‘Trying to Silence Us’: Salvadoran News Outlet El Faro Says Bukele Government Has Frozen Some Assets

The Salvadoran news outlet El Faro says President Nayib Bukele’s government has frozen the personal assets of two of its shareholders in retaliation for its reporting.

“These are not fiscal measures,” El Faro editor-in-chief Carlos Dada, who along with much of the news site’s staff has been operating in exile, said in a press conference announcing the development on May 7. “They are political measures trying to silence us.”

“This is an illegal move against our private assets and it is shocking, but not surprising at all,” Dada told FRONTLINE, adding that the Bukele government has targeted El Faro for years.

The news comes a month after FRONTLINE and El Faro released a documentary chronicling how Bukele’s administration had made pacts with violent gangs it claimed to be fighting, including MS-13.

That documentary, The Deal: Trump, Bukele & the Gangs of El Salvador, traced how El Faro uncovered evidence that Bukele’s administration had offered privileges to gang leaders in prison in exchange for a reduction in homicides and voter support in territories the gangs controlled.

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The popular Salvadoran leader, who had publicly said that he would never negotiate with gangs because “you are giving them legitimacy,” claimed “El Faro lied” and said documents showing his administration’s dealings with gang leaders were “fake.”

As The Deal recounted, most of El Faro’s journalists are now outside El Salvador following threats and harassment, but remain determined to keep reporting on the Bukele government.

“Silence is not an option,” Dada told FRONTLINE editor-in-chief and executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath in an episode of the series’ podcast released last week.

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The Bukele administration has not publicly commented on El Faro’s announcement about the frozen assets. Bukele has publicly criticized and sought to discredit the outlet in the past, saying, “The opposition has made manipulation its main strategy, and ‘journalism’ is one of its main weapons.”

Bukele’s targeting over the years, Dada told FRONTLINE, has forced El Faro to dedicate “significant economic and human resources” to defending itself. “That is time and resources we should have used reporting and producing good journalism,” Dada said. “So it has tremendously affected our operations and the public right to be informed.”

A May 7 El Faro editorial noted that “the Bukele administration’s attacks against El Faro always occur following this outlet’s publications” about alleged wrongdoing by the government, and that “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.”

In addition to detailing Bukele’s tangled history with the gangs, The Deal also examined what led up to Bukele’s offer to imprison U.S. deportees at the notorious CECOT prison, and the gang leaders in U.S. custody whom Bukele asked to be returned to El Salvador in exchange.

Bukele has said the Trump administration’s return of MS-13 members would help El Salvador “finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants” of the gang. But some observers suspected he had another motive: preventing gang leaders in U.S. custody from exposing the details of their past dealings with Bukele’s administration.

“The reality,” El Faro reporter Óscar Martínez said in The Deal, “is that Bukele is trying to cover up his past.”