February 26 was the last day that the investigative journalism magazine GatoEncerrado had a physical newsroom. It was one of 11 Salvadoran media outlets affected by the freezing of U.S. cooperation funds. Days earlier, preparations for the eviction had already begun at the magazine’s premises, a space of about 70 square meters in a neighborhood of San Salvador. Everything was being inventoried. From March onward, only half of the editorial staff will continue to work from home. February 20 was the last day of work for some of the journalists, who arrived at the office to sign their severance papers. One of them was Eugenia Velásquez, a veteran journalist specializing in political and legislative coverage. Before leaving the newsroom, she said she had no intention of giving up journalism, in a tone evoking years of experience: “Journalism has always been under attack. It's been like this since the war, with the difference that persecution is now more sophisticated.” Minutes later, she said goodbye to her colleagues and left. Seven other GatoEncerrado journalists no longer have a salary at the magazine.
The severing of U.S. cooperation triggered a domino effect of thousands of layoffs around the world. Employees of USAID, the main U.S. cooperation agency, and thousands of workers at hundreds of companies that served as intermediaries between the United States and the organizations receiving cooperation projects were also dismissed throughout February. Intermediary offices are certified organizations with sufficient institutional capacity to carry out multimillion-dollar projects, enabling them to receive funds from the U.S. Treasury and then implement the various projects and programs in recipient countries with local allies or partners. Some of the organizations that received the largest amounts of money to implement programs in El Salvador were Chemonics International, Inc; Creative Associates International; Pact World; and Development Alternatives, Inc. Then there are consolidated entities with their own mission, such as the Red Cross, World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, and Save the Children, which, in addition to their usual work, received U.S. funds for specific projects.
But almost no organization or spokesperson feels free to talk to journalists these days. “These are very difficult days, we will not be able to give any interviews, nor can we take you to the places where we worked,” said the press officer of an organization based in El Salvador that El Faro contacted in mid-February. With the recorder off, other employees of cooperation projects explained that their counterparts in the United States had instructed them to remain silent, as a way of ensuring that at least the money for severance pay would arrive.
This newspaper sought to interview 12 organizations that received funds from the United States, but the result was more or less the same. Some employees in these organizations agreed to talk only on the condition that they not be named. In mid-February, a program officer from an organization who spoke with El Faro explained that she was still employed, but that they had been officially told that their project would no longer continue after March. In the interview, although she was still employed, whenever she referred to her employment situation she used verbs in the past tense. I asked her why she couldn’t be cited in the article: “We can't give the impression that we’re still working, because that would be in breach of the work stoppage order they sent us,” he explained.
Another foundation executive alluded to fear of Nayib Bukele’s administration. “The government keeps an eye on who appears in newspapers like yours [El Faro] and that's why we prefer to stay off the radar.”
There are other reasons for the silence: “This government is a bully,” says a senior executive of a Salvadoran organization. “We don't need that because we are going to continue working no matter what.”
On the afternoon of Friday, January 24, dozens of organizations based or with branches in El Salvador received emails warning of the suspension of U.S. funding. It was a fateful weekend. “On Friday I shared what I knew with a few people, but I felt like nobody paid much attention, like nobody believed it,” says Adriana González, a Salvadoran journalist and founder of Proyecto Lava, a solutions-journalism publication. “Come Monday, it started to get around that everything was on hold, and several days later they told us that our project was no longer going ahead.”
An education project executive told El Faro that, in the month between January 24 and her dismissal, they experienced “literally a crisis of collective hysteria”. She and her colleagues communicated constantly to share the latest news, waiting for “something” that would come: a message, a call, an email announcing the end of the project, the dismissal. At the beginning of February, USAID employees in the United States began publishing lists with the names and identification numbers of the projects that had supposedly already been canceled by the review undertaken by the Trump administration. El Faro constantly reviewed these lists and the number of terminated projects increased every day.
“We went home to work, but as we were on break we would just put that we were available on our laptops, but sometimes we weren’t asked for anything. I started having trouble sleeping. I had colleagues who had to move houses because they were renting. Nobody knew anything for sure, and the worst thing was that we were told we should keep quiet because otherwise we would jeopardize the liquidation,” said the executive.
