Women’s rights organizations in Central America have been key actors in promoting women’s right to a life free of violence and advocating for reproductive rights and other social and economic protections for women and girls. Yet throughout Central America, these organizations have experienced myriad attacks in recent years. In this article, we examine attacks on women’s rights organizations in four Central American countries: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Although there are important distinctions among the regimes of these four countries, across all of them, setbacks for women have occurred in contexts characterized by increased militarization, autocratic governance, the incursion of conservative religious ideologies in government policies, and the spread of dangerous misinformation that discredits women’s organizations’ efforts. Within these regimes, women’s organizations have been subjected to intimidation, physical violence, legal threats, and digital harassment. Our analysis identifies patterns in these attacks, showing similarities and differences across the four countries during various temporal moments. To do so, we draw on twenty-nine interviews with twenty-eight women activists, academics, and human rights defenders in the region as well as a compilation of newspaper articles, social media, and independent reports documenting attacks on women’s rights leaders and organizations in the four countries. Efforts to dismantle the work of women’s organizations and committed feminists in Central America provide a window into the gendered dimensions of authoritarian practices in the region.

Music accompanied the US intervention in Nicaragua. Above all other genres, US popular music dominated Nicaraguan culture beginning in 1919. And it never left. This article examines the foxtrot, a wildly popular US music and social dance, as a lens for understanding how Nicaraguans saw themselves, how they negotiated the intervention, and how they acted upon the world. It argues that Nicaraguans developed new musical expressions, making foreign culture their own, despite the dominance of US intervention. Through transculturation, Nicaraguans maintained a sense of national identity. More than an entertainment, the foxtrot grew into a discourse for reckoning with US intervention and contesting Nicaraguan cultural values. Remarkably, the transnational circulation of the Nicaraguan foxtrot resonated beyond Central America, putting Nicaraguan music on the global stage. The first section traces the origins and transmission of the foxtrot during the ragtime era between the 1890s and 1917, followed by the early jazz period. The second section narrates the foxtrot’s 1919 arrival and rooting as a popular music in western Nicaragua. The third section surveys the foxtrot’s domestic and transnational dissemination via Nicaraguan entertainments and US recording companies from 1919 to 1933. The fourth section explores the cultural embrace of the foxtrot in Nicaragua during that same period. Conversely, the fifth section pursues its literary critiques. The sixth and final section examines Nicaraguan composer Luis A. Delgadillo as a prominent advocate and critic of the foxtrot. The conclusion places the Nicaraguan foxtrot in context of greater Latin American production.

Maya glyphic texts from the Classic period (250–900 CE) typically chronicle the exploits of historical or divine characters; everyday or functional records are rare. Here, the authors offer a reconstruction and transcription of a ‘microtext’ painted on an interior wall of Structure 10K-2 at the site of Xultun, Guatemala. The text records a unique astronomical formula that concludes with a name, attributing the work to an individual named Sak Tahn Waax (‘White-chested Fox’). To date, this is the only known example of a Classic Maya mathematician directly credited for their work, attesting to the value of its intellectual authorship.

This article examines the evolution of COVID-19 vaccination efforts during 2021 and 2022 in six Central American countries, each with distinct social policy legacies and political regimes. Drawing on official data sources, the article differentiates two phases: the initial rollout of vaccines and the subsequent expansion of second-dose coverage to secure immunity. We advance three main arguments. First, differences in performance can be partly explained by the state capacities needed to implement vaccination campaigns. Second, regime type does not explain success; Nicaragua matched the performance of the most effective democratic countries. Third, presidential will accounts for the divergent trajectories of autocratic regimes. These findings underscore that in times of crisis, effective social intervention is possible without democratic pressures and accountability and highlight the need to further examine variation within nondemocratic regimes.

A geophysical survey at Cahal Pech, Belize, identified one of the earliest securely dated lithic caches from the Maya lowlands. Linked to Middle Preclassic (800–400 cal BC) monumental architecture and communal ceremonial events, this find demonstrates the effectiveness of gradiometry for detecting ritual deposits.

This article presents the results of the first diachronic study of obsidian procurement patterns in the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific coast of Central America; it sheds light on the integration of the region in long-distance exchange systems. This study is based on portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (pXRF) analysis of all 713 obsidian artifacts collected from Terminal Classic and Postclassic contexts on Tigre Island, Honduras, and of 54 additional obsidian artifacts from two sites on the south coast of Honduras that are housed in museum collections. Analysis of obsidian artifacts collected in the excavation of the earlier occupation of the site of La Tigüilotada (AD 800–1200) on Tigre Island revealed the predominance of Ixtepeque obsidian and the lesser presence of Güinope obsidian. Obsidian artifacts from excavations of the reoccupation of La Tigüilotada (AD 1300–1500) and of the site of Gualorita (AD 1400–1550) relied almost exclusively on La Esperanza obsidian. Least-cost path analysis shows likely riverine routes connecting all three sources to the Gulf. We contextualize these results within prior obsidian sourcing studies from the region and conclude that precolonial island settlements took part in different transference networks from their mainland counterparts.

