2026-10-04News

Six countries added, and the map stops being South America

Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama are published, each to the same depth as the nine already here.

Until this week the site covered South America. It now covers fifteen countries, and six of them are not in South America - which means the comparison can do something it could not before: set a Central American answer beside a South American one on the same question.

Every one of the fifteen answers all fifteen topics that can carry a citation. Two topics are closed permanently and are not counted against any country: nothing in culture and etiquette could carry a citation, and a safety ranking rests on crime statistics that are not comparable across these countries.

The six arrived with two things we did not have before. The first is a second kind of origin group: Panama's Friendly Nations list, which is not a treaty bloc at all but a list of states named one by one in a decree, cutting across every bloc already modelled. The second is CA-4, read at the instrument by three people independently.

What is left in scope: Nicaragua, Belize, the Caribbean, and Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname to close the continent.