Days after President Donald Trump's executive order to suspend US financial support to foreign organizations was announced, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele accused journalists and news outlets that have benefited from that aid of being part of "a global money laundering operation" and of promoting a globalist agenda.
Bukele's message, published on his X account on Feb. 8, came in response to a post from the @wikileaks account about contributions from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the media. The post made no reference to El Salvador or an alleged money laundering network.
Es falso que Wikileaks haya filtrado un listado de medios de comunicación y ONG financiados por USAID para generar “falsas matrices de opinión” contra Maduro
La desinformación surge de portales oficialistas como Venezuela News:https://t.co/jWvzZwvz8b
— Cazadores de Fake News (@cazamosfakenews) February 17, 2025
In response, the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES, for its acronym in Spanish) said Bukele's allegations were part of a disinformation campaign that sought to silence journalists who have investigated and denounced abuses of power and the management of public resources.
For Salvadoran journalists, Bukele's statements are an example of a narrative that authoritarian regimes have used on multiple occasions in order to discredit and criminalize the work of independent media, based on the ways in which they are financed.
“The first thing they do is set up a narrative in which they begin to accuse without evidence, only to discredit, and in a populist way to reach the masses and make them believe that there is really money laundering here,” Ezequiel Barrera, director and founder of the investigative digital magazine Gato Encerrado, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “They have found in this narrative [about USAID support] that comes from the United States the opportunity to be even stronger in discrediting the media.”
Although, like Bukele, several other Latin American leaders have taken advantage of Trump's executive order to disqualify media outlets and journalists that receive funds from international cooperation, in previous years leaders in the region have already described this type of financing as forms of interference and destabilization.
Journalists from independent media and experts from Latin America agree that these types of narratives are misleading fallacies to hinder the efforts of the press as monitors of power.
Clayton Weimers, director of the North American office of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), said in a statement on Feb. 3 that Trump's move would create a vacuum that would benefit propagandists and authoritarian regimes.
José Nieves, director of the Cuban digital media outlet El Toque, agrees that the suspension of foreign support is a victory for governments such as those of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua that spread the narrative that there is no independent journalism when it is supported by funds from the United States.
“It is a misleading narrative because it assumes that North American funding is what determines stories and that is a fallacy,” Nieves told LJR. “The idea behind that reasoning is that 'he who pays rules.' That's an idea that presumes that all people change their opinions if someone pays them. And it is an idea that speaks more about the person who has it than about who is presumed to act in that way.”
The journalist said that receiving a grant or funding from international cooperation or some organization does not mean putting oneself at the service of said entities. Rather, he said, the logic behind this type of financing is an overlap of principles and objectives of the donor organization and the media outlet.
“In my almost 10-year career directing a media outlet, a donor has never told me 'you have to talk about this, you have to say this,'” Nieves said. “We have decided to work with certain funders when we understand that the objectives they pursue coincide with our objectives. And if the objectives of North American funding are to bring democracy to Cuba, to have a regime change, those objectives are also our objectives.”
The team of the Salvadoran media outlet Gato Encerrado during the recording of a video interview. The newsroom has been a sub-recipient of USAID funds through implementing organizations. (Photo: Courtesy of Gato Encerrado)
In a report published in May 2024, USAID explained that among the objectives of funding independent media in Latin America were to support them in their work to provide objective and accurate information to citizens, counteract attempts by non-democratic actors to control the information space, and shield communities from the manipulation of information.
Similarly, a journalist who requested anonymity, whose country is governed by a dictatorial regime, said that the media group she directs seeks financing from entities whose objective is to strengthen democracy. The key, she said, is knowing how to align the interests of each media outlet with those of the entities that grant the funds.
“They are programs that are seeking to maintain open democratic spaces, not telling us what to publish,” the journalist told LJR. “The editorial lines of each media outlet are independent and they have never told us what to publish or how to say things. The only thing they are asking of us is that we give space to diversity of thought and to the topics that have to be covered. That is, to the traditional tasks of journalism.”
In most cases, support from international cooperation for independent media does not come directly from USAID or other US government entities, but from organizations that are beneficiaries of these agencies, known as implementing organizations. This turns the media that receive the support into sub-beneficiaries of the funds.
Gato Encerrado, for example, has been a sub-beneficiary of international cooperation funds through implementing organizations such as The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), IREX and Internews, Barrera said. Normally, he added, they look for calls that provide financing for projects on disinformation and democratic values, as well as coverage of topics such as corruption and human rights.
To be selected to receive funds from these organizations it is necessary to meet a series of criteria. NED, for example, establishes that applicants for its support programs must be independent media, and that the projects to be funded must be non-partisan, promote and defend human rights, support freedom of information and strengthen democratic institutions, among others.
“The agreement was that they gave us, based on our project, some type of financing so that we could carry out a series of investigations or a series of in-depth reports in which we could explain the situations that are happening,” Barrera said. “They never told us 'that's what you have to write about.' They never told us 'we are interested in investigating this person or that government.’ It was never like that.”
