Caribbean & Central America - June 2026

The first piece in this June 2026 edition of the Latin American Regional Report: Caribbean & Central America begins in Guatemala where the eight-year tenure of the country’s now former attorney general (AG) María Consuelo Porras (2018-2026) ended on 17 May. Blacklisted by over 40 countries, Porras was the most visible face of the ‘pacto de corruptos’ network of institutional corruption which President Bernardo Arévalo, whose assumption of office in January 2024 represented a break with the discredited political establishment, had pledged to root out. With Arévalo’s anti-corruption agenda hitherto hobbled by Porras’ continuance in post, his appointment of Gabriel Estuardo García Luna, an adviser to the prosecutor general’s office, has been hailed by the president and pro-democracy groups as a turning point for the country, although challenges persist.

The next piece looks at increasingly confident forecasts that the El Niño weather phenomenon will develop this year, which have sparked widespread concerns in northern Central America, particularly in the arid so-called ‘Dry Corridor’. We then focus on Costa Rica where the country’s new President Laura Fernández signed a law to finance a new US$800m electric train project, as part of a wider drive to overhaul the country’s infrastructure and reform the energy system.

Turning to the Caribbean, we begin in Cuba where the US continues to ramp up its maximum pressure campaign on the island aimed at forcing political and economic change, recently indicting Cuba’s former president Raúl Castro (2008-2018) over the deadly shootdown of two planes in 1996. The indictment comes as Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (Gaesa), the opaque state-owned military conglomerate that Castro founded in the 1990s, was also targeted last month by the US. Still focusing on Cuba, the next piece considers the energy crisis on the island, with massive, recurring power cuts a central feature of Cuba’s ongoing economic collapse. A new report by economist Ricardo Torres for the Cuba Study Group (CSG) explains the origins of the breakdown and why there are no quick fixes in sight.

We then turn to Jamaica where two interlocking questions are being asked. One is whether recent offshore exploration will reveal commercially viable oil and gas deposits. The second: if the oil really is there under the sea, does it make economic and environmental sense to develop it? The final focus piece considers the recently published Democracy and Development Report 2026 for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which describes the Caribbean as “one of the most democratic regions in the developing world”, but also cautions that Caribbean democracies are “under pressure”.