In Washington, in those early days there was resistance. Several implementers sued the Trump administration in court, with the aim of reversing the freeze. So far there are five lawsuits in the courts challenging the executive order, according to the independent website JustSecurity.org. One of these cases is being handled by federal judge Amir Ali, who on February 13 ordered Trump to restore the foreign aid. The Executive failed to comply with the order and so the plaintiffs argued that the Trump administration was defying the order. Judge Ali then summoned the Trump administration to unfreeze the congressionally-allocated funds, but Trump appealed and the case went up to the Supreme Court of Justice. On March 5, the Court rejected Trump's request to maintain the freeze on funds, but the process will continue in dispute.
USAID used to send subscribers emails with information about new calls for projects or contracts. Adriana González told El Faro that on Monday, January 27, she received the latest emails from USAID announcing projects and available positions. She found it strange because she also knew that USAID was closing. She saw on the internet that USAID’s head of security was fired for denying access to the offices to personnel reviewing cooperation projects one by one. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) intended to enter the area of confidential information. The following Sunday, Elon Musk, the head of DOGE, called USAID a “criminal organization” laundering money. “USAID was a viper's nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” he wrote on his social media platform X. “Time for it to die.”
But Trump not only ordered the closure of USAID; he also froze the funds that other offices, such as the State Department itself or the Department of Justice, distribute to the world and which also depend on the approval of Congress.
In El Salvador, these decisions took the form of people being fired, offices being closed, calls for proposals being canceled, projects being aborted. Some programs addressed basic needs in health, improvement of education, agricultural adaptation, prevention of undocumented migration, eradication of gender violence, prevention of violence, rehabilitation of prisoners, care for deportees, the environment...
“The United States is biting its own tail,” says a foundation executive who spoke to El Faro and who lost 70 percent of the organization’s 2025 budget. “We work on the prevention of violence in communities. We work directly with children who we have detected were three steps away from crime. We work on a culture of peace, of support, of opportunities. But if there is no such work, the issue of crime can probably increase.”
In El Salvador, for the fiscal years 2024 and 2025, the United States had approved $258 million for 215 projects, according to publicly available data updated on March 7. “When we received the closure notice, we started firing people immediately, because the more days that passed, the more money it could cost us,” explained one of the sources.
The notice of permanent closure caused some organizations to lose more than half of their annual budget. In other cases, the loss is between 70 and 90 percent, according to testimonies compiled by El Faro.
Funding to the press
GatoEncerrado, for example, lost seven out of every ten dollars that the magazine had budgeted for 2025: some $300,000 in total. The magazine learned overnight that only half of its members would be able to continue working. “We were very slow and not very far-sighted in making it a priority to find a formula for self-sustainability,” says director Ezequiel Barrera.
Dependence on U.S. cooperation is a weak point of the Central American press, admits Angélica Cárcamo, executive director of the Central American Journalists’ Network (RCP), an organization that emerged in 2022. The cause of this dependence, says Cárcamo, lies in governments such as the Salvadoran one: “When I was president of APES [the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association], I had meetings with the media where we saw that the government was taking action to prevent the diversification of funding: It prevented businessmen from placing ads in those media, and there was an anti-press narrative that generated concern about wanting to advertise in critical media. In El Salvador there is no media law or regulation of government advertising, and there is also persecution through abusive tax audits.”
Cárcamo adds that many media outlets had to register as corporations, or “sociedades anónimas”, due to government obstruction from registering as non-profit associations or foundations. “That makes everything difficult because foreign aid agencies do not usually make donations to private companies — only to associations or foundations,” says Cárcamo.
But the United States also bears responsibility for this dependence, as it has played on its dominant geopolitical position. “The United States assumes its status as an ‘aid provider’ and feeds this relationship of dependence in the Central American economies, which allows it to influence the decision-making of the main actors of each country: the legal system, security, health, education, etc., in an asymmetrical system in which the United States conditions aid,” said PRISMA, a regional organization that investigates development and environmental issues, in a recent article. “With the reduction of traditional U.S. support, other international powers will surely intensify their interest in the region and take up free spaces,” says another article, from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, on foreign aid as geopolitical strategy.
In the interviews with the sources, there is also a veiled criticism of the inequality with which some projects were structured, favoring high salaries and more budget for implementers than for partners in the field. An employee of an implementing organization told El Faro that she was aware of these inequalities and that she therefore tried to hide her salary, which was over $3,800 a month, so that the lower-level employees would not be upset. “They worked from dawn to dusk, on the front line, and earned three or four times less,” says the executive.