Barrera rejected accusations that receiving financing from implementing organizations or international cooperation agencies affects their status as independent media.
“We are independent when it comes to investigating and making editorial decisions,” Barrera said. “We would not seek a type of financing that would call into question our independence.”
Nieves agreed and said that, in the face of disqualifications and accusations, media have as a defense their journalistic rigor and their code of ethics.
“Each media outlet must establish its own policies, its own standards, it must be as transparent as it wants and as it can with its audiences and respond. Do what is called accountability,” he said.
Laura Dib, director of the Venezuela program at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said that, in her experience working with human rights organizations and programs that receive support from entities such as USAID, these types of agencies have clauses in their contracts to guarantee that there is no interference in the projects they support.
In addition, the contracts also include transparency clauses and establish compliance indicators to ensure that the money is used appropriately, Dib added.
“It is very easy in that narrative to demonize the aid that comes from abroad without knowing a little about the thoroughness with which these contracts are carried out and the autonomy that the implementing partner has to operate,” Dib told LJR. “All organizations that receive money from the United States can be audited at any time and have a full duty to guarantee the transparency of all that information.”
In at least two countries in the region, journalists and media outlets have been individually singled out for allegedly having benefited from support from United States entities, calling into question their credibility.
In the Dominican Republic, a group of journalists was the victim of a smear campaign on social networks last week, for allegedly receiving funds from USAID. Journalist Johnny Arandel, author of the publications that led to the smear campaign, retracted his accusations days later and said they were unfounded.
Journalists in El Salvador fear that President Bukele's disqualifications could escalate into a judicial persecution, as happened with the attacks on the independent media El Faro. (Photo: Screenshot)
In Venezuela, various portals reported on an alleged WikiLeaks dissemination of USAID documents that revealed that independent media such as La Patilla, Efecto Cocuyo, El Pitazo and EVTV had received payments from USAID in order to destabilize the government. Cazadores de Fake News, which specializes in fact-checking, debunked the information and clarified that such a leak did not exist.
In El Salvador, journalists from independent media are concerned that the disinformation campaign surrounding the suspension of US support will lead to possible legal persecution by the Bukele government, Barrera said.
Representatives from media outlets such as Revista Factum, Voz Pública, MalaYerba, Focos TV and Revista Elementos, as well as Gato Encerrado, met after Trump's executive order was announced to put together a joint strategy to defend themselves against the discrediting narrative and seek alternative financing options.
On Feb. 3, the group released a video on social networks in which they talk about the importance of free journalism and financing from international cooperation in a democracy and in the decisions made by Salvadoran citizens.
“One thing that worries us a lot is that this narrative, when it begins to gain strength, and to have some type of echo among the public, among large audiences, that it will begin to give rise to criminal prosecution [of journalists],” Barrera said. “In the end what they seek is to wear down the media and even put journalists from independent media in jail just because they have been critical.”
Linking journalists critical of power with criminal schemes is not new in El Salvador. In 2020, Bukele accused digital media outlet El Faro of money laundering. It was subjected to audits by the Ministry of Finance. This persecution, along with further harassment and reports that its journalists had been spied on, led to El Faro moving its administrative and legal offices to Costa Rica in April 2023.
“The government of El Salvador has always been looking for ways to implicate the media in some money laundering scheme or in forms of criminal prosecution,” Barrera said. “I have no doubt that it will be like that [on this occasion]. We have already seen it on other occasions, and we are seeing the same pattern.”
Barrera said that, while accusations from Bukele and other authoritarian leaders against media that receive funds from international cooperation are launched without evidence, the work of Salvadoran journalists is well supported to defend itself.
“Every statement that is made in a report or in a publication, everything has a support. We do investigative work, we follow the journalistic method, we are not part of any conspiracy group against the government,” he said. “It is the very nature of journalism to shed light on the darkness where they want to keep dirty laundry.”
For her part, the journalist who requested anonymity said she sees a tendency among the continent's authoritarian leaders to see the suspension of funds to independent media as an opportunity to get rid of journalism's job of holding the government accountable.
Hoy, en El Salvador, el periodismo independiente resiste pese a estar otra vez bajo amenaza. pic.twitter.com/lxfurILLi2
— Factum (@RevistaFactum) February 3, 2025
“People in power are bothered that there are actors in society who monitor public work,” she said. “[To say that the media receive funds from the United States] is a narrative that is being used in a very convenient way to try to eliminate spaces of oversight from society.”
Paradoxically, it is these same authoritarian governments that have tried to suffocate the independent press by blocking other forms of financing. That has forced many newsrooms to depend on support from international entities, Nieves said.
“That is where the trap and fallacy is, because one has to resort to this type of international cooperation funds because in our countries we do not have a way to sell advertising, nor to have a public government fund that is equitable and accessible to everyone,” Nieves said. “They control the resources and economies of our countries and make it impossible for us to sustain ourselves in any other way than that.”
