This article contributes to broader discussions of early Latin American nation-making by focusing on the interplay among territory, sovereignty and human movement in nineteenth-century Central America. How did early Central American nations create sovereign spaces? And how did human movement in turn impact the meanings of bordered spaces? Drawing from constitutions, legal codes and archival documents related to the implementation of migration laws, the central argument of this article is that Central American governments typically treated free migration not as a threat to sovereignty but as an opportunity to reinforce sovereignty over the fixed spaces through which people moved.

The scholarship seeking to explain the ineffectiveness of violence against women (VAW) laws has focused on the lack of resources or will to implement these laws. Less attention has been given to how these laws are crafted and positioned in the legal hierarchy, which may undermine them from the start. This article focuses on four cases from Central America, a region where fifty-five laws to protect women from violence were passed between 1960 and 2018, yet VAW continues. It finds that the legal positioning and language of these laws prioritize family unity while undermining women’s rights to protection; thus, these laws fail by design. The article identifies four legal placements that delay (El Salvador), undermine (Honduras), diminish (Nicaragua), or render abstract (Guatemala) the effectiveness of VAW laws in the context of penal and judicial codes. This work has direct policy implications and broader relevance beyond the cases examined here.

La mayor parte de las mujeres traficadas para el comercio sexual por la frontera suroeste de Estados Unidos proceden de México y Centroamérica. Esta investigación, fundamentada en una metodología cualitativa, que incluye entrevistas en profundidad con cincuenta y dos traficantes de mujeres y ochenta y seis dueños de negocios de prostitución en México, analiza los vínculos entre los diferentes actores involucrados en el tráfico de mujeres de México y Centroamérica para el comercio sexual en Estados Unidos. Concluimos que estos actores ocupan lugares estratégicos dentro de una cadena de mando que tiene el propósito de proporcionar a los patrones estadounidenses una remesa ininterrumpida de mujeres. Los traficantes reclutan y transportan mujeres, mientras que los dueños de centros nocturnos de Estados Unidos se benefician de la explotación de la prostitución. Asimismo, esta actividad depende de la participación de madrotas y padrotes mexicanos, que reclutan y dan cobijo a mujeres en tránsito al norte.

The objective of this paper, based on interviews with 95 human smugglers (coyotes) involved in agriculture and 51 in prostitution, is to provide a comparative analysis of the networks transporting (mostly) male migrants intending to work in US agriculture and those recruiting women/girls for the US sex industry. Networks carrying females for sex work are bigger and use more fraudulent recruitment strategies. However, migrant smuggling for agriculture is not totally different from sex trafficking; similarities between the types of networks analysed dwarf their differences. Smugglers frequently use some form of deception to convince their would-be clients/victims to undertake risky journeys. I conclude that both networks are demand-driven. Smugglers serve the interests of US agribusinesses and sex business owners rather than those of the males and females they recruit.

The metal-mining boom Latin America experienced in recent decades precipitated highly contentious anti-mining social movements in Central America. In this context, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban all metal mining by law. In contrast, policy in nearby Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua remained pro-mining. These cases are compared using a most similar systems design. Comparison reveals the importance of three variables: how national economic-elite networks and interests relate to multinational corporations; national movement coordination and goals, specifically in relation to prohibition; and how parties and leaders relied on popular bases or capital. These factors shaped the contention between elites and movements that influenced state actions around mining and led to this ‘least likely case’ of extractive policy change in El Salvador.

Observers have increasingly described the drug-related violence and corruption affecting Central America as the region's ‘Colombianisation’. This narrative is not just confused and misleading; it is dangerous. The Colombianisation discourse perpetuates ineffective and destructive anti-drug policies. It also obscures the circulations and connections that make the drug trade, the drug war and their associated economies of violence possible. We do, however, recognise one form of Colombianisation that actually is under way, but it is not the one imagined by security pundits. The real Colombianisation is a convergence of geopolitical and economic interests that have seized upon the geographical realignments of the drug trade to expand the same agroindustrial-military nexus in Central America that proved so ‘successful’ in Colombia.

Following the ends to the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the revolutionary coalitions that had led the fight against authoritarian regimes began to fracture. However, none of the splinter parties that broke from the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit has succeeded on their own as political parties. In this article, I argue that there is no single reason to explain the poor performances of the Democratic Party (PD), the Renovating Movement (MR), and the Democratic Front Party (FDR) in El Salvador, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Renovate-MRS) and the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (Rescue-MRS) in Nicaragua, and the New Nation Alliance (ANN) in Guatemala. However, their limited financial resources, alliances with non-revolutionary centrist and centre-right parties, and voter tendency to overlook internal ideological and personal debates within the original political parties, especially the FSLN and FMLN, have not helped.

Scholars have paid considerable attention to the connection between Washington's withdrawal from intervention and the emergence of dictatorship in Central America during the 1930s. The current article seeks to enhance our understanding of those interconnected developments through the investigation of the US Foreign Service and its role in the early 1930s presidential campaigns in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It shows that the dynamic interaction between actors in both Washington and Central America set in motion a process that would produce decades of authoritarian rule in the isthmus.

This paper makes an empirical contribution to discussion of the optimal exchange rate regime. Using a new dataset for Central American countries, we compare the dynamics of the real exchange rate (RER) between dollarised and non-dollarised countries. Our results show that the two dollarised countries in the region, El Salvador and Panama, are quite different in terms of RER dynamics. In El Salvador the RER spends more time away from its equilibrium level than in the non-dollarised countries in the region, while the contrary is true for Panama. We also find that inflation persistence is similar in El Salvador to the other countries, but smaller in Panama. This leads us to the conclusion that some degree of exchange rate flexibility helps countries to have a more aligned RER. Nevertheless, a long-lived, highly credible dollarised economy, like Panama, can reduce inflation persistence to such an extent that RER misalignments are in fact less frequent than in countries with more flexible exchange rate regimes.