Gangs are widely considered major contributors to the high levels of violence afflicting Latin America, including in particular Central America. At the same time, however, the vast majority of individuals who join a gang will also leave it and, it is assumed, become less violent. Having said this, the mechanisms underlying this ‘desistance’ process are not well understood, and nor are the determinants of individuals’ post-gang trajectories, partly because gang desistance tends to be seen as an event rather than a process. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research carried out in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Nicaragua's capital city Managua, and more specifically a set of ‘archetypal’ gang member life histories that illustrate the occupational options open to former gang members, this article offers a longitudinal perspective on desistance and its consequences, with specific reference to the determinants of individuals’ continued engagement with violence (or not).

Nicaragua is often held up as an exception within the Central American panorama of criminal violence, widely presented as the safest country in the region due to its particular revolutionary legacies, the (supposed) absence of transnational gangs and drug-trafficking organisations, and the National Police's representation as an efficient and professional force. This commentary proposes an alternative reading of Nicaragua's contemporary political economy of violence in order to reveal the profoundly misleading nature of this prevalent view. In particular, it highlights how Nicaragua is governed through a particular political ‘settlement’ underpinned by drug trafficking, police and judicial corruption, as well as ‘mafia state’ governance. These factors have coalesced to establish a highly efficient and engrained ‘narco-state’ whose undoing is unlikely in the short term.

This article explores Mexico’s overlooked importance in the Central American armed conflict, the limits of its influence, and its connection to the late Cold War. Mexico’s policy toward Central America attempted to prevent an American and Cuban military intervention in the area and avoid a Cold War confrontation along its southern border. Mexico attempted to build detente in the region and prevent a global escalation of tension between the great powers. Meanwhile, it sought to propose a “third way” for the revolutionary actors shaped after Mexico’s political system and history. Studying Mexico’s efforts to create detente-like arrangements can shed light on the efforts of peripheral actors and their projects to influence the international system despite the actions of hegemonic powers.

This article contributes to migration and livelihood scholarship by reflecting on global and political dimensions of livelihoods and experiences of illegalisation in Central America. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with Nicaraguan families and their migrant family members in Costa Rica, the article adopts a translocal livelihood perspective and uses the notion of everyday politics to explore migrants’ mobility practices and nuance the role and reach of illegalisation in relatively accessible South–South migration. In conclusion, the article reinvigorates the notion of ‘everyday politics of mobility’ to incorporate the multi-sitedness, multi-dimensionality and multi-directionality of translocalising livelihoods, offering a lens for future comparison of illegalisation within and beyond the so-called Global South.

During the 1980s, more than 20,000 Salvadorans fleeing the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War entered the neighboring country of Nicaragua. Their flight was part of a larger multidirectional migration out of El Salvador in which Salvadorans sought refuge across Central and North America. In response to this unprecedented influx of Salvadoran refugee men, women, and children, the Nicaraguan government—newly under the control of the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)—declared that all refugees would be permitted “the opportunity to survive and produce.” This article argues that the timing of the refugees’ arrival proved mutually beneficial for both the Salvadorans and the FSLN by illustrating how Sandinista officials sought to further agrarian reform projects via refugee integration into agricultural cooperatives. As such, Nicaraguan refugee policy functioned as an integral part of Sandinista statecraft. Through an analysis of refugee-produced sources, government and UNHCR documents, and news reports, this article sheds new light on the entwined histories of Salvadoran refugees and the Sandinista state in the transnational context of the late Cold War period in Central America.

Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research carried out over two-and-a-half decades in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article explores how legal and illegal economic activities are socially legitimized, and more specifically, how certain illegal economic activities can end up being seen as legitimate, and certain legal ones perceived as illegitimate. The first part of the article explores the variable morality surrounding different types of criminal activities that local gang members engaged in during the 1990s and 2000s. The second part considers my experiences running a local market stall, describing the contrasting reactions I faced when I resorted to first legal, and then illegal, strategies to boost my revenue levels. Taken together, these examples showcase how the social legitimization of an economic activity has less to do with whether it is legal or illegal, but rather the future aspirations it embodies.

Costa Rica suspended payments on its London debt in 1901, at the beginning of a democratisation process and during a crisis in the world coffee market. Meanwhile, autocratic Nicaragua, also a coffee exporter, continued paying its foreign creditors. This article assesses the causes of these distinct outcomes, which are at odds with the influential hypothesis that democracy makes for better borrowers. Strongly represented in Congress, Costa Rica's coffee elite pushed for the end of a tax on coffee as the legislative became more powerful. The executive had used that revenue to service the debt, which went on default as a consequence. Politics were radically different in Nicaragua: coffee growers were weaker and President Zelaya ruled without legislative tutelage. Hence, his government could raise a similar tax to honour the sovereign debt. With a clean record, the dictator borrowed abroad to build a modern army, the backbone of his autocratic regime.

