The Salvadoran media outlet El Faro reported that it has installed its administrative and legal structure in Costa Rica, as a measure to protect its newsroom from the growing persecution that President Nayib Bukele has undertaken.
Through a statement released by El Farothe Salvadoran outlet reports that after 25 years of journalism in El Salvador under the administration of the company Trípode, SA, de CV, it will now work under the legal umbrella of the Fundación Periódica, based in San José.
“Our newsroom will continue in San Salvador and we will continue doing journalism in El Salvador. But our administrative and legal operation no longer. We are now a Central American newspaper based in San José. It is the culmination of a process that we undertook a few months ago due to the lack of conditions to continue operating in El Salvador,” El Faro details in its statement.
They do not abandon El Salvador
Despite its decision, El Faro reaffirms its willingness to continue working in its country of origin. “We removed El Faro but our newsroom will continue to do journalism in El Salvador. We will not stop reporting on the country that is at the center of our coverage, “they warn.
«Our journalism, then, is not going anywhere. The move is precisely to continue doing so independently and critically, less vulnerable to the arbitrariness of the regime. We are leaving to stay,” says the newspaper, without specifying what conditions its editors would be operating in, which could always be exposed to persecution by the State.
Bukele, the absolute
The Salvadoran newspaper, which in recent years has denounced persecution, espionage and constant criminalization attempts by the Bukele government, justified its departure from its country by “the dismantling of our democracy, the lack of controls on the exercise of power by a small group, the attacks on freedom of the press and the closure of all transparency and accountability mechanisms (which) in El Salvador seriously threaten the citizen’s right to be informed”.
During the Bukele administration, adds El Faro, “we have been the object of delegitimization and defamation campaigns originating in the Presidential House; we have faced physical surveillance and threats; espionage with Pegasus; harassment of advertisers and defamation of officials and deputies of the official party. But, above all, we have faced multiple audits by the Ministry of Finance, with fabricated accusations to which we continue to respond and appeal in all the corresponding administrative and judicial instances, despite knowing that in El Salvador there is no longer a division of powers; the president even used a national chain of radio and television to falsely accuse us of money laundering”.
El Faro is the most prestigious investigative media outlet in El Salvador. To his credit he accumulates uncovering of corruption cases of the governments of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), such as former president Antonio Saca; former left-wing presidents Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sánchez Cerén, of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN); and now from Bukele himself.
In the last three years, the Bukele government has launched an anti-gang operation, which has supposedly made El Salvador the safest country on the continent, according to official propaganda. El Faro attributes it to “negotiations under the table” with the gangs. The media outlet also denounces that it was because of the same desire to hide this pact with criminal structures that the government approved a law that threatens journalists and media outlets that publish news about local crime.
With this law, the regime tries “to stop publishing information about the secret negotiations between Bukele and the leaders of the three main gangs, in which the government, among other things, promised not to extradite them to the United States in exchange for They will lower the homicide rates and support the election of deputies of Nuevas Ideas in the 2021 legislatures.”
