Costa Ricans held a march in solidarity with Nicaraguan refugees on Aug. 25, 2018. An estimated 500,000 Nicaraguans live in Costa Rica, with more arriving daily as crisis in the country deepens.
Reuters/Juan Carlos Ulate
Nicaraguan migrants send over US$1 billion home each year. This money has played a changing role in domestic politics – first boosting the Ortega regime and, now, sustaining the uprising against him.
When different sides in a violent political crisis become ever more entrenched, democracy quickly starts to wither.
Militias guard a barricade after police and pro-government militias stormed a rebel-held neighborhood in Masaya, Nicaragua, on July 17, 2018.
AP Photo/Cristibal Venegas
Nicaragua has exploded in violence since mass protests began against President Daniel Ortega in April, with hundreds dead and thousands wounded. Amid such chaos, criminal violence is likely to follow.
Daily life in some parts of Central America is so fearsome for parents and children that crossing Mexico and risking detention in the U.S. seems less fearsome.
Reuters/Edgard Garrido
Central American youth are 10 times more likely to be murdered than children in the US. Child homicides in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are rising even as other violence declines.
Undocumented entries across the border are at all-time lows. The people now arriving are not Mexican workers, but a smaller number of Central American families seeking to escape dire circumstances.
In this April 2018 photo, siblings from El Salvador huddle together on a soccer field in Mexico.
awaiting temporary transit visas that would allow them to continue to the U.S. border, where they hoped to request asylum.
(AP Photo/Felix Marquez)
Immigration turmoil in the U.S. means Canada must craft its own migration management plans – to help Central Americans fleeing misery in their homelands, some of it with Canadian involvement.
Ivan Rodriguez and Juan Ortiz are still searching for relatives who disappeared in San Miguel Los Lotes during Guatemala’s June 3 Fuego volcano eruption. The government’s rescue mission has now ended.
AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd
Walter E. Little, University at Albany, State University of New York
Guatemala has ended its Fuego volcano rescue mission and declared 110 dead. But people in the hot, ash-covered eruption zone say that the real death tally is much higher and that they’ll keep digging.
Children at an immigrant family separation protest in Phoenix.
AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin
Who’s in charge of deciding how immigrants coming over the US-Mexico border are treated? Both Congress and the executive branch have power, a legal scholar explains.
The United Nations has called a new Trump administration policy of separating migrant families and detaining children ‘abuse.’
Reuters/Patrick Fallon
Trump hopes migrants won’t come if they know their children will be taken away. That grim logic ignores the inescapable dangers that drive thousands of Central Americans to flee their homes each year.
Nicaragua, which overthrew its last violent dictator in 1979, is the only Latin American country since Cuba to stage a successful revolution.
AP Photo/Alfredo Zuniga
History shows that Latin American presidents usually don’t last long after they use violence to repress mass protests. Is Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega the next to fall?
Remembering victims of genocide in Guatemala City.
EPA/Esteban Biba
Decades after the end of a civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the survivors’ search for justice goes on.
Mexico has been doing the U.S.’s ‘dirty work’ on immigration for too long, says the front-runner in the country’s July 1 presidential election.
AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo
Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are leading more Central Americans to stay put in Mexico. Mexico’s presidential candidates have a lot to say about that, and none of it involves mass deportations.
Many women in this caravan of Central American migrants said they were fleeing physical and sexual violence. The Trump administration has overridden an Obama-era ruling that domestic abuse may be grounds for asylum.
Reuters/Edgard Garrido
Countries have some flexibility in interpreting UN agreements on refugee rights. But Sessions’ decision that abused women don’t qualify for asylum in the US is an extraordinarily severe ruling.
Detainees sleep in a holding cell at a processing facility in Brownsville, Texas.
AP Photo/Eric Gay
Chytrid fungus has caused a global “amphibian apocalypse,” killing frogs worldwide. Now some appear to be evolving resistance – but a closely related fungus threatens newts and salamanders.
Protests against social security reforms in Nicaragua quickly gained traction. Now, even the Catholic Church is suggesting ‘democratization’ may be on the horizon.
Reuters/Oswaldo Rivas
For 11 years, Daniel Ortega’s regime has been unshakable. But Nicaragua’s autocratic leader is vulnerable after weeks of deadly protest. Now, some citizens are calling for him to resign.
Members of a caravan of migrants from Central America.
REUTERS/Edgard Garrido
Some 200 Central Americans who fled violence at home want to apply for asylum in the US. Trump says they’re ‘not welcome.’ Here, key info on the ‘caravan’ to the US-Mexico border.