Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on April 24 urged political candidates in Trinidad & Tobago (T&T) to reaffirm their commitment to press freedom ahead of the upcoming elections, following a sharp drop in the country's security ranking on RSF's World Press Freedom Index. Rising crime and the declaration of a state of emergency caused the country's security score, ranking the level of safety for journalists, to fall from 6th to 24th in 2024.

US-directed repression and counter-insurgency in El Salvador in the 1980s allowed the imposition of "free trade" or "neoliberal" regimes in the generations since then—ultimately culminating in the adoption of CAFTA. This, in turn, has exacerbated the expropriation of the traditional lands of the peasantry by the agro-export oligarchy. It also led to the hypertrophy of the narco economy and a new nightmare of violence, which Nayib Bukele has exploited to establish a new dictatorship. This dictatorship is now openly in league with Donald Trump, and has in fact become critical to his fascist agenda. In Episode 275 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg breaks down El Salvador's historical role as a laboratory of genocide and police-state methods for US imperialism, and the imperative of trans-national resistance.

The Trump administration's deportation policies took center stage this week as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele visited the White House, courts continued challenging the legality of the deportations, and a Maryland senator travelled to El Salvador in an attempt to make contact with a man known to be wrongfully deported.

President Donald Trump's migration crackdown has been credited with reducing flows northward towards the United States, but it is leaving hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers trapped in limbo further south, unsure whether to take riskier journeys to try to reach the US and anxiously wrestling with what to do next.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report March 19 urging Mexican authorities to conduct a "thorough" and "impartial" investigation into an apparent mass killing site outside the city of Guadalajara, in Jalisco state.

According to the report, a local collective called the Jalisco Search Warriors on March 5 uncovered uncovered the site on an isolated ranch, where they found "bone fragments…hundreds of shoes, clothing items, charred human remains, and three underground ovens..."  The discovery was made while attempting to locate missing individuals or their remains, with local citizens organizing the effort in the absence of a sufficient response by the authorities.

Mexico has launched a massive deployment of 10,000 troops to cities and towns on the border with the United States. Videos and photos posted on social media by Mexico's Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA) showed military and National Guard troops lined up boarding transport planes and rows of army trucks rolling out in the predawn darkness Feb. 4 from bases in Mexico City, Tlaxcala and other cities. Large contingents were also mobilized to Mexico's southern border in the Yucatan. The response—dubbed "Operativo Frontera Norte"—is part of an agreement reached the previous day between US President Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum postponing trade tariff threats for a month. (El Paso Times, Peninsula360)

President Trump has ordered the construction of a 30,000-bed facility to hold migrants at the notorious US naval facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as part of his mass deportation campaign. The US base has been used to house terrorism suspects since 2002, becoming synonymous with torture and unlawful imprisonment. The US has secretively detained refugees and migrants intercepted at sea at Guantánamo Bay for decades, but the facility has not previously been used for people apprehended on US soil or at this scale.

Human rights organizations, including the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), have urged an immediate end to violence between illegal armed groups in the northeast Colombian region of Catatumbo. WOLA joined the Colombian movement "Defendamos la Paz" in a call for armed groups in Catatumbo to suspend their conflict. In the Jan. 19 statement, WOLA wrote: "The Ejercito Nacional de Liberación (ELN) must cease human rights violations and adopt a truce to halt armed confrontations with Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) dissidents." The rights organizations also called on the Colombian government to provide immediate humanitarian aid for the large number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the region. WOLA urged the armed groups involved to "respect international humanitarian law and allow relief efforts to reach those in need."