Caribbean & Central America - November 2024

The recent election of Guatemala’s 13-member supreme court (CSJ) and 156 appellate court judges for five-year terms has failed to provide much optimism regarding the prospects for anti-corruption reformist President Bernardo Arévalo, in terms of delivering on his election-winning pledge to dismantle the so-called ‘pacto de corruptos’ network of institutional corruption, as the first piece in this November 2024 edition of the Latin American Regional Report: Caribbean & Central America explores.... Read More

The recent election of Guatemala’s 13-member supreme court (CSJ) and 156 appellate court judges for five-year terms has failed to provide much optimism regarding the prospects for President Bernardo Arévalo, an anti-corruption reformer, in terms of delivering on his election-winning pledge to dismantle the so-called ‘pacto de corruptos’ network of institutional corruption.... Read More

Guatemala is not the only country to have recently picked new supreme court (CSJ) justices.... Read More

The murder in September of Juan López, a prominent environmentalist, has reignited familiar concerns regarding the plight of human rights defenders (HRDs) in Honduras.... Read More

On 4 October Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, confirmed that Spain had offered nationality to 135 Nicaraguan political prisoners taken from a prison in Managua the previous month and flown to Guatemala where they were welcomed by Guatemala’s President Bernardo Arévalo and Eric Jacobstein (a top US State Department Western Hemisphere Affairs diplomat).... Read More

Migrants are on course to send home a record-breaking amount of remittances to Nicaragua this year, with money sent home providing an economic lifeline to many families and helping to shore up the government’s financial position.... Read More

On 10 October the US embassy in San José referred to Costa Rica as a “silicon rainforest” in a Facebook post explaining the semiconductor supply chain, as the two nations step up nearshoring efforts in the industry.... Read More

At a joint press conference with Haiti’s now former Prime Minister Garry Conille in Nairobi on 11 October, Kenya’s President William Ruto said of the multinational security support (MSS) mission to Haiti, of which Kenyan police are the main component: “Already this mission is showing positive results, restoring hope and providing a glimpse of stability that lies ahead.” Few in Haiti would agree with this optimistic spin, not least as it came only a week after a gang-perpetrated massacre of up to 115 people in the town of Pont-Sondé following which the performance of the Haitian police and the MSS was severely criticised.... Read More

The 2nd European Union (EU)-Caribbean Global Gateway Conference on Sargassum was held from 1-2 October in St George’s, the capital of Grenada.... Read More

On 19 October President Luis Abinader, who took office again mid-August following a landslide victory in May, dropped a small bombshell.... Read More

PANAMA | Panama Canal posts revenue growth despite drought.... Read More