Podcast: El Niño Drought Devastates Central America | The Lighthouse

This is the transcript of episode 87 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

HONDURAN FARMER (Audio: 2:15-2:45): This harvest was for our family’s daily food. We’ll go terribly hungry. We’ll eat one meal a day to survive. This is tragic. Sometimes I can’t even sleep. I keep thinking about how I’ll feed my family.

GRESSIER, HOST: A farmer in Honduras explains how the lack of rain damaged his crops. Honduras is the country hardest hit by the devastating El Niño drought in Central America.

I’m your host, Roman Gressier. On today’s episode: El Niño hits Central America, Bukele approaches elections facing no major opposition, and Costa Rica’s president moves to slash the budget of its chief criminal investigation agency.

From the studios of El Faro English, this is Central America in Minutes.

Red alert for drought

This year, the climate trend known as El Niño has already caused huge damage to crops in Central America, reports Gabriel Labrador.

The UN weather agency projects an almost 100 percent chance that El Niño will continue through February. They said the temperature could spike “off the charts we have used for the last four decades.”

El Niño is caused by rising temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. It brings long periods without rain or a late start to the rainy season. This ruins crops.

The Central American Dry Corridor, a swath cutting across three countries, is especially vulnerable. It includes eastern Guatemala’s lowlands, southern and western Honduras, and eastern and central El Salvador. It’s one of the regions on Earth most exposed to extreme climate threats.

No country single can be called the absolute hardest-hit by El Niño in the region. But a recent study by Oxfam concluded that Honduras shows the worst indicators. They recorded the most direct damage to subsistence farming and water resources.

According to the study, 84 percent of corn farmers have already lost almost all of their crops.

Honduras has shown the worst collapse in water access for families. It’s also one of the places where inflation of the price of food is most severe.

In Guatemala, a study by the FAO and the World Food Program showed that around 3 million people faced critical food insecurity. Of these, about 250,000 people were in an acute emergency that threatened their survival.

Meanwhile, El Salvador is the country with the highest loss of rural jobs. It’s also where the most livestock has died or been sold to help families survive.

In Panama, the government reduced the number of ships crossing its vital canal due to low water levels.

According to a roundup by the exiled Nicaraguan outlet ConfidentialEl Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica each activated red alerts or states of emergency in late August. And weeks earlier, in May, Guatemala issued an orange alert.

Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, a lack of information and government opacity hides the true scale of El Niño.

Nicaragua refused to declare an emergency. State media claimed the impact of El Niño would be “limited.”

Bukele heads to elections

Next to El Salvador. President Nayib Bukele will seek a third term on February 28. Yet no major opposition candidate is running against him, report Leyrian Colón Santiago and Yuliana Ramazzini in an August 27 dispatch for El Faro English.

Buoyed by high popularity, his constitutional rewrite allowing indefinite reelection, and a close alliance with the Donald Trump administration, Bukele has been the de-facto president of El Salvador since he began his second term in June 2024.

In 2021, Bukele’s political party, Nuevas Ideas, gained a legislative supermajority. Their first act was to illegally remove constitutional magistrates and seize total control of national decision-making.

Since then, Bukele has only increased his electoral control.

In May, a series of constitutional reforms allowed for indefinite presidential reelection. The presidential term extended from five to six years and the 2029 presidential election was moved up to 2027, while Trump is still in office.

According to 2025 Global Electoral Integrity ReportEl Salvador has the third lowest electoral integrity rating in the Americas, after Nicaragua and Venezuela.

This has put El Salvador’s tiny opposition in disarray.

Only two parties have nominated presidential candidates: the traditional left-wing FMLN and the right-wing ARENA party. And the centrist Vamos party is facing an internal rift.

In recent interviews with El Faro English, Vamos’s only legislator, Claudia Ortiz, and the party’s secretary general, Cesia Rivas, clashed over whether to form electoral alliances with other groups regardless of ideology.

Every Friday you receive the most relevant news of the week and recommendations.

Ortiz was the opposition candidate for the Legislative Assembly who received the most votes in 2024. She says the party won’t run a presidential candidate because no candidate can compete with the current president.

Meanwhile the FMLN, the former guerrilla front turned political party that governed El Salvador from 2009 to 2019, is running a prominent doctor and unionist Rafael Aguirre.

Arena, the hard-right party that governed from 1989 to 2009, is running an even lower-profile ticket: former legislator Mayteé Iraheta and municipal official Verónica Henríquez.

Arena has been totally eclipsed by Bukele’s right-wing project. They currently have two legislative seats and one mayor’s office. And the FMLN has no legislators or mayors.

According to June polling from Central America University, Arena and the FMLN combined are projected to receive just 2.3 percent of presidential votes next year.

That’s compared to 63 percent who said they would vote for Bukele. And another 30 said they either didn’t know, didn’t respond, or planned to cast a null vote.

“Bukelization” in Costa Rica?

FERNÁNDEZ: No. First of all, there is no such thing as “Bukelization.” What we have replicated is Bukele’s maximum-security prison model.

GRESSIER: That’s Laura Fernández, the president of Costa Rica, in an interview with the newspaper El País. They asked her if she would import El Salvador’s “Bukele model” to her country, which is facing a historic homicide crisis fueled largely by drug trafficking violence.

Costa Rica’s new supermax prison is a project initiated under the past president, Rodrigo Chaves, who is now Fernández’s Minister of the Presidency and Treasury.

In Costa Rica, long considered Central America’s most stable democracy, a conflict is smoldering between Costa Rica’s executive and judicial branches, reports Yuliana Ramazzini.

Fernández asserted that the Constitutional Chamber infringes on the powers of the Legislative Assembly, where her party holds a simple majority.

Meanwhile, the Executive Branch has cut the Judiciary’s budget. The Judicial Investigation Agency is the hardest hit, accounting for 40 percent of the total cuts. This is the Costa Rican agency most similar to the FBI.

The former president Chaves, in his role as Treasury Minister, signed the new budget allocations. In other words, the executive branch is dictating the judicial budget.

In recent weeks, the showdown between branches triggered sparring between legislators and public protests to defend judicial independence.

The comparisons to El Salvador and “Bukelization” stem from Bukele’s 2021 removal of constitutional judges, which cemented his control of the Salvadoran Judiciary.

Costa Rican Security Minister Gerald Campos criticized the Judiciary. He said that, instead of worrying about budgets, they should stop benefiting criminals.

He also defended the administration’s ability to reallocate the budget. The government said the changes were part of a “cascade of priorities.”

On August 24, Supreme Court Chief Justice Orlando Aguirre filed a petition to the Treasury to revoke the new budget. He argued the Treasury had violated the financial autonomy of the Judiciary.

This week, the Treasury rejected that appeal, arguing that its official letter is merely a proposal. Any final adjustment, they said, is in the hands of the Legislative Assembly, where—again—the ruling party holds a majority.

This episode was written by Gabriel Labrador, Yuliana Ramazziniand Leyrian Colon Santiago. Editing by Roman Gressier and sound design by Omnionn.

Listen to Central America in Minutes on the KPFA Pacifica Evening News and participating Pacifica Network radio stations. You can also stream the show on Apple, Spotify, amazon, iHeart, and YouTube.