This article examines the relationship between formal tax systems and criminal governance, utilising the Northern Triangle of Central America as a case study to illustrate how gang-controlled territories challenge traditional notions of tax sovereignty and territoriality. By analysing the overlapping fiscal functions of state taxation and the extortion practices of criminal organisations, such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Mara Barrio 18 (M-18), the article highlights the complexities that arise in regions with dual tax authorities. This exploration aims to broaden the scope of tax scholarship and social science research by encouraging further study into how these non-state actors influence tax compliance, the construction of legal norms, economic behaviour and state fiscal authority, including the potential recognition of criminal governance within formal tax systems.

This article examines how Miskitu King Robert Charles Frederic (1824–42) used colonial contracts with foreign merchants to advance his political agenda in Moskitia, on Central America’s Caribbean coast. Drawing on European and Central American archives, this study challenges narratives that portray Indigenous leaders as passive actors in colonial expansion, highlighting how the king strategically wielded contracts to facilitate the import of foreign capital through concessions and loans. His mastery of international finance enabled resistance to imperial domination while allowing him to consolidate power, maintain independence, and participate in nineteenth-century Atlantic political transformations. However, this strategy compelled him to facilitate the entry of financial capitalism into Moskitia, subsequently defining his kingdom’s fiscal governance and external relations. By examining Robert Charles Frederic’s learning process in navigating Caribbean political and Atlantic financial systems, this article contributes to scholarship on Indigenous agency in colonial encounters and reveals how peripheral actors mediated the global spread of economic institutions.

A substantial section of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the global South depend on foreign funds to conduct their operations. This paper explores how the availability of foreign funding affects their downward accountability, abilities to effect social change, and their relative influence in relation to traditional grassroots, membership-based organizations (GROs), which tend not to receive such funding. Drawing on a case study of Nicaragua, we challenge the notion that foreign funding of domestic NGOs leads to the evolution of civil society organizations, which have incentives and abilities to organize the marginalized sections of society in ways to effect social change in their interests. Instead, we find that foreign funding and corresponding professionalization of the NGO sector creates dualism among domestic civil society organizations. Foreign funding enhances the visibility and prestige of the “modern” NGO sector over traditional GROs. This has grave policy implications because foreign-funded NGOs tend to be more accountable to donors than beneficiaries and are more focused on service delivery than social change-oriented advocacy.

Research on helminth parasites of amphibians and reptiles has a long-standing history and has seen continuous growth. Recent efforts by various authors to compile comprehensive checklists are crucial for advancing our understanding of parasite diversity, ecology and evolution. Nematodes belonging to the family Molineidae parasitize vertebrates worldwide, with the genera Kentropyxia, Oswaldocruzia, Poekilostrongylus, Schulzia and Typhlopsia identified as infecting amphibians and reptiles across the Neotropical and Panamanian regions. While these parasites are relatively common, there is a lack of updated identification keys and incomplete information about their morphology, biology, distribution and host range. In this paper, we conducted an extensive bibliographic survey of Molineidae nematodes in amphibians and reptiles and provide a checklist of 53 species found in the Neotropical and Panamanian regions, including the Caribbean islands, along with updated details on their diversity, host range and geographic distribution.

The recent identification of an outlying cemetery at the Maya ceremonial centre of Ceibal, Guatemala, is providing new insights into the Preceramic to Middle Preclassic transition in the Maya lowlands, c. 1000 BC. Identified within the Amoch Group complex and dating to c. 1100–800 BC, the use of a dedicated area for the dead is not previously documented in this region for this period. Here, the authors argue that the emergence and subsequent disappearance of this practice was likely interwoven with social change, involving the adoption of ceramics, increasingly sedentary lifeways and, ultimately, the creation of monumental ceremonial centres.

Representations of the human body are ubiquitous in cultures across the world. Beyond the aesthetic, figurines transmit deeper meanings that were readily decodable by their intended audience and may still offer sociocultural insights despite the loss of this coding through time. The discovery of a rare tableau of ‘Bolinas’-type clay figurines dating to 410–380 BC at San Isidro, El Salvador, now permits the theoretical reconstruction of a less stratified Preclassic society in south-east Mesoamerica and the exploration of its spheres of interaction, which may have stretched along the coast from Guatemala to Costa Rica.