S. military operation and arraigned in New York on drug charges. Nayib Bukele reposted it online upon his capture.

That version of Bukele was almost unrecognizable from the one who in 2022, angry about U.S. anti-corruption sanctions, compared Joe Biden’s policies to the United Fruit Company.

State of alert

The U.S. military’s capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro sent a shockwave through Central America. In Nicaragua, a few hours after the attack, co-dictator Rosario Murillo called a meeting at the presidential residence to order a “state of alert” and increase state surveillance.

“She ordered increased surveillance of ‘radical opposition elements,’ ‘deportees from the United States,’ and on the possible ‘formation of groups that disturb our peace,’” reported the Nicaraguan digital outlet Confiencial.

The Southern District of New York named Nicaragua in Maduro’s indictment as a thorough-fare for alleged Venezuelan drug shipments.

In El Salvador, de facto president Nayib Bukele mocked Maduro in the video on X, alongside a picture of Maduro in handcuffs.

Bukele has deep ties to Venezuela. As El Faro revealed in 2021, among the most powerful figures in his government is a tight ring of informal Venezuela-born advisors tied to their home country’s opposition. One of them, Sara Hanna, went with Bukele to the Oval Office last year.

The ties are also financial. Revista Factum revealed that Bukele received $1.9 million in investment in 2013 from Alba Petróleos, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA.

Bukele’s chief ally in Central America, Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves, also celebrated Maduro’s capture. “Now he must answer for his crimes in Venezuela and abroad,” he wrote.

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Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo, who has declared himself a social democrat but mostly governed conservatively, and as an ally of Trump, has tried to find middle ground. In one statement, posted to X, he called for respect for the U.N. Charter and called for an end to “any unilateral military action.”

It’s worth recalling that his father, Juan José Arévalo, was the first president of the Guatemalan revolution in the 1940s and a staunch critic of U.S. imperialism and European fascism.

His son Bernardo has been critical of the Venezuelan regime since he was elected in 2023. In a second statement, he expressed support for the Venezuelan people in rebuilding democratic institutions.

In Honduras, where Trump pardoned convicted narco-president Juan Orlando Hernández, outgoing President Xiomara Castro was the most vocal in her opposition.

She called Maduro’s kidnapping an “affront to the sovereignty and independence of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a complete disregard and moral defeat of the United Nations Charter and international law.”

That contrasts with President-elect Tito Asfura, who called for an “orderly, peaceful, and constitutional transition” in Caracas.

Venezuela is an important ally to Castro, a major friction point with the United States. When U.S. Ambassador Laura Dogu criticized a defense meeting between the two countries, Honduras responded by announcing that it would denounce its extradition treaty with the United States. But early in Trump’s term, Honduras walked back the threat.

Panama is even more revealing. Trump has threatened to retake the Canal by force, and strong-armed the country into pulling Canal contracts from a Chinese company.

President José Raúl Mulino walked a tightrope. On Tuesday, at a bicentennial event commemorating liberator Simón Bolívar, he declared Maduro illegitimate, stating that “in Venezuela, the people spoke clearly and overwhelmingly at the polls in 2024.”

But he diverged from the Trump administration on one key point: that he will not recognize the new president permitted by the Trump administration, Delcy Rodríguez, and that the transition must lead to 2024 opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia taking office.

What’s interventionist?

Just weeks ago, the White House published a new National Security Strategy declaring a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, and asserting its dominance over the Western Hemisphere. And the Trump administration is now shaking up its envoys to Central America.

On Thursday, Houston philanthropist Melinda Hildebrand arrived in Costa Rica as the new U.S. ambassador.

Hildebrand and her husband Jeffrey, an oil exec, reported a net worth of upwards of $10 billion dollars last year, according to the Houston Chronicle. And the Washington Post named the couple as major donors to Trump Victory, the fundraising committee for Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign.

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Trump said Hildebrand will focus on trade and immigration. Her selection is another show of the State Department’s closeness to the private sector in its Central America policy. Right before the elections in Honduras, Chris Landau, Under Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, criticized the election citing “key representatives of the business community in Honduras.”

Trump has yet to nominate an ambassador to Honduras. Biden’s pick, Laura Dogu, who was critical of the current government’s ties to Venezuela, left last year.

The same goes for Guatemala, where Arévalo announced on Wednesday that Ambassador Tobin Bradley is leaving the embassy in the next few weeks.

Ambassador Bradley oversaw close cooperation including the announcement of U.S. Army involvement in port renovation and of a third-country asylum agreement. Trump even sent Arévalo a personal letter on Independence Day in September.

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But Bradley toed a delicate line. Miami Republican María Elvira Salazar called for his removal in November, joining the U.S.-sanctioned attorney general who, like Bukele, claimed the ambassador and other Biden-era officials had been interventionist in their anti-corruption policy.

According to Arévalo, Bradley, a career diplomat, said he received a transfer order as part of a move to replace Biden-era ambassadors around the world.

As for El Salvador, in December Trump nominated Troy Edgar, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security right under Secretary Kristi Noem.

Trump cemented close ties last year with El Salvador by rendering Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants to the CECOT megaprison. In recent weeks, Trump and Bukele announced a reciprocal trade agreement to waive certain tariffs.

The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, CISPES, wrote that “Edgar’s nomination likely opens the door to greater militarization in El Salvador, as well as closer coordination in surveillance, intelligence, and intensified deportations.”

Plummeting migration

Last, we turn to Tapachula, the Mexican migrant town on the border with Guatemala. A new report by Cindy Espina in Plaza Pública shows that the number of undocumented migrants passing through Tapachula dramatically fell by three quarters between 2024 and 2025.

ESPINA: Migration from Central America to the United States has declined, and the data on migratory movements demonstrate this. But that doesn’t mean that it has stopped. Claiming this would render invisible the migrants who, despite the anti-migration policy imposed by Donald Trump, continue to migrate, showing that the root causes that forced them to migrate still exist.

GRESSIER: In late 2018, Tapachula was a thoroughfare for migrant caravans. In 2021, it became known as a “ciudad cárcel”, or prison city, for mass migrant detention and checkpoints. Now, Espina writes that, in the city center, migrants no longer wait in long lines for remittances. And “cuarterías,” houses where migrants often rented rooms, are eerily empty.

This episode of Central America in Minutes was produced with support from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. It was written by Yuliana Ramazzini and Roman Gressier. Sound design by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart, and YouTube.