Bukele Freezes Personal Assets of El Faro Shareholders
<p>The Bukele regime in El Salvador has crossed yet another red line in its attacks on El Faro, freezing personal assets of shareholders. We will keep practicing journalism with the certainty that, as long as we don’t stop, they won’t either.</p>
El Faro
Determined to silence independent journalism, Nayib Bukele’s regime in El Salvador has crossed yet another red line in its attacks on El Faro by seizing the personal assets of its shareholders.
Between February and April 2026, it froze funds in a bank account and a property belonging to two partners of Trípode S.A. de C.V., the company that founded El Faro.
In tax terms, this is a “preventive lien,” that is, a hold on individual assets, serving as a guarantee of payment against any potential debts of a company.
This is the latest episode in a long-running tax crackdown against our media outlet, which began in 2020 when Nayib Bukele stated on national television that “they are under investigation for serious money laundering.”
Under his orders, the Treasury Ministry launched four audits against Trípode. Unable to substantiate the president’s money laundering accusation in any of the audits, the Ministry changed the charge to tax evasion for the four fiscal years audited.
We have appealed each of these findings and demonstrated that they are unsubstantiated. But it is very difficult to defend oneself in a co-opted judicial system like El Salvador’s. Now the dictatorship has begun to take action against the media outlet’s shareholders.
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This newest escalation is not surprising.
As we have denounced over the past five years, the Bukele administration accuses us of failing to pay taxes that we actually do pay, and of failing to pay taxes on income that never existed — and that the Treasury Ministry simply invented.
The entire process has been irregular from the start. For example: the Treasury Ministry violated the law when auditing the 2014 and 2016 fiscal years, because the period to do so had already expired.
The Treasury Ministry accuses us of evading taxes on funds from foundations that were not declared in the year we signed the contract. But those taxes, as we have also demonstrated, were paid on time in the years those funds entered our accounts. Despite this, and despite the fact that there is no final ruling from the four audits, it has proceeded to freeze our personal assets.
We cannot, therefore, view the auditors’ conclusions as procedural errors, but rather as yet another item on the long list of harassment, surveillance, interventions, attacks, and smear campaigns against us due to the journalism we practice.
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The Bukele administration’s attacks against El Faro always occur following this outlet’s publications about its mafia-style deals, its corruption, its interest in concentrating all power for itself and its inner circle; and the effects this has on the Salvadoran population.
The first accusation, in September 2020, came three weeks after El Faro published an investigation revealing the existence of a pact between the Salvadoran government and the MS-13 gang.
Subsequent cross-referencing of the timeline of major El Faro investigations with data from the surveillance of our phones using Pegasus spyware reveals Bukele’s obsession with identifying our sources, the materials we are working on, and our publication dates. His ultimate goal is to silence us.
This new escalation comes on the heels of the premiere of The Deal, a documentary that El Faro co-produced with the U.S. program Frontline PBS detailing these criminal pacts. Days ago, El Faro’s deputy managing editor Sergio Arauz testified before the U.S. Congress’s Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission denouncing government abuses and corruption.
The Bukele regime faces international accusations of crimes against humanity, following the March release of a report by the International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations under the State of Emergency in El Salvador (GIPES). The expert group, which has drawn on El Faro’s investigations as part of its sources, points to the possible criminal liability of members of the Bukele government.
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In this context, the government persists in criminalizing journalists and media outlets that defy its propaganda, using the weight of the state apparatus, controlled by the Bukele family, to persecute critical voices.
A year after the forced exile of our staff from El Salvador, we have continued to practice journalism and investigate the government, through the publication of digital magazines, weekly podcasts, international collaborations, and more gatherings of journalists, such as the Central American Journalism Forum.
We will continue to practice journalism with the commitment and rigor that have defined us since 1998. But also with the certainty that, as long as we don’t stop, they won’t stop either.