Carlos Dada, the director of El Faro, a newspaper in El Salvador that has published investigations into the Nayib Bukele administration, has claimed that it has “received reliable information that the Salvadoran Attorney General’s Office is preparing arrest warrants for El Faro journalists.”
El Faro had recently published a new series of videos reiterating and expanding reporting on Bukele’s negotiations with Salvadoran gangs, something that Bukele has been denying for multiple years.
The United States Treasury had reinforced the accusations of Bukele’s administration negotiating with gangs when it sanctioned officials from Bukele’s administration, alleging that the administration “provided financial incentives to Salvadoran gangs MS-13 and 18th Street Gang (Barrio 18) to ensure that incidents of gang violence and the number of confirmed homicides remained low.”
Read more: El Salvador gets its bitcoin from Bitfinex, raising control concerns
El Faro’s editor-in-chief, Óscar Martínez, stated that, “We understand that the alleged crimes for which these warrants are being built are apology for crimes and illicit association. Any capture or raid on our homes will be for having done journalism.”
Bukele’s administration has previously been willing to detain those critical of his regime, often without following the appropriate constitutional processes.
Mario Gomez, a technologist and critic of the Bukele administration’s embrace of bitcoin, was detained and accused of fraud, despite no arrest warrant being issued.
Read more: Bitcoin is no longer legal currency in El Salvador
Bukele has recently been collaborating closely with the Trump administration, providing his human-rights-abusing prisons for the Trump administration to use to detain individuals, many removed and kept away from the United States in explicit violation of court orders.
Trump has communicated his intention to send United States citizens to these prisons and suggested that he is not a supporter of due process.
