An Antidote to Indecency

It’s easy to read this year-in-review issue of Central America Monthly as doom, gloom, and crimes of state. But each of these stories contains greater acts of courage, resilience, and ethical judgment.

Human rights attorney Ruth López is El Faro’s Person of the Year. One of the highest-profile political prisoners in El Salvador, she’s a nuisance to total power. In the era of Nayib Bukele, she investigated dozens of corruption cases, brought lawsuits against the president before the highest courts, and stood shoulder to shoulder with victims of a new police state. She “needed to be silenced before her allegations and truths reached more ears, and before her popularity made her capture more difficult and costly,” writes veteran political reporter Gabriel Labrador in an explanatory essay, The Dictatorship in El Salvador Takes Ruth López Hostage.

On May 18, López’s arrest was a warning shot to dozens of dissidents who fled the country. A new Salvadoran exile grew as Bukele entered his second year as de facto president. “Emboldened by its renewed relationship with the United States, in 2025 the Salvadoran dictatorship openly launched a hunt for anyone critical or inconvenient, no longer even pretending that its actions were legitimate,” writes our editorial board. But there have been quiet consequences: “As time passes, internal discontent grows as more people are affected by the repression unleashed, more citizens refuse to participate in the regime’s lies, and more are outraged by immoral power.”

It’s true. Nothing boosted Bukele’s dictatorial project this year more than Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Their carceral cooperation made global headlines. That’s our Story of the Year: Bukele in the Shadow of Trump. But Óscar Martínez and I note that even U.S. diplomacy, which pretends to have forgotten that presidential reelection in El Salvador was unconstitutional, has its dissenters.

One leading dissenter in our region was José María Tojeira, the Jesuit provincial and former rector of Central American University (UCA). One of the most respected intellectuals of postwar El Salvador, “Chema” Tojeira died on September 5 in Guatemala. He was a staunch advocate for transitional justice, environmentalism, and human rights. In San Salvador, Ramiro Guevara chronicled his funeral services, which were attended by hundreds of people. That scene leads the way in 2025 in Ten Pictures.

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After we published the November issue, a Salvadoran court announced a new trial for 13 military leaders accused of orchestrating the 1981 El Mozote massacre. We covered the trial in San Francisco Gotera back in 2021, before it ground to a halt and Judge Jorge Guzmán fled for exile. Now, we translate research from four Argentine academics showing the dictatorship of Rafael Videla’s complicity in one of the most notorious crimes in contemporary Latin America. Authoritarians are allergic to declassified documents, which is why we featured them both prominently in our first series of Tertulias.

In the year ahead, we’ll publish the magazine in two cycles: from March to June and September to December. Eight issues, just like this year. Next year, we’re eager to have more global voices from academia tackle the next question: How did the regime fall?

Today we also include two pieces from Guatemala. Our Article of the Year is a newly re-edited translation of our May chronicle: The Massacre of a Trial for Genocide, an account with El Faro English reporter Yuliana Ramazzini of how the second trial for genocide in the country was hogtied before the verdict. We also share our full interview in English, Spanish, and Ixil with survivor Engracia Mendoza Caba. Her refusal to be silent about the Ixil genocide is a moving indictment of decades of impunity in Guatemala.

We’re pleased to have Latino USA producer Reynaldo Leaños Jr. join us with a special podcast episode unmasking a White House lie: that U.S. taxpayer dollars were funding “sex changes” in Guatemala. USAID projects around the world were then decimated. Organizations serving queer Guatemalans are now looking beyond that aid money, which for decades tried to mold Central America in its image.

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Meanwhile, on the U.S. home front, “a prolonged new kristallnacht” of persecution of immigrants is unfolding in the United States. Today, we re-up a photo concert sharing the work of nine photographers spanning from Central America to New York and Los Angeles. ICE is here! premiered in November at the Central American Journalism Forum (ForoCAP). Omnionn, who produced the original soundtrack, told me that he sampled cumbia and corrido tumbado to depict the resistance of immigrant communities under siege by an increasingly unaccountable federal police force. You’ll want to watch it on a big screen.

We end this year with Gaza, where the world is a witness to genocide. Live at ForoCAP, El Faro editor-in-chief Carlos Dada spoke with Homero de León, a Mexican doctor from Doctors Without Borders who had just returned from his third mission there. International humanitarian doctors are among the few who can still come and go. “Homero, I lost all hope in humanity,” one Palestinian colleague told him. “I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I want my children to at least have one.”

“There’s so much despair, but there’s also a certain hope,” he told Dada. “For me as a humanitarian doctor, and for you as journalists, speaking, documenting, and denouncing go hand in hand. They’re both acts of justice, acts of humanity, and acts of resistance.”