ly infiltrated politics at every level. Juan Orlando Hernández, the president, has been fingered in at least threeUS cases against drug-traffickers, including one in May in which his brother was sentenced to life behind bars. Elections in November are unlikely to change much. Yani Rosenthal, a leading presidential candidate, served three years in a jail in the United States for money-laundering.
In Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, the authoritarian president, acts with increasing impunity. Over the past four months seven presidential hopefuls, as well as numerous intellectuals and former ministers, have been detained. On August 6th Nicaragua’s electoral council disqualified the main opposition party, Citizens for Liberty, from running. As of December NGOs must register as “foreign agents”. Police are also going after La Prensa, the country’s oldest newspaper. There is “no trace of democracy”, says a Nicaraguan businessman.
Few ordinary folk in these countries think they can change things through elections or protests. Many think their only option is to flee from their homes. In July US border guards had 213,000 encounters on the southern border, the largest number in a month since 2000. Some 44% were from the Northern Triangle. But this understates the problem. Many more of those fleeing spend time in Mexico, before trying to go farther north, while many Nicaraguans go south to Costa Rica.
President Joe Biden has made Central America, especially the Northern Triangle, a foreign-policy priority. (Officials fear they can do little about Nicaragua.) Rather than simply reinforcing the border, the administration wants to tackle the democratic regression and its effects.
That is easier said than done. The United States has some diplomatic tools at its disposal, such as slapping visa bans on the ruling elites. Last month the State Department published a list of more than 50 current and former officials accused of corruption or undermining democracy in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They will not be allowed to travel to the United States and may face further sanctions. (Similarly, Nicaraguans linked to the regime have been issued with visa bans.) The Justice Department says it will launch a task-force to investigate corruption and human trafficking in the region.
Boosting governance, security and prosperity in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador from afar will be much trickier. Some violence-reduction programmes may have had a bit of success over the past few decades. But even assessments by USAID admit that past aid efforts have had little effect. American officials say they have learned from previous mistakes. Their initial focus now is on improving prosperity, by working with the private sector in each country. For example, US officials are trying to persuade local businesses to provide more jobs. They also want them to lobby for policy changes, such as the introduction of well-regulated public-private partnerships for infrastructure projects. Such projects are typically wholly state-run and highly prone to graft.
Mr Restrepo says that American efforts need to be more “disruptive”. That could be achieved by creating a parallel market for captive industries, such as sugar. Producers could then sell goods directly to the United States rather than going through local cartels. Such work, he says, “takes a lot of nerve”. Mr Biden and his team may not have enough.■
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This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Joe Biden’s other headache"
From the August 26th 2021 edition
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