Óscar Picardo, from Francisco Gavidia University (UFG), explains that one of the projects in which he participated would receive $40 million over five years, but that as local partners, the university would only execute $4 million. “We might have executed not even a million dollars, at most, in real estate, in all the staff, because we hired a director for the institute, three researchers who had already been working for more than a year, assistants, accountants, and so on. A courtroom was remodeled because it had a legal component, and some workrooms were remodeled, too. In other words, a lot of work was done with those resources. And only a million dollars were actually spent.”
Picardo says that a large part of the remaining $36 million went to the implementing agency. “A team of criminologists came to El Salvador almost every month for training, for interventions. That back-and-forth alone is expensive.”
The administrative costs of the projects, according to public information on foreign aid, took 24 out of every 100 dollars of the total aid budget in the 2023-2024 fiscal year. Since 2014, U.S. aid to El Salvador has amounted to 1.4 billion dollars, of which 16 percent —some 241 million— was directed exclusively to administrative costs.
With funding that does not depend on the United States, GatoEncerrado will continue to work, but it will not be easy. The first thing they have to resolve is the payment of the computer server where they host their website. “We need to stay online and we have to pay almost $900 every three months, because if we move to a normal server it’s quite easy to hack it, to get us thrown off, to attack us,” says Barrera. At the time of the interview, on February 20, he was hopeful that Reporters Without Borders would respond to a request for financial support.
GatoEncerrado started out as a blog in 2014. Barrera and co-founder Mario Beltrán were working as journalists for other outlets at the time and saw their blog as a project where they could express themselves freely. “At La Prensa Gráfica, at the time, they wouldn't let me publish hard-hitting investigations, and that was frustrating, so the blog was an outlet, an escape,” says Barrera. Luis Laínez, editor-in-chief of La Prensa Gráfica at the time, is now the manager of Diario El Salvador, the propaganda newspaper of the government of Nayib Bukele. After a couple of years, Barrera obtained grants of between 3,000 and 9,000 dollars from cooperation foundations to be able to investigate and publish reports. They published major stories about environmental destruction, nepotism in the foreign service during the last FMLN administration; and, during the pandemic, they revealed serious indications of corruption in state contracts, such as one involving a company owned by Health Minister Francisco Alabí.
“It hurts that we will no longer be able to cover the Legislative Assembly,” says Barrera. In addition to that project, the magazine loses others, such as a regional alliance of Central American media that would cover transparency and corruption. Another GatoEncerrado project, which will also not continue and which depended on the Center for Support to Investigative Journalism in the Region (CAPIR), allowed them to reveal that there were networks of hitmen active in the National Civil Police between 2019 and 2024. Under the same project, GatoEncerrado also published that a current official very close to Bukele had received $1.2 million from the San Salvador City Council, without justification, while Bukele was the mayor. “Those publications were the first of this project that would continue in 2025, but now it will no longer be possible,” says Barrera.
“We journalists are affected, but what is really affected is society, which is no longer receiving this information,” says González from Proyecto Lava, one of the youngest journalistic initiatives in El Salvador. Lava had been up and running for six months in a media network financially supported by U.S. aid, but she had been completing the various stages to obtain individual funding for a year. She was in the final stage of the negotiation when everything fell apart.
The Salvadoran Journalists’ Association (APES) says that 11 journalistic projects in El Salvador have lost U.S. funding. “From those who were abruptly left without oxygen to those surviving on a minimum, in all cases this has a strong impact: fewer investigative journalistic pieces and digital content are produced,” says Sergio Arauz, APES president and deputy editor at El Faro.
The APES estimates that around 50 journalists have lost their jobs in the country and that another hundred media employees have been laid off. “We still can't assess the worst of it: Thanks to these colleagues we know that the president and his family became landowners and coffee growers; or that a group of deputies and ruling-party supporters benefitted from state bank loans to acquire privileged real estate. Then there are all their revelations related to environmental depredation,” says Arauz.
APES itself has suffered first-hand from the adjustment. 50 percent of its 2025 budget has been lost. This means, according to Arauz, limiting “vital” services: the mechanism for protecting people at risk has been slowed down; support for psycho-emotional care; support for the production of journalistic pieces through scholarship programs and other training services. “The possibility of helping is less and we are certainly in a critical situation,” he says.
