The influential digital newspaper El Faro denounced on Thursday that the government of Nayib Bukele froze assets belonging to its partners in retaliation for its reports on alleged dealings between the president and gang members. The measure, which affects a bank account and a property, is linked to an alleged tax debt that the newspaper denies.
Instead, El Faro connects the action to the recent publication of a documentary that expanded on its allegations about Bukele’s alleged dealings with criminals. The president, who governs with sweeping powers, rejects accusations that he made pacts with gangs in exchange for support to reach power in 2019. “The dictatorship has begun to move against the media outlet’s shareholders,” El Faro said in a statement. Its staff have been working in exile for the past year.
According to the newspaper, the government is once again responding with reprisals to publications about “its mafia pacts, its corruption, its interest in concentrating all power for itself and its close circles; and the effects this has on the Salvadoran population.” El Faro recently released a documentary that, it recalled, details Bukele’s alleged “criminal pacts,” which broke down in 2022 and gave way to an anti-gang war.
That offensive, carried out under a state of exception, has led to the arrest of around 92,000 people without judicial warrants and has prompted allegations of crimes against humanity from a group of international jurists. The “ultimate objective is to silence us,” El Faro said, noting that the freezing of assets is being justified as a measure to guarantee the eventual payment of obligations.
The process began in 2020, and the government has failed to prove its accusations of tax evasion and even money laundering, the publication maintained. In 2023, after 25 years in El Salvador, El Faro moved its administrative and legal structure to Costa Rica. The complaint came one day after a press association reported that El Salvador recorded in 2025 the largest wave of journalists going into exile since the end of its civil war three decades ago, amid fears of detention and attacks by officials.
Some 53 communicators left the country last year because of “harassment, surveillance, threats or under the category of preventive exile,” the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES) said in its annual report.
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