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Last week, a source within police intelligence circles provided El Faro with new details about a plot by the regime of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to manufacture criminal charges against members of the newsroom: Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro had ordered two senior National Civil Police commissioners to coordinate an operation to detain members of El Faro upon arrival at the airport and falsify a cocaine consumption test.
Crucially, their teams were to also plant cocaine in their luggage, in order to secure a ten-year prison sentence on drug trafficking charges. “In the cocaine consumption test elaborated by officers from the DAN, the test, obviously manipulated, would turn up positive, for which the journalists would be arrested,” said the police intelligence source.
The two police commissioners were Eduardo Linares, head of the Anti-Narcotics Division; and Víctor Rodríguez Peraza, until last year head of the General Secretariat of the National Civil Police. Security Minister Villatoro ordered Commissioner Linares, according to the source, “to prepare the operation to capture the journalists, and coordinate the entire apparatus with Commissioner Víctor Peraza.”
“The false accusation of drug trafficking and arrest was so that the arrest would not appear to be politically motivated, derived from the recent reporting of El Faro, which has uncovered the mafia pacts between Bukelismo and the gangs,” said the source.
“My advice,” he added, “is that your colleagues at El Faro abstain from continuing to try to enter the country, because the plan has not changed: If you attempt to enter again, they will capture you and accuse you of drug trafficking, with ten years in prison.”
In a second major leak, a source inside the justice system told El Faro that, months ago, the central government ordered the Bukele-controlled Attorney General’s Office to create a list of names “with one sole intention,” said editor-in-chief Óscar Martínez in a Spanish-language livestream on Thursday night: “to construct judicial cases against those people, for whom the Bukele administration has asked that the Attorney General’s Office profile possible cases to accuse them upon their arrest.”
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The source in the judiciary asserted that the list contains at least 60 names, including Salvadoran anti-corruption attorney Ruth López, the legal director for human rights organization Cristosal who was arrested in May and has been accused in a secret trial of illicit enrichment. On July 1, Amnesty International declared López as one of three prisoners of conscience in El Salvador, the first time this occurred in the country since the civil war (1980-1992).
Reportedly on the list are members of El Faro and journalists —whose names were unspecified by the source— from other Salvadoran news outlets.
The security officials named by the sources as part of these plots are key operators in the Salvadoran regime’s state of exception: Minister Villatoro, a veteran security hand and powerful figure in Bukele’s cabinet, directly oversees the Police; Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado, a Bukele loyalist illegally instated in 2021, has overseen the prosecution of tens of thousands of Salvadorans in mass trials without the right to defense.
Commissioner Peraza, added Martínez, “is who, until last year, served as head of the General Secretariat of the PNC and who was mentioned as possibly able to assume the directorship of the Police following the helicopter crash of former director Arriaza” — a role that the Bukele regime, almost a year later, has yet to fill.
Constructing ‘non-citizens’
The threat of conviction on fabricated charges of drug trafficking adds to the money laundering and tax evasion allegations by Nayib Bukele that led to the administrative exile of El Faro’s legal incorporation to Costa Rica in April 2023. El Faro has also denounced government smear campaigns, stalking, illegal wiretaps, constant online harassment and threats, and the denial of work visas in El Salvador for two El Faro employees.
In 2021, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures to 34 members of El Faro, citing “serious, urgent risk of suffering irreparable harm to their human rights.”
In early May, El Faro received and publicly denounced information from a source with knowledge of government actions in El Salvador that the Bukele regime had begun to prepare at least seven arrest warrants for members of El Faro. The warrants reportedly included charges of apology for crimes and illicit association.“
We believe that they were building a trial against us in the public opinion, which is how Bukelismo operates: first, they construct ‘non-citizens’ —gang members, the corrupt, and sellouts— so that when the arrests come, the public trial has already taken effect,” said Martínez this Thursday.
El Faro had just published a three-part video interview with two former leaders of the 18th Street gang, detailing their negotiations with the political circle of Nayib Bukele dating back to 2014, when he was a candidate for mayor of the capital city, San Salvador.“
The whole point,” he added, “was to accuse us of being gang members for the crime of interviewing gang members who had negotiated with the Bukele government, and are free because the government helped them escape the state of exception.”
In the weeks following the publication, the Bukele regime issued a series of chilling political arrests against López, one of the most prominent human rights activists in El Salvador; campesinos and private transportation businessmen; and, in early June, constitutional lawyer and government critic Enrique Anaya.
On May 13, Bukele announced a Foreign Agents Law that will impose a 30 percent tax on donations to civil society, whom he accused of responding to a “globalist” agenda and destabilizing the country, and requiring organizations and individuals to submit to a Foreign Agents Registry within 90 days of passage. The new law, approved on May 21, empowers a new state agency to arbitrarily decide who is granted an exemption.
On Friday, June 6, and Saturday, June 7, El Faro held a special edition of the Central American Journalism Forum in San José, Costa Rica. It was that Friday, according to the police intelligence source, that Minister Villatoro ordered Commissioners Linares and Peraza to capture El Faro journalists upon their return to El Salvador from the conference.
Particularly illustrative of the timing of the threats is that El Faro had just published the second issue of its Spanish-language digital magazine, focused on the resurgence of political prisoners in El Salvador. El Faro English titled its June 15 issue of Central America Monthly: “Silencing Dissent: The Return of Political Prisoners to El Salvador.”
Additionally, one of the members of the newsroom who gave a journalism workshop at ForoCAP in San José, photojournalist Carlos Barrera, had just received a World Press Photo Award for his long-term coverage of the human toll of the state of exception in El Salvador. Independent reports estimate that at least 400 people have now died in custody.
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Upon receiving word from diplomatic and other sources of the existence of a police operation at the airport, members of El Faro did not board their flight. According to the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association, at least 40 journalists have fled El Salvador since early May, adding to a ballooning population of political exiles who have left since 2021.Exile is the subject of the third issue of Central America Monthly, which will be released as scheduled on Tuesday, July 15.
“We continue gathering information and discovering the plans of the government,” said Martínez of the plot against members of El Faro. “We think it’s important to tell the public, because we believe that this is a way to deactivate these absurd intentions to destroy the credibility of a newsroom that for 27 years has survived different kinds of harassment.”
“It is journalism that is exposing these cases of corruption that go against the narrative that Nayib Bukele's regime wants to impose,” said El Faro director Carlos Dada. “That is why they want us out of the country, and why they want human rights defenders out, or in jail. The tools this dictatorship uses to try to silence critics are death, jail, or exile.”
This article first appeared in the July 4 edition of the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here.