In recent days, a reliable source with knowledge of government actions in El Salvador told El Faro journalists that the Nayib Bukele-controlled Attorney General’s Office is preparing at least seven arrest warrants for members of El Faro. The source presented evidence adding credibility to this account. If executed, any arrests would mark the most frontal state assault on press freedom in El Salvador since Bukele came to office in 2019.
El Faro made this announcement on Saturday night, in a Spanish-language livestream. “Any capture or raid on our homes will be for having done journalism,” stated editor-in-chief Óscar Martínez.
The source reached out to El Faro following the publication this week of a three-part video interview, subtitled in English, with two former leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang, shedding new light on Bukele’s years-long relationship to —and negotiation with— Salvadoran gangs, dating back to 2014, when he was mayoral candidate for San Salvador. It was the first time that gang sources involved in the pacts did so on camera.
The warrants against El Faro reportedly include the charges of apology for crimes and illicit association, despite explicit and longstanding protections of the journalist-source relationship in El Salvador.
On Friday evening, upon the release of part two of the interview, Bukele ventured on X that “a country at peace, without the dead, extortion, or mothers crying for their children is no longer profitable for the human rights NGOs, the globalist media, the elites, or Soros.”
State Intelligence Agency (OIE) chief Peter Dumas wrote Thursday that “one must not throw mortars at those with bombs,” adding: “With ‘journalists’ financed by and tied to maras, drug trafficking, sexual abuse, human trafficking, and other crimes, we should have double the budget. They cannot hide forever behind the invisible shield of ‘journalism.’”
The OAS Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Human Rights Watch, and Salvadoran Journalists’ Association (APES) are among those to have already condemned the possible arrest warrants.
“No body, no crime”
At the heart of the threat of arrests is irony: El Faro was only able to interview the two Revolucionarios because they escaped El Salvador with the complicity of Bukele.
One, who goes by “Liro Man,” recounts that he was taken to Guatemala, through a blind spot in the Salvadoran border, by Bukele gang negotiator Carlos Marroquín; the other, Carlos Cartagena, or “Charli”, was arrested on a warrant in April 2022, early in the state of exception, but quickly released after the police received a call at the station and backed off.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Salvadorans were being rounded up without due process, on charges of belonging to gangs.
The video interview explains the dichotomy: For years, Salvadoran gang leaders cut covert deals with the entourage of Nayib Bukele. In their interview with El Faro, the two Revolucionarios say the FMLN party, to which the now-president belonged a decade ago, paid a quarter of a million dollars to the gangs during the 2014 campaign in exchange for vote coercion in gang-controlled communities, on behalf of Bukele for San Salvador mayor and Salvador Sánchez Cerén as president.
This support, the sources say, was key to Bukele’s ascent to power. “You’re going to tell your mom and your wife’s family that they have to vote for Nayib. If you don’t do it, we’ll kill them,” Liro Man says the gang members told their communities in that election. Of Bukele, he added, “he knew he had to get to the gangs in order to get to where he is.”
With Bukele as president, starting in 2019, they agreed to curb homicides, including by hiding bodies to suppress official reporting: “No body, no crime,” top Bukele negotiator Carlos Marroquín reportedly told the men. They also assert that, as part of the pact, which lasted until March 2022, the Bukele administration also tolerated extortion.
Three years into the state of exception, the gang leaders explained to El Faro why they reached out to the newsroom, and why now: “We’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time,” said Liro Man, “for the simple reason that the government beats their chests and says, ‘We’re anti-gang, we don’t want this scourge.’ But they forgot that they made a deal with us, and you [El Faro] were the first to get this out.”
Attacks against journalism
In September 2019, in Bukele’s first official act, the Press Secretariat briefly shut El Faro and Revista Factum journalists out of his press conferences. He then pulled ads and contracts from traditional newspaper El Diario de Hoy for reporting the decision. “Even then, it was clear that the president was willing to bring the full institutional power of the government to bear against voices of dissent,” wrote El Faro in a July 2020 editorial, “Bukele Is a Threat to Journalism.”
In September 2020, the attacks intensified after El Faro revealed Bukele’s gang negotiations for a reduction in homicides to the public for the first time. He responded by personally accusing El Faro on national television of being subject to investigation for “serious money laundering.” This was the month that El Faro was illegally and collectively most surveilled using Pegasus spyware in El Salvador.
Bukele’s baseless money-laundering allegation was never substantiated, and the government never addressed the findings of El Faro’s reporting, opting to vehemently and flatly deny that any gang negotiation was taking place. Meanwhile, when prosecutors raided Bureau of Prisons facilities, they found evidence adding to that published by El Faro, even as top officials pulled hard drives and logbooks to try to hide the evidence.
In April 2021, the Salvadoran government notified El Faro of the preliminary accusation that the news organization had evaded taxes it had in fact paid, essentially by manipulating a selection of one-time donations to El Faro as if they were in fact monthly contributions, thus falsely generating a supposed untaxed sum.
In the intervening months, El Faro faced government attacks including smear campaigns, stalking, illegal wiretaps, threats, constant online harassment, and the denial of work visas for two foreign El Faro employees, including one from El Faro English. As early as 2022, up to ten journalists from El Salvador were already exiled, according to APES, a situation which in the ensuing three years has remained volatile. In 2024, the association registered the most press freedom violations in the country in a single year on record.
In April 2023, El Faro announced its most frontal measure to fend off government attacks in El Salvador, finalizing the exile of its legal incorporation to Costa Rica, and the transition from a company to a private foundation, while leaving the lion’s share of the members of the newsroom and administration living and working in El Salvador.
If carried out, the arrest warrants in El Salvador are the first time in decades that prosecutors seek to press charges against individual journalists for their journalistic labors.
In January 2022, the editorial board laid out El Faro’s vision of its role amid the authoritarian regression in El Salvador: “Every citizen must decide for themselves whether they want to be informed, or whether they prefer the blind loyalty this administration has demanded of its supporters since its first day in power,” they wrote. “We don’t have that choice. Our job is to report. We can’t change the news, and we never will.”
This article first appeared in the May 5 edition of the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here.
