The largest newspaper in El Salvador and one of the most important in Central America, El Faro suspended the publication of content this Thursday (7). The decision is a protest against a law proposed by President Nayib Bukele whose stated aim is to curb criminal gang activity, but which in practice limits journalistic activity and is seen as a threat to press freedom.
The site dawned with a black stripe and, over it, a text entitled “No to censorship”—other than that, no report is highlighted.
El Faro writes that readers find on the portal a model of “critical journalism with the declared intention of understanding political and social phenomena that determine the lives of Salvadorans”. Among these phenomena, the text cites the origin and development of gangs, as well as secret alliances made between these criminal groups and different politicians and governments.
“Without an independent press, citizens would never know about these pacts. To keep explaining this, to keep revealing these pacts, is now a crime that can be punished with up to 15 years in prison in El Salvador.”
The vehicle refers to a bill approved last Tuesday (5) by the Salvadoran Congress, aligned with the president. With 63 votes in favor, out of a possible 84, the new legislation establishes a penal reform that will make it possible to punish with sentences of 10 to 15 years in prison the dissemination of gang messages in the media.
According to the approved text, the law will apply to anyone who “reproduces and transmits messages or communications originating or allegedly originating from groups of delinquents that may generate disturbance and panic in the general population”. The project also targets those who mark territories with acronyms that refer to organized crime as a form of threat.
To justify his proposal, Bukele compared the scenario of El Salvador with that of Nazi Germany. “When the Germans wanted to eradicate Nazism, they banned by law all Nazi symbology, as well as messages, apologies and everything related to the promotion of Nazism. Now we will do that with the gangs,” he wrote on Twitter.
According to Faro’s editorial, the amendments to the Penal Code are a “gag” that harms freedom of the press and expression. “But above all, [fere] the citizen’s right to be informed. What should Salvadorans know about gangs? Nothing, according to the regime.”
The law passed does not detail what kind of messages from gangs will be considered illegal — which adds legal uncertainty to the already delicate scenario of the press in El Salvador.
It is common for journalists specializing in public safety to use as research and contextualization material photographs and videos that show explicit violence committed by criminal groups, in addition to messages left by alleged gang members on social networks. Without this possibility of verification and verification, the tendency is for the topic to disappear from the news.
“It is a new tool to criminalize journalistic work,” the Association of Journalists of El Salvador said in a statement. “[A nova lei] is a clear attempt at censorship, [que] threatens with imprisonment the media and journalists who report the reality that the Bukele government seeks to hide.”
El Faro uses the same argument in his editorial when he states that “in a democracy, it is not power that decides what is published and what is not”. For the newspaper, the new law “comes when democratic life has already been dismantled and the regime is trying to hide its own negotiations with criminal groups and their corruption by all means.”
“That’s why today, in protest against this gag law, we closed our front page. El Salvador paid a very high price to obtain our freedoms. We cannot allow them to be taken away from us by a regime that seeks to keep citizens in the dark. Tomorrow you will find here what we did and continue to do: journalism. Today we protest”, says the text.
In December, the US Treasury Department issued sanctions against two government officials in El Salvador for allegedly negotiating with the MS-13 gang to support the president’s Nuevas Ideas party in the 2021 legislative election.
In return, the gang obtained money from the government and privileges for its imprisoned leaders, such as access to cell phones and prostitutes, according to the indictment. Bukele claimed that everything was a lie and pointed to previous governments that had carried out this type of activity.
Under the justification of fighting violence in the country that has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, the Salvadoran legislature, controlled by the president’s acronym, approved an exception regime in the country at the end of March.
The decision was fueled by the most violent day in El Salvador’s recent history — on March 26, the country recorded 62 murders. In ten days of the state of exception, more than 6,300 people suspected of being part of criminal gangs were arrested.
However, human rights organizations have warned of instances of police abuse and arbitrary detention of suspects without access to a lawyer. In an interview with sheetJosé Miguel Vivanco, lawyer and former director for the Americas of the NGO Human Rights Watch, said that Bukele acts like a mafioso and jeopardizes the legitimacy of the state.
