It can be said about El Salvador like it can be said about Honduras: There is evidence that all three political machines of the last three decades secretly partnered with organized crime for their political benefit: whether for campaign cash, vote coercion, or to bring down the number of homicides. In some cases, U.S. courts accused their figureheads of forming part of the very criminal structures themselves. But in every case, the national political leadership adamantly insisted that it was false, an opposition conspiracy, a mere confabulation.

This fifth issue of Central America Monthly puts that evidence on the table. We dedicate the cover to the November 30 presidential, legislative, and municipal elections in Honduras, which are already showing signs of co-optation and infighting in key institutions, political violence including assassination of local candidates, and criss-crossing accusations of fraud — all of which have marred past elections. That is the subject of a special podcast episode, Six Threats to the Election in Honduras.

All of the reporting on Honduras for this issue was done in Tegucigalpa, including a Q&A with journalist and author Óscar Estrada, coupling the technical with the criminal: None of the political parties in Honduras have any intention to shine a light on campaign spending, he proposes, because, as he says in the title, “I believe every presidential candidate in Honduras since 2013 has taken drug money.” In the section From the Archive, we re-published El Faro director Carlos Dada’s 2021 chronicle of the blurred lines between the Los Cachiros cartel and National Party capo Óscar Nájera, the “Cacique de Colón”. In Honduras, the narco-state is everywhere and nowhere. Before reading it, remember: No guns in the swimming pool.

Estrada is even more blunt. As for the Honduran criminal underworld and its political cronies, since 2021, “nothing has changed. Anywhere,” he concludes.

El Salvador is another story, one reaching all the way to the Donald Trump White House. Building on our August issue on the close ties between the U.S. president and his Central American lieutenant, Nayib Bukele, today Carlos García, a Mexican journalist, leading expert on MS-13 and frequent El Faro collaborator, has published the most in-depth case file ever released to the public on each and every one of the 27 historic Mara Salvatrucha leaders who were indicted on terrorism charges in the Eastern District of New York, and for whom the Trump administration has shown willingness to deport back to El Salvador, with full knowledge of their covert prior negotiations with Bukele and each of the two parties who ruled before him.

Take your time to chew through and return to Twenty-Seven MS-13 Bosses as Pawns between Bukele and Trump, which we plan to nurture with new information and insights over time. To help dimension its enormity, editor-in-chief Óscar Martínez penned an accompanying introduction, Gangsters and Suits: The Most Murderous Mafia of Postwar El Salvador. “Without these men, without these criminals, it is impossible to understand the political history of El Salvador’s fragile democracy and its descent into the current dictatorship,” he writes. “These gang members are now also indispensable for understanding the methods of the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump.”

This case file is not an abstraction or an inadvertent hagiography. In Twenty-Five Years of Horror, El Faro photojournalists Víctor Peña and Carlos Barrera curated two-dozen pictures published over the past two decades in El Faro to show the victims and perpetrators of cycles of violence that gripped Salvadoran communities —and destroyed thousands and thousands of lives— since the time when many of the old criminal gazes now indicted were newly deported from the United States. The editorial board writes: “These are gang members wanted for extradition by the United States and whom Bukele himself illegally released. That agreement, which Secretary Rubio sealed in San Salvador, aims to save a criminal: Nayib Bukele.”

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Pause. For readers accompanying Central America Monthly since the first issue in May, Dispatch from Guatemala, a few trends are likely apparent. We have taken a stab at explaining the nature of the political leadership in our region today, from Nayib Bukele to Rosario Murillo to Donald Trump. While the newsroom was born in El Salvador and —albeit mostly from exile— will continue singularly focused on explaining the country, El Faro English strives to connect the dots between countries often experienced and analyzed in isolation, as seen in this issue on political corruption and organized crime, our June number on political prisoners, or the July installment on the new Central American exile. We try to ask deeper questions, in order to seek sharper answers and spark longer-lasting debate.

The third and final section of this issue is a combination of chronicle, reportage, and essay. New York University academic Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading expert on authoritarianism around the world, joins The Tertulia with an essay exploring the common threads between “regimes as diverse as those of Mussolini, Gaddafi, Putin, and Pinochet,” and what can be learned from that same history on how civil society might effectively counter them. First published in El Faro in Spanish in 2021, she told me last week that her work is “unfortunately more relevant than ever.”

This month like in past issues, we invite colleagues from around the region to throw their pen into the mix. Costa Rican journalist Álvaro Murillo, vice president of the Central American Network of Journalists, went to Nosara, that sparkling beachfront cut out from the jungle and ballooning in recent years, whose recent visitors include Michael Jordan and Ivanka Trump, to explain what many Costa Ricans view with suspicion as the “new Tulum”. Who are the winners and losers of the flood of dollars and vacation homes, in a place where there are ten swimming pools for every social welfare house?

We are honored to close with an alternatingly poignant and enraging essay by our deputy editor Sergio Arauz, combining the public with the private in multiple senses — a piece that will resonate with countless Salvadorans, Central Americans, and even in the United States, where health often appears to be for sale and the systems of care too often violate their seminal oath. “This is an intimate story of a man condemned to die in pain amid the precariousness of El Salvador’s public health system,” Sergio begins with a deep breath in To Die of Hospitals in El Salvador. “This is the story of my father’s death.”