Across Central America, some 40 media outlets were affected, according to the RCP. Director Angélica Cárcamo says that some media outlets have lost 80 percent of their funding and that protection and shelter programs for journalists have also been dismantled. “There are colleagues who, due to criminalization in their countries, were supported to go to a safe country, and with the freeze they were stranded — not only in economic terms, but also legally, running the risk of being captured and deported if they stay longer than the established period,” says Cárcamo. Some Central American journalists no longer have anyone to pay for the apartment in the United States where they stayed, far from the reach of the autocrats in their countries.
“There are governments celebrating these things,” laments Cárcamo. “They celebrate that now the citizenry will be more subject to a media ecosystem centered on the ruling parties and governments in power and their propaganda and not on journalism centered on the citizenry,” explains Cárcamo.
Cárcamo says that some media outlets will disappear, others will merge, and that the challenge is to raise awareness among organizations around the world so that they help financially support journalism. In El Salvador, initiatives such as the Alliance of Independent Media have already emerged, publishing articles in unison. “They are not media created by USAID. They have existed for a long time and have strengthened quality investigative journalism for 10, 15, or more years, and they will continue to do so,” says Cárcamo.
Barrera, the director of GatoEncerrado, in spite of everything, says his project will stay alive. “We are going back to our roots,” he says, and recalls, not without sarcasm, that to write his first article in GatoEncerrado he had to buy a coffee at the Pollo Campero in the Metrocentro shopping center in San Salvador, where there was free internet.
At the beginning of February, the GatoEncerrado team met to reflect on the changes in funding and the critical situation. “Everyone said they wanted to continue publishing. Everyone said they wanted to support in some way. They were willing to continue in some way.”
Dueling narratives
In theory, the Trump administration has until April to define which cooperation projects will remain in force and to do so they will assess whether they are aligned with their vision. “Personally, I don't think any of the programs we have at the university will survive,” says Óscar Picardo, director of the Institute of Science, Technology, and Innovation at the UFG. He was part of the management team of Libres, a five-year program focused on the eradication of gender violence in which various universities such as the UFG and Eastern University (Univo) from El Salvador worked with Arizona State University in the United States. Last year there were 39 independently recorded femicides in El Salvador, a phenomenon that goes unnoticed under the propaganda that there are no homicides thanks to the state of exception.
Libres had created an institute and hired experts in the field, including a professional from Don Bosco University who, after 18 years of working there, accepted a position at Gavidia and, five days later, found himself unemployed due to Trump’s order. The UFG hired him with its own resources, but the project had to abruptly close its offices in San Salvador after the notification.
Picardo helped create the Institute for the Prevention of Gender Violence. The whole project was designed to last five years, ending in 2027, with the possibility of renewal, and involved total outlays of 40 million dollars, although the twenty or so organizations involved also had to make a contribution.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced to the world, while visiting El Salvador on February 3, that he had been appointed acting director of USAID, alarming the political establishment in Washington and prompting Democratic senators to send letters to the State Department. “It is concerning that this is an effort by the Trump administration to unilaterally remake the federal government without authorization from Congress,” Tess Bridgeman, a former White House legal adviser in the Obama administration, told NPR.
As Rubio made his first international trip to Central America and the Caribbean in early February, protestors gathered in favor of USAID outside its offices in Washington. “To all USAID employees, thank you,” Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts told the crowd. “You keep the United States safe, and you help people all over the world. I want to apologize to you for having to endure this offensive nonsense,” he said.
In his speeches, Trump has outlined his preferred types of foreign aid programs: He has said that he is against diversity, equality and inclusion, and the fight against climate change, among other things. His government is now searching through the millions of foreign aid programs for certain terms and concepts and, based on that, seems to be limiting the projects.
In El Salvador, on February 8, Bukele used the USAID issue to attack the press. “The vast majority of ‘independent’ journalists and media are, in reality, part of a worldwide money laundering operation, whose objective is to promote the globalist agenda, together with NGOs financed under the same scheme. We had already denounced it before, but now there is official confirmation, with new names, figures, and documents,” Bukele wrote on his account on X, the social media platform of Musk, with whom he often interacts.
Bukele and Musk shared on social media a publication from the whistleblowing site Wikileaks explaining how the implementing agency Internews finances journalism and media around the world, as an example to insinuate that the media are part of a global psychological operation.
Secretary Rubio, for his part, accused the agency in an interview with Fox News of “supporting programs that upset the host government[s] with whom we’re trying to work.”
