<p>El Faro’s photographers spent half of 2025 in exile, but captured some of the most sensitive issues in El Salvador. They also looked beyond the consolidating dictatorship to deportations in the new Trump era and survivors of Guatemalan genocide.</p>
Although El Faro’s photographers spent half of 2025 in exile, they captured some of the most sensitive issues of the year in El Salvador: survivors of the regime’s prisons, mining pollution, precarious school conditions, and the lonely protest of a mother searching for her son in Nayib Bukele’s prisons. This year, the regime’s repression intensified, leaving behind snapshots as diverse as they are iconic: a portrait of Charli, the 18th Street gang leader who for years was Bukele’s political partner, or the early days of exile of Ingrid Escobar, one of El Salvador’s most tireless human rights defenders. They also looked beyond the consolidating dictatorship to deportations in the new Trump era and survivors of Guatemalan genocide. These are the ten photographs of 2025, as selected by our editorial and photographic team.
On June 10, 2025, Ingrid Escobar had been in exile for two days on the heels of a wave of repression carried out in May by the Bukele dictatorship. Diagnosed with cancer and with her two children, the director of the legal-aid group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario fled El Salvador in the same month as nearly 50 journalists, according to the Association of Journalists of El Salvador, a flow that continued over the following months and was also joined by organizations such as Cristosal. Escobar was and continues to be one of the most active critical voices against the abuses of the dictatorship. She led marches in favor of innocent prisoners under the state of exception, gave dozens of interviews to international media, and collected evidence of torture inside prisons relying on survivor testimony. Escobar remains outside the country. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)Mr. Orellana in the warehouse of his recycling business on February 25, 2025, after his release from the prisons of the state of exception. Orellana was a victim of gang extortion for years; one of his employees was murdered by these organizations. After his arrest on December 4, 2023, Orellana tried to prove his status as a victim, but he was imprisoned without being heard, prompting his family to present evidence that granted him parole on December 15. In January 2024, he was recaptured and remained in prison until February 2025. Although he was reunited with his family, Orellana left prison having witnessed the murder of other prisoners at the hands of guards. As of 2025, the state of exception has led to the deaths of more than 400 people in state custody and the imprisonment of more than 85,000. Human rights organizations have denounced the return of systematic torture in Salvadoran prisons. What is known about what happens inside is known thanks to courageous testimonies such as that of Mr. Orellana. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)During the first months of 2025, El Faro interviewed Carlos Cartagena, known as Charli, for two consecutive days. Charli, one of the most recognizable faces of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang, rose to notoriety after starring in a BBC documentary in the early 2000s, when he was already the leader of the IVU community, a stronghold where his gang dominated the lives of thousands of Salvadorans. Charli was also one of the national leaders of that gang, which was declared an International Terrorist Organization by the Donald Trump administration in 2025. Charli was captured and released, with the help of high-ranking officials in the Bukele administration, during the first days of the state of exception in 2022, when thousands of Salvadorans without gang tattoos were arrested. He fled the country. In the interview, Charli told El Faro how for years his gang made deals with Bukele’s inner circle to help him become mayor of San Salvador, which he won in 2015 by just over 6,000 votes, and later president. (Photo: Víctor Peña)When she landed in Guatemala in October, after being deported from the United States, Alicia Hernández was struck by the reality faced by hundreds of deportees who migrated decades ago. She learned that no-one was waiting for her, that she had no family left in Guatemala to take her in. She cried and made one last desperate call to her relatives in the United States to see if they knew anyone who could take her in. The response was not encouraging. No-one had a relative to contact her, but they would let her know if any friends could help. That day, Alicia went to the migrant shelter in Zone 5 to wait. As of October 15, 2025, during the second administration of Donald Trump, 398 planes from Global X and Eastern Air Express landed at La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala, carrying 34,539 deportees. