On World Press Freedom Day, May 3, the director and founder of Salvadoran digital media outlet El Faro took to social media to speak up about a potential and serious threat from the government of President Nayib Bukele.
Carlos Dada said a source informed El Faro that the Attorney General's Office is preparing at least seven arrest warrants against its journalists following the publication of interviews that reveal alleged pacts between the government and criminal gangs.
The current crisis was triggered by the May 1 publication of a three-part interview with Carlos Cartagena, aka “Charlie,” a former leader of the Barrio 18 Revolucionarios gang, and with “Liro Man,” a lower-ranking leader of the same criminal group. They detail various agreements between the Bukele government and criminal organizations. According to the interviews, these pacts date back to the time when Bukele was mayor of San Salvador in 2015 and continued during his rise to the presidency.
Cartagena, who according to El Faro reached a powerful position in crime at the age of 16 and is now wanted by the government, said the group collected votes for Bukele’s campaigns for mayor of San Salvador and president of the country.
"His instructions were that we had to support him, and we were instructed to vote for Bukele," Cartagena said. "We were part of the support he needed at that time. He didn't even have a political party."
There have long been suspicions and rumors about a deal between Bukele and gangs, and El Faro itself has published several reports on the subject. This time, it presented a statement from a wanted gang leader who says he left El Salvador with the government's cooperation.
"What the videos show is that the partnership between Bukele and Bukele supporters and gang members built Bukele's political power," Óscar Martínez, editor in chief of El Faro, said in a conversation with Dada broadcast this week on YouTube. "They're asking us to tell a political story without his political partners, and that's also absurd."
It was in the same conversation that Dada said there was a risk of arrest.
“We have reliable information that the Attorney General’s Office is preparing arrest warrants, proceeding against us. We assume this is the only way they've found to silence us,” Dada said. “The government feels deeply insecure because it knows there is abundant evidence.”
According to Dada, he learned of the risk of arrest from a source who had proof. He did not specify what the proof was. The warrants against El Faro reportedly include charges of apology for crimes and illicit association. The relationship between journalist and source in El Salvador has explicit and historical protections.
El Salvador has lived under a permanent state of emergency since 2022. Bukele's government has been using brutal methods to repress organized crime, including large-scale arrests that, according to human rights organizations, do not respect due process. The method has reduced violence to levels much lower than before and brought popularity to the president, as well as accusations of authoritarianism and disregard for human rights.
At the same time, Bukele has acquired a power without checks and balances, with the domination of the legislative and judicial branches by his allies. The press offers one of the few forces that criticize his power, and no other news outlet represents a spirit as independent and unafraid of power as visibly as El Faro.
In 2023, El Faro moved its administrative and legal operations to Costa Rica following legal harassment from the Bukele government and the discovery that Pegasus spyware was installed on the phones of its journalists. Often, when publishing a major story, the publication's journalists leave the country beforehand.
After El Faro published the videos with the gang leaders on May 1, the Salvadoran government began a coordinated campaign against the outlet’s journalists. The director of the State Intelligence Agency, Peter Dumas – who, according to Dada, has been systematically attacking El Faro for more than a year and a half – wrote on Thursday that “you shouldn’t throw mortars at those who have bombs.” He then accused El Faro of complicity in the crime and asked for more funding for espionage.
"With 'journalists' financed and linked to gangs, drug trafficking, sexual abuse, human trafficking, and other crimes, we should have double the budget," he wrote. "They can't hide behind the invisible privilege of 'journalism' forever."
Dada responded to the threat of more funding for spying.
"The director of the state intelligence agency is publicly asking for more funding for spying so he can continue spying on journalists," Dada said. "A public official is already accusing us of a series of crimes."
The most direct response Bukele offered to the allegations from the interviews with the gang leaders was a post on X questioning the work of non-governmental organizations and media outlets.
"It's clear that a country at peace, without deaths, without extortion, without bloodshed, without corpses every day, without mothers mourning their children, is not profitable for human rights NGOs, nor for the globalist media, nor for the elites, nor for Soros," the president wrote.
Bukele then published a video with the phrase “Fear of what?”, which became a slogan of his government.
In a more subdued tone, El Salvador's presidential commissioner for Human Rights and Freedom of Expression, Andrés Guzmán, said that freedom of the press is "respected" and "guaranteed" in the country.
The commissioner also said that anyone, including journalists, can practice their profession without fear of reprisals, as long as they respect the law.
"The principle of legality applies in our country for all citizens, including journalists," he said, adding that if there are accusations against anyone, it is the responsibility of the competent institutions to guarantee due process and the presumption of innocence.
In addition to these statements, many trolls on social media attacked El Faro. Several posts argued that if the president made a deal with the gangs and then broke the pact and arrested their members, his merit was even greater. Others said that giving voice to a confessed and wanted criminal, even if it is to present evidence of a complaint against the government, constitutes a crime.
"If you meet with gang members and repeat all the lies they tell you, you become one of them," wrote lawyer Guillermo Gallegos, president of the Legislative Assembly from 2016 to 2018.
El Faro journalists vehemently defend that their work does not constitute a crime, but simply the exercise of press freedom. They point out that interviewing sources, including criminals, is common practice in investigative journalism.
Dada said that it was through this method that El Faro revealed war crimes, the infiltration of the Zetas gang in Guatemala, drug trafficking routes that pass through El Salvador, assassination squads within the National Civil Police and the infiltration of organized crime in all political parties.
"In our 27 years of journalism at El Faro, we've encountered drug traffickers, murderers, thieves, gang members, and corrupt officials, all of whom have helped us understand how criminal organizations operate," Dada said. "Journalism's primary function is to inform, and the act of informing is primarily for the benefit of the public. Sometimes informing requires speaking with people who are fugitives."
"What we've done is what we had to do,” Martínez said. “It's our job to do journalism, to give you information so you can know and do with that information what you want."
Several organizations, such as the Inter-American Press Association, Human Rights Watch and the Salvadoran Journalists Association (APES for its initials in Spanish), as well as Pedro Vaca, IACHR Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, expressed support for El Faro, condemning the possible arrest warrants.
“My attention and alertness regarding the report by El Faro, which has allegedly received information about arrest warrants and search warrants,” Vaca wrote on X. “I value and acknowledge El Faro’s journalistic trajectory and relevance. The seriousness of the report urges an official response regarding guarantees for journalism.”
El Faro has documented ties between Bukele and criminal organizations for years, starting with an investigation published in 2018 about an alleged pact with gangs involving the Cuscatlán market when Bukele was mayor of San Salvador.
As proof that the allegations are true, the journalists also cited the sanctions imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department against Bukele government officials, such as Carlos Marroquín (chairman of the social fabric reconstruction unit) and Osiris Luna (vice minister of security and chief of penal centers), for facilitating pacts with gangs.
"We are by no means the only ones who have documented Nayib Bukele and his government's pact with the gangs," Dada said.
For El Faro journalists, the current threats represent a critical moment not only for the newspaper, but for all press freedom in El Salvador and for democracy in the country itself.
"All these arrest warrants that we have been told are being prepared today, while absurd and Kafkaesque, are not surprising," Dada said. "This is the problem when such excessive concentration of power is allowed."
