A police intelligence source asserts that Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro ordered two senior National Civil Police leaders to plant false evidence of drug trafficking against members of El Faro. A source inside the justice system reports the existence of a list of dozens of names for whom prosecutors were ordered to fabricate criminal cases, including El Faro journalists.

Last month, prosecutors charged alleged members of Los Cachos for recent murders of campesinos in Bajo Aguán, a land conflict that President Xiomara Castro promised in 2021 to address through agrarian reform and U.N.-backed initiatives like a Truth Commission. Four years later, as elections unfold again, unresolved land disputes, private and partisan interests, militarization, and organized crime hobble advances.

In recent days, in a growing wave of police repression and arrests, the Bukele regime revived a bill to tax donations to civil society groups, deployed the Military Police to disperse demonstrators from his personal residence, and ordered detentions including Ruth López, legal director for human rights organization Cristosal, a leading evidence-gatherer of state crimes under the state of exception.

Two Maya K’iche’ pro-democracy leaders who were key in fending off an electoral coup in 2023 and 2024 have now been arrested and accused of terrorism, including a member of President Bernardo Arévalo’s cabinet. In response, Arévalo and Indigenous authorities presented an injunction against the attorney general and called for renewed demonstrations. Amid an ever-steepening assault on anti-coup actors, human rights experts warn about the danger of terrorism charges to curb the right to protest.

A reliable source in El Salvador told El Faro that the Bukele-controlled Attorney General’s Office is preparing at least seven arrest warrants for members of El Faro. The source reached out following the publication of an interview with two former leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios on Bukele’s years-long relationship to gangs. If carried out, the warrants are the first time in decades that prosecutors seek to press charges against individual journalists for their journalistic labors.

The Catholic Church in San Salvador has gone from blessing Nayib Bukele’s unconstitutional reelection and the state of exception to gathering tens of thousands of signatures against his unilateral decision to reactivate metals mining. Bukele has responded testily, drawing from a smear playbook in Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, where priests are imprisoned or exiled and mass is held under state surveillance and veto.

With Donald Trump back in the White House, Nayib Bukele offers sweeping deportation cooperation while asking the U.S. to send back MS-13 leaders awaiting trial. Trump says Panama is not going far enough in shunning China’s Belt and Road initiative, while Guatemala has agreed to accept regional deportees in exchange for support for infrastructure projects. Each Central American country is forging its own path.

On Wednesday the Bukele-controlled legislature changed the Salvadoran Constitution to allow for express constitutional changes in a nearly single-party state. A week earlier, the Inter-American Court found Nicaragua guilty of permitting the 2011 unconstitutional reelection of Daniel Ortega, who is currently radically rewriting the Nicaraguan constitution and since 2007 has changed it a dozen times.