‘Criminalising journalism’: Famous Salvadoran outlet to relocate

World
By William

Founded in El Salvador in 1998 and celebrated for its independent investigative reporting, digital news outlet El Faro has decided to move its administrative and legal operations out of the country amid what it describes as a campaign of government intimidation.

In a editorial on Thursday, the outlet said it had registered as a non-profit organization in San Jose, Costa Rica, on April 1, though it stressed that its newsroom remains in El Salvador and plans to continue operating as usual.

“Under Nayib Bukele’s government, campaigns sprang from Casa Presidencial [the Presidential House] have sought to discredit and discredit El Faro and its employees,” the editorial states.

“We have experienced physical surveillance and threats, Pegasus spyware attacks, advertiser harassment, and defamation of government officials and legislators from governing parties.”

The decision comes as human rights and press freedom groups express growing concern over the state of democracy and civil liberties in El Salvador.

President Bukele, who was first elected in 2019, has led a brutal crackdown on gangs over the past year, a campaign that has proven widely popular and has brought many in El Salvador a reprieve after years of violence.

But critics say any gains in public safety come at a high price. Important civil liberties have been suspended under a “state of exception” in place for more than a year, and tens of thousands of people have faced arbitrary detention, with reports of abuses including torture and deaths in custody.

“More than 66,000 people have been detained, many of them arbitrarily. There have been massive, systematic human rights abuses,” Duncan Tucker, the regional media manager of the US division of the human rights organization Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera in a recent telephone conversation. “There is a dismantling of the rule of law in the country.”

Bukele has also been criticized for removing checks on his authority and targeting alleged rivals, with El Faro’s investigative reporting being one of his favored targets.

“Across Central America, governments are criminalizing journalism they believe is against their best interests. It’s not there yet, but El Salvador is evolving very quickly into another Nicaragua,” Carlos Dada, the co-founder of El Faro, told Al Jazeera in a phone call.

“We decided we had to move El Faro out of Bukele’s reach. He doesn’t want any other story in the country but his own.”

Spyware attacks

The outlet says such attacks come in many forms, from surveillance and spyware to televised speeches by Bukele who lashed out at the publication and its reporters.

Most troubling, Dada said, were several audits from the country’s finance ministry and what he called “trumped-up criminal allegations of tax evasion.”

El Faro says he will appeal against those allegations, but that there is no longer a separation of powers that guarantees the independence of the judiciary.

“What chance of legal defense is there if the president makes accusations without evidence and controls the entire judicial system and the three branches of government?” the outlet said in Thursday’s editorial.

Roman Gressier is one of 22 known cases of individuals in El Faro having their phones infiltrated by Pegasus, a spyware product created by Israeli surveillance company the NSO Group. The cases were confirmed by digital watchdog groups Access Now and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

“The attacks were very consistent with our investigative reports, major political events in El Salvador, and government attacks on our newsroom,” Gressier told Al Jazeera in a phone call. “You feel that your life and property has been violated. You don’t know who has your information or what they’re going to do with it.”

The Bukele administration has denied using Pegasus spyware to track journalists, claiming that their own officials had their phones hacked.

But the NSO Group says it sells its products exclusively to government agencies, and a Citizen Lab report found that the Pegasus attacks on Salvadoran journalists and activists came from El Salvador, concluding that government involvement was “highly likely” .

In 2021, the United States took the rare step of placing the NSO group under sanctions, citing its use by governments to “silence dissidents” and monitor journalists and human rights groups.

Concerns about press freedom

Press freedom associations also say the Bukele government has created a hostile atmosphere for the country’s media outlets by routinely using rhetoric that defames reporters.

Last April, Bukele called a gang investigator “garbage” in a post on Twitter. Soon after, Bukele’s director of the prison service tweeted that El Faro’s journalists were “terrorists”, “mercenaries” and spokesmen for criminal gangs.

Around the same time, the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly also passed a bill threatening publications with jail time if they shared material alleged to replicate gang messaging.

Tucker, Amnesty International’s regional media manager, said the law was “vaguely worded” and could be used against news outlets covering gang issues if the government finds their coverage unfavorable.

According to Asociacion de Periodistas de El Salvador (APES), a Salvadoran press freedom organization, the number of recorded cases of hostile behavior towards journalists has risen from 77 cases in 2019, when Bukele was first elected, to 125 cases in 2020. That number subsequently increased to 220 cases in 2021.

Dada said the hostility to journalism is part of a larger push to shrink the space available to alternative voices and independent institutions.

“We may have higher visibility, but we’re far from alone,” Dada said. “Journalism is one of the last remaining places of resistance, but not the only one. We are determined to continue reporting in El Salvador as long as possible.”

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