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)On September 5, 2025, at the age of 78, Father José María Tojeira, one of the most respected intellectual voices in postwar El Salvador, died in Guatemala. Days later, hundreds honored him at a ceremony at José Simeón Cañas Central American University. In the image, some of those who worked closely with him hold up a balloon with his face on it. He arrived from Spain in Honduras in 1969. In 1985, he was sent to El Salvador and appointed provincial of the Jesuits. After the 1989 assassination of the rector of the UCA, philosopher and Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría, and five other priests of the Society of Jesus and two collaborators, perpetrated by the military on campus during the civil war, Tojeira assumed the rectorship of the university. On that fateful night, he was living 200 meters from the scene and heard the gunshots. Tojeira raised his critical voice in favor of the poor throughout all postwar governments, whether Left or Right, including the current dictatorship of Nayib Bukele, who attacked the Jesuits on several occasions. With his death, in a time of silence and fear, El Salvador lost one of its most influential critical voices against state abuses. His remains are in the Jesucristo Liberador chapel at the university, alongside those of the priests massacred during the war. (Photo: Ramiro Guevara)Aerial view of San Sebastián River, La Unión. The river’s water is polluted due to mining activity that took place in the area until 2017, when a law banning mining in El Salvador was passed. In December 2024, the Bukele-controlled Assembly passed the General Mining Law, which allows mining. Dozens of organizations and environmentalists organized demonstrations throughout 2025. The image, taken on January 26, is a reminder of the lasting and harmful effects of a practice that may return on an industrial scale in El Salvador. (Photo: Víctor Peña)Engracia Mendoza, 51, is a survivor of a massacre carried out by the Guatemalan Army in the village of Chulultze’, in Chajul. She fled there with her family when she was eight years old to escape the military violence in central Chajul. There, in Chulultze’, her father and sister were killed. Forty-two years later, in early 2025, sitting in a wooden chair in her home in central Chajul, she is guarded by the family pet. In mid-2024, Engracia and dozens of other survivors traveled to Guatemala City to testify during the trial of Benedicto Lucas García, who was accused, as head of the Army in the early 1980s, of carrying out genocide against the Ixil Maya population. After 90 hearings, the trial was postponed due to appeals filed by Lucas García’s defense. The trial was frozen in 2025. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)Alicia Martínez, a 56-year-old street vendor, walks the streets of San Salvador with a sore on her leg that bites with every step, while also carrying the weight of not knowing where her son Jonás is since the police detained him in February 2023 for the simple fact of living in La Campanera, a neighborhood once controlled by the 18th Street Sureños gang. Since that day, her life has become a mixture of physical pain and constant anguish: she works longer hours to support her youngest son and to put together a monthly package that she delivers without any certainty that her son will receive it in prison. She fears finding out on social media that he has been hospitalized or killed, as so many other mothers have under the state of exception. In a country with overcrowded prisons and secret trials, thousands of families search for their detainees almost blindly. Alicia stood in front of the Mariona prison on March 9, 2025, with her cross and her worn-out voice to repeat a cry that is also a plea: “They took them alive, we want them back alive.” (Photo: Carlos Barrera)Erick Martínez, 16, and his sister Nallely, 11, sat on the walls that remained of a coffee farm in the community of El Rescate, trying to get internet reception to do their homework in early February 2025. Every week, their father spends $1.25 so that the children can have internet access, or at least the possibility of catching a signal when possible. To go to school, they must get up at 4:00 a.m. Monday through Friday for a nearly three-hour trip to downtown Berlin. In 2025, under an intense propaganda campaign, the Bukele dictatorship appointed an army captain as minister of education. She announced that children must arrive with short hair and impeccable uniforms in a country where thousands of minors must walk dirt roads and cross rivers for hours to get to class. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)Dacia Ramírez, 42, has a tattoo on her back in memory of her daughter Achly Gabriela Méndez Ramírez, who died in the 2017 fire at the Hogar Seguro (unironically, “Safe Home”), a housing facility for children in Guatemala, along with 40 other girls. Eight years later, on August 12, 2025, six former officials were sentenced to between six and 20 years in prison for child abuse, dereliction of duty, abuse of authority, and manslaughter for locking the girls inside during the fire. Among them are the then-director of the Hogar Seguro, a secretary of social welfare, the ombudsman for children's rights at the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman, and a deputy commissioner of the National Civil Police. (Photo: Edward Grattan)
