In Ecuador, electoral authorities have scheduled snap elections for August 20 after President Guillermo Lasso dissolved the legislature to head off an impeachment effort. Voters will cast ballots for both the Legislative Assembly and for president, with a runoff to follow in October if there is no outright winner in the first round. Elected officials will serve until the next scheduled elections in 2025. Lasso is ruling by decree, with constitutional court oversight, until the new elections. This week he signed a decree to boost investment with measures like tax exemptions. The powerful Indigenous movement CONAIE has vowed to protest unwanted decrees. Read last week’s newsletter and analysis from Pablo Ospina Peralta for more on Lasso’s move. 

In El Salvador, civil society groups have struck a deal with four opposition parties to back a unity candidate to challenge incumbent Nayib Bukele in the 2024 presidential election, El Faro reports. The negotiations, which some politicians have denied, brings together the rival traditional parties FMLN and ARENA alongside Vamos and Nuestro Tiempo. “The intention,” union leader Stanley Quinteros told El Faro, “is to present a single ticket that represents both the left and the right.” Bukele has vowed to run for reelection, even though the constitution bans consecutive presidential terms. Civil society groups have yet to choose their nominees. Once they do, candidates will register with Nuestro Tiempo, a party formed in 2019, to “sidestep the unpopular baggage of the traditional parties,” reports El Faro. Despite his authoritarian turn, Bukele remains highly popular, and any opposition candidate would face a tough race. According to El Salvador observer Tim Muth: “The purpose of a civil society candidate cannot be to win, but instead to use the candidacy as a platform for trying to educate the Salvadoran public about the damage the Nayib Bukele has done to the institutions of Salvadoran democracy.” The alliance would also seek to disrupt Bukele’s majority in the legislature.  

In Colombia, testimony from a former paramilitary commander has once again confirmed that the military and state institutions “actively coordinated” with the notorious Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group in a counterinsurgency campaign, The Guardian reports. The testimony claimed the AUC intervened in the 1998 and 2002 elections and specifically named former President Álvaro Uribe for his role in a 2003 scheme to murder a local mayor in which the AUC served as hitman. Meanwhile, Uribe, long accused of paramilitary ties, could face trial for witness tampering in a case over his alleged connections to right-wing death squads. Today, offshoots of the AUC, nominally demobilized under Uribe in the mid-2000s, continue to terrorize rural Colombians, with Black and Indigenous communities especially vulnerable. 

In Brazil, Congress has moved to weaken the ministries of Indigenous peoples and the environment, key institutions in combating deforestation and illegal mining in the Amazon rainforest, The Guardian reports. Draft legislation approved at the committee level would ax the rural environmental registry from the Ministry of Environment and strip the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples of its powers to demarcate Indigenous lands. Separately, the Brazilian state oil company Petrobras is set to appeal a new ban on oil drilling near the mouth of the Amazon River. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Andre Pagliarini writes for The New Republic, faces a “a high-wire act” to balance policies that are both good for the economy and good for the climate. 

A new Associated Press report details how secret networks in Honduras—one of four countries in the Americas with a total abortion ban—help people access medication to terminate unwanted pregnancies. “Activists in the networks use code words, aliases, encrypted messages, burner phones,” according to the report. “Most don’t know one another, or any specifics beyond their role in the chain.” On March 8, 2023, International Women’s Day, President Xiomara Castro overturned a ban on emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill or Plan B. The ban had been introduced under the de facto regime that replaced ousted president Manuel Zelaya in the wake of the U.S.-backed 2009 coup, making it the only country in Latin America to ban the medication. 

In Guyana, ExxonMobil has appealed a court ruling requiring an “unlimited guarantee” from the company to cover costs in the case of an offshore oil spill. The ruling, Amy Westervelt writes for The Guardian, could “change the face of offshore oil drilling throughout the Caribbean.” If the decision is overturned in Guyana, plaintiffs could take the fight to the Caribbean court of justice. But the case, argues financial analyst Tom Sanzillo, is more about economics than the environment. “ExxonMobil has the resources to clean up a spill,” he writes. “Guyana does not.” A consortium led by ExxonMobil raked in nearly $6 billion from Guyanese offshore oil last year.