The first exclusively digital newspaper in Latin America and a reference for investigative journalism on corruption, criminality and human rights in Central America, Salvadoran El Faro woke up on the 7th with no news — unprecedented in its 24 years.
The “uncomfortable” reports, as defined by the publication, were replaced by a black background and the text “No a la Censura” (no to censorship).
The strategy of resorting to silence was adopted after the approval of a project, proposed by President Nayib Bukele, which limits press coverage of one of the most sensitive topics for Salvadorans: the activities of “maras” or “pandillas”, criminal factions who control territories and subject the population to a routine of extortion, kidnapping and murder for decades.
Announced after a record 87 murders attributed to gangs in a single weekend, the reform of the Penal Code affects journalism by providing sentences of up to 15 years in prison for those who “reproduce and transmit messages or communications originating or allegedly originating from groups of delinquents that can generate disturbance and panic in the population”.
Since 2020, reports from Faro have been denouncing that Bukele’s administration negotiated with the country’s three main gangs to reduce the number of homicides and support his party, Novas Ideias, in the legislative elections. Under the new rules, such news could not be published.
The law reform is the latest step in the increasingly authoritarian trajectory of the president, who has already entered Congress with the Armed Forces to pressure lawmakers, removed Supreme Court justices and put in place a group that paved the way for him to try to re-election, previously vetoed. For the co-founder and director of Faro, Carlos Dada, it is also the most serious attack on press freedom in El Salvador since the end of the civil war, 30 years ago.
Recognized with awards such as the Maria Moors Cabot, Dada says that in three years Bukele is taking the country to a fate similar to that of Nicaragua under dictator Daniel Ortega, in power since 2007. “There is absolute control of the narrative. Bukele is obsessed with silence the few counterweights that remain.”
It was the first time you spent a day without publishing news in Faro’s 24 years. Why this protest? Since the signing of the agreements that ended the civil war in 1992, this is the first law to censor the press. It seemed to us a more serious step in the dismantling of the freedoms and democratic life that we suffered under this government.
They removed the tools to explain a phenomenon that diametrically affects the entire country. When we report that a government makes a deal with gangs, our sources are gang members, who confirm the negotiations. Today we could not report this. We can no longer talk about territorial control by factions, and Salvadorans who live in communities controlled by them, where the state is not present, will be invisible. It’s a gag law, censorship with all its letters.
How important is it to shed light on this issue? These gangs were born in California, and when our civil war ended, the US began to deport Salvadorans who were part of them. Many arrived without even speaking Spanish to a country full of weapons, without social fabric. And they quickly began to grow, to the point that today they are responsible for much of the violence in El Salvador and the Northern Triangle. They live off extortion, are blamed for most of the sky-high murder rates, impose their power through violence.
Bukele promised to act harshly against the gangs but, as El Faro showed, ended up negotiating with their leaders, like previous governments. What strategies has he been using to try to contain these groups? All parties promise to eradicate gangs and all have sat down to negotiate with them. In the case of Bukele, he started by giving a lot of prominence to the Army and the police, he said he had a territorial control plan against crime. And it’s true that murder rates have dropped dramatically, but now we’ve had a terrible wave of blood, with 62 dead in one day, 87 in total. [num fim de semana]. And it was demonstrated once again that the decrease in violence was not due to the presence of the State.
Do you already know what motivated this record of murders? Did you want to give a message? We don’t know, because this government closed all access to public information. But our experience tells us that gangs have learned to play politics. They use the dead on the streets to trade. All this leads me to conclude that the low homicide rates at the beginning of the government occurred because there was negotiation with the gangs. And suddenly there are 87 bodies on the streets because something broke in the deal.
Before the new law, in what ways had the president been intimidating the media? Bukele runs a campaign of delegitimization and public lynching of journalists. He accused us, on national television, of money laundering. They opened four investigations against us for tax evasion, accused us of covering up sexual abuse. spied on our journalists [com o software israelense Pegasus]. They sent drones that came in through the windows of our houses, they threatened to put car bombs in our office.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued precautionary measures to reporters from El Faro and two other publications, as it considers that our lives are at risk for our professional practice. There are already Salvadoran journalists in exile.
It’s a scenario that looks like Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega. We are moving towards a situation like Nicaragua at a very fast pace. In three years Bukele dismantled the institutions, which Ortega took ten years to do.
Bukele’s popularity reached 90% in 2021. How is it today? According to the latest polls, it was between 80% and 85%. In other words, he is still the president with the most popular support in all of Latin America.
How did he get it? He is also probably the most skilled president at communicating, particularly with the younger generations, through digital platforms that old-school politicians neither understand nor use. He is a master at using TikTok, Twitter and Facebook.
There is no more opposition in El Salvador. State institutions are taken over, access to public information has been closed. There is absolute control of the narrative. That’s why he’s obsessed with silencing the few remaining counterweights, which are us and civil society organizations. He created the image that we are enemies of the people, that we do not allow their work. It’s a successful strategy.
This is reminiscent of the way Jair Bolsonaro (PL) tries to undermine the public’s trust in journalism. What similarities do you see between the two leaders? In addition to attacking journalists, another common element is strengthening armed institutions, increasing funding to the army to ensure loyalty to the person, not the state. There is also the strategy of blaming your rivals for everything, following the populists’ playbook. And another common feature — and I’m sorry to say it so frankly — is a minimal intellectual sophistication. They don’t have a clear sense of history, they see themselves as the center of the story.
But I think a fundamental difference is that Brazil still has a large middle class that doesn’t swallow these speeches so easily. Bolsonaro is populist, but not popular. And it seems to me that he tried to finish off the left, but he couldn’t. He rules with strong political opposition.
One difference is the way they handled Covid. When the pandemic began, he installed one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. If you went out on the street, you could be arrested and sent to a containment center — and there many became infected and died. But it was curious because Bukele’s way of facing the pandemic changed radically when he decided to bring bitcoin [como moeda oficial].
Bitcoiners are libertarians. They don’t like being asked for vaccination certificates. El Salvador has gone from a situation where it did not even allow Salvadorans to enter the country to one in which anyone is accepted without even needing to be vaccinated. In other words, the strategy is political, not sanitary.
Bukele has been criticized externally by international organizations and by governments such as the US. Will that stop him? The US has always had great influence in the country. Bukele realized that the Joe Biden administration had as its axis of policy for Latin America the fight against corruption — and his administration is full of scandals. So he decided to fight the US, and now relations are the worst ever. He is isolated, seeking bridges with governments like those of [Recep] Erdogan [na Turquia] and [Vladimir] Putin [na Rússia].
Returning to the law of censorship on criminal factions, what will you do now to continue reporting on the matter? I still don’t have an answer. I don’t want a journalist from El Faro to end up in jail for 15 years for taking a picture. But we are talking with lawyers, with other media outlets in El Salvador, looking at the options we have. Because silence is not an option for us.
x-ray | Carlos Dada, 51
Exiled with his family in Mexico as a child due to the civil war in El Salvador, he returned to the country at the age of 26 and founded the newspaper El Faro in 1998. Graduated in journalism at Yale University (USA), he was a professor at the institution and received the Maria Moors Cabot and Anna Politkovskaya. He is currently writing a book on the assassination of the Archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Oscar Romero, in 1980.