Faced with these warring narratives, various projects tried to maneuver against the clock to modify the names, labels, and contents of their programs, in the hope of surviving the DOGE review. Picardo says that, together with Arizona State University, they tried to modify some terms in the description of the USAID-funded project. “When we started talking to Arizona State, after the freeze, they suggested reorienting the focus of the project a bit toward family violence prevention — that is, making the gender issue less visible,” says Picardo.
“There is a very ideological change; before Trump, USAID was focused on local needs. Now, apparently it is going to be cooperation focused on their needs,” says Picardo.
From Oct. 1, 2019, to Mar. 7, 2025, El Salvador received $1.006 billion in aid from the United States, according to official foreign aid data consulted by El Faro. This figure includes what was received by both the government and civil society organizations.
Of that total, 2.59 percent ($26 million) went to projects that included funding for journalism. To obtain this data, El Faro consulted four people who worked on these cooperation projects in El Salvador. The four sources agreed on the names of four implementing organizations that work with Salvadoran journalists: Counterpart International, Internews, Pact World, and Pan-American Foundation for Development. This newspaper searched the ForeignAssistance.gov database for these organizations’ projects from 2019 to 2025.
Of the $26 million, the amount exclusively for journalism could be less, because there are programs in which it is only one component of broader projects. According to a similar analysis, for the 2024-2025 fiscal year, of the $258 million approved, only 13 percent (about $33 million) is directed to projects that, among other things, had components of funding for the press.
Electoral institutions
In the latest update of the U.S. government’s foreign assistance page, on March 7, there is no longer any information on projects that had been available in December. For example, information on the implementing agency Internews is no longer listed.
The data shows that El Salvador has had nearly 1,000 cooperation projects since 2019 to date, touching food security, agriculture, anti-corruption programs, care for the deported population, police and military training programs, projects to improve education at all levels, violence prevention programs, and Civil Protection Institutions, among many others.
All of this, say the interviewees, will surely be lost. As will the agreement with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to support electoral transparency: Since 2019, the Consortium for Elections and Strengthening of the Political Process (CEPSS) advised and accompanied the Tribunal at different stages of the 2019, 2021, and 2024 elections with 15 projects for 15 million dollars, provided by USAID and the State Department. The projects would formally end in March, but they closed abruptly on January 24.
The fact that the TSE is working without international observation is not insignificant in a country where the president was unconstitutionally re-elected in February 2024, where the president's deputies also changed the electoral rules and political-administrative map without consultation a few months before the 2024 elections, where public financing for parties was de-facto eliminated, and where the private funding of campaigns has never been audited in the democratic life of El Salvador. “I believe that the TSE is going to implement internet voting. They are promoting it, and that requires a lot of observation from allied entities to ensure that it is being done properly,” a person who worked on that project told El Faro. The CEPPS Consortium was made up of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).
Recent TSE presidents always cited IFES as a guarantee of transparency. From now on, this will no longer be the case, unless the agreement with CEPPS —which has already closed its website— is one of those that survives.
Trumpism seems obsessed with “soft power”, a concept with which academia has described USAID’s global influence. In his book “The Government of Global Elites. How Consent is Organized. The experience of the Northern Triangle” (2015), Guatemalan sociologist Fernando Valdez took an in-depth look at how USAID had served various U.S. hegemonic interests like the creation of think tanks in Central America such as FUSADES in El Salvador, or FUNIDE in Nicaragua, “and subsequently to create the necessary political and legal conditions” for certain policies, such as the signing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
Trump and Musk argue that USAID’s influence only helped to impose a perverse world order akin to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Valdez explains in his book that the 2030 Agenda was the result of a shift by global elites in 2012, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Now these sustainable-development goals are at risk as Trump and allies preach that “globalism must die”. Trump insists instead that the United States should look to its own problems and use only “common sense”.
According to NBC and CNBC, by February 7, Musk had lied 160 times about USAID-related issues, such as when he said USAID had sent thousands of condoms to Gaza. Musk has accepted some of these mistakes and has ordered, for example, the restitution of the cooperation aimed at containing the Ebola virus in Africa. “We will make mistakes, we are not perfect,” he said on February 27.
These mistakes will be costly. “The premise behind the cooperation is that if higher education is improved in El Salvador, fewer young people will leave for the United States,” says Picardo from UFG. “Trump said: You need us; we don't need you. So the picture is clear”.