In a Nicaraguan population-based cohort, SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence reached 28% in the first 6 months of the country's epidemic and reached 35% 6 months later. Immune waning was uncommon. Individuals with a seropositive household member were over three times as likely to be seropositive themselves, suggesting the importance of household transmission.

The Cuban and Sandinista Revolutions stand together as Latin America's two socialist revolutions achieved through guerrilla insurgency in the latter half of the twentieth century. But beyond studies that demonstrate that Cuba militarily trained and supported the Sandinistas before, during, and after their guerrilla phase, and observations that the two countries were connected by the bonds of socialist revolution, the nature of Cuba and Nicaragua's revolutionary relationship remains little explored. This article traces exchanges of people and expertise between each revolutionary state's Ministry of Foreign Relations and Ministry of Culture. It employs diplomatic and institutional archives, personal collections, and oral interviews to demonstrate the deep involvement of Cuban experts in building the Sandinista state. Yet, Cuban advice may have exacerbated tensions within Nicaragua. This article also shows that tensions marked the day-to-day realities of Cubans and Nicaraguans tasked with carrying out collaborations, revealing their layered and often contradictory nature. Illuminating high-level policy in terms of Cuban-Nicaraguan exchanges and how they unfolded on the ground contributes to new international histories of the Sandinista and Cuban revolutions by shifting away from North-South perspectives to focus instead on how the Sandinistas navigated collaboration with their most important regional ally.

This article analyzes the revolutionary diplomacy of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) through the prism of Nicaraguan and Western European relations during the final decade of the Cold War. It contends that —despite the FSLN's ideological affiliation with Third World national liberation movements, Cuba, and the socialist bloc—the campaign to influence Western European foreign policies was central to the Sandinista government's international strategy. By pushing Western European governments to play a prominent role in Central America's violent Cold War conflicts, the Sandinistas sought to undermine US power in the isthmus and alter the inter-American dynamics that shaped their region's history up to the late 1970s. Furthermore, by building financial ties with Western European countries, the FSLN could avoid complete financial dependency on the Soviet bloc and strengthen Nicaragua's image as a nonaligned state. The Sandinistas’ campaign to challenge US hegemony in Central America through a pragmatic outreach to Western Europe was largely successful, but it came at the cost of implementing domestic reforms that ran counter to their own ambitions. Ultimately, this prompted the FSLN to hold elections in 1990, which resulted in their removal from power.

The year 1976 was a violent one in Nicaragua. In an effort to quash the Sandinista guerrillas, the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle had declared a state of siege, suspending constitutional guarantees, muzzling the press, and unleashing the Guardia Nacional. Despite the dangers of dissent, thousands of students across the country walked off their secondary school campuses that year to protest poor funding, inept teachers, and oppressive administrators. This article examines this series of strikes to uncover the ways in which teenagers managed to organize their schools and communities in spite of the repression that marked the final years of the Somoza regime. Analyzing student documents, Ministry of Education records, and newspaper reports, this article argues that in the context of a decades-long dictatorship, student demands for more democratic schools opened a relatively safe pathway for cross-generational activism that forced concessions from the Somoza regime. By the 1970s, secondary schools had come to reflect the state's authoritarianism and mismanagement, and widespread educational deficiencies brought students and parents together in a joint project to demand better schools. Battles over the quality of education, thus, showcased the power of an organized citizenry and laid the groundwork for the revolutionary mobilizations that were to come.

The material evidence of human presence in the Chontales region of central Nicaragua spans from 1420 ± 30 BP, or cal AD 554–670 (±2σ) through to the present, as was recently established (Donner and Geurds 2018). This cultural chronology, divided into three main periods, contrasts with the one previously proposed by (Gorin 1990), who defined six different phases from 500 BC through AD 1600. Here, we report on 11 new radiocarbon (14C) assays, introducing an update to the cultural sequence, consisting of two considerable changes, while also providing further overall strengthening. First, the earliest traces of human groups are now placed at 1645 ± 25 BP, or cal AD 263–536 (±2σ); second, five different periods are established for the research area. A recalibration of Gorin’s dates identified their consistency with the results reported here, supporting the new cultural chronology of central Nicaragua. Additionally, this study achieved the complete temporal characterization of Aguas Buenas, the largest pre-colonial archaeological site in Nicaragua.

Does citizen approval of vote buying depend on the type of benefit being offered? I answer this question using data from a survey experiment conducted on a nationally representative sample of Nicaraguans in 2017. Nicaraguans report significantly lower approval of money-for votes exchanges compared to goods-for-votes exchanges. Furthermore, reported rates of vote buying are lower in the money condition (4.8%) than in the goods-for-votes condition (7.8%), even though the posttreatment question assessing vote buying experience was identical across conditions. This study echoes other work suggesting the need for care in designing questions about vote buying, as slight changes in question wording that prime participants to think about goods versus monetary exchanges can affect both citizen approval of the behavior and the reported prevalence of vote buying.