Today, as El Faro celebrates 27 years of journalism, it is only fitting that we open the inaugural issue of El Faro English’s digital magazine, Central America Monthly, with a judicial chronicle from Guatemala, steeped in the tradition of El Faro’s long-form reportage of Central America. From the courthouse in Guatemala City to the highland forests of Quiché, Yuliana Ramazzini and I spent months documenting the trial of retired General Benedicto Lucas García, an iconic leader of the 1980s Cold War counterinsurgency — and a military man accused of perpetrating genocide against the Maya Ixil people.
The Massacre of a Trial for Genocide is the tale of how a historic war-crimes case has been stopped dead in its tracks: a portrait of the protracted battle over memory and enforced forgetting in Central America. It is a testament to historical irony that, four decades later, some of the most forceful evidence of the barbarity of the troops under Benedicto’s command came from the CIA and Reagan State Department, in days when U.S. leaders tried to keep the Guatemalan military dictatorship close in a zealous shared fight against communism.
As an accompaniment, we have published the full testimony of courtroom witness Engracia Mendoza Caba, whose memory of the destruction of the hamlet of Chulultze’, and the murder of two family members in February 1982, we extensively quote in our dispatch. We release her account in English, Spanish, and her first language, Ixil, accompanied by audio clips from the interview she graciously granted us in her home in Chajul in late October 2024.
To those who know El Faro for its yearslong coverage of secret pacts between gangs and political leaders in El Salvador, we continue to break new ground: Next in this issue is an exclusive video interview, with a written introduction from editor-in-chief Óscar Martínez, of two historic leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang on the covert deals their criminal organization cut with the entourage of Nayib Bukele, from his early political days in 2014 until early 2022, almost three years into his presidency. They assert that the gangs’ vote coercion was integral to Bukele’s rise to total power, accuse a Bukele negotiator of instructing them to repress official homicide counts by hiding corpses, and describe how they were made enforcers of a sweeping Covid-19 lockdown. Last, the gang leaders reveal how Salvadoran officials helped them flee from the state of exception, as tens of thousands were swept up in mass arrests.
This is the first time gang leaders speak on camera, on the record, about Bukele’s dealings with them.
Even as Bukele bills himself as a crusader against crime, and as Donald Trump’s nearshoring jailer of choice, this three-part video adds to El Faro’s trove of photos, audio, leaked documents, and interviews documenting his backchanneling with those very organizations.
With global eyes fixed on the country in recent months, the public has a right to know. To see the big picture.
The Bukele regime’s reaction has been swift. El Faro denounced ten days ago that the Attorney General’s Office began to prepare at least seven arrest warrants for members of El Faro stemming from the publication. These would mark the most significant escalation against the newsroom in El Salvador under Bukele, preceded by the exile in 2023 of our legal incorporation to Costa Rica, illegal surveillance using Pegasus spyware, phony accusations of tax fraud and money laundering, and a well-heeled official campaign of online and physical harassment.
El Faro continues to respond to government attacks with journalism, with the verbs that have characterized our work over the last three decades: to question, to demonstrate, to reveal. El Faro English adds another: to translate Central America.
It is in that spirit that we congratulate our photojournalist Carlos Barrera on winning a 2025 World Press Photo award, for training his lens on the personal toll of state violence under the state of exception in El Salvador. Barrera, who will receive this major photojournalism recognition in Amsterdam on Friday, is our second journalist to win a World Press Photo, following Fred Ramos in 2014. In today’s monthly issue, Barrera co-signs This Is What Bukele's Fantasies Look Like, a photo essay capturing official promises abandoned in the rubble of propaganda: from the non-conversion of an old prison into a cultural center to the non-existence of Bitcoin City.
If a lie can be photographed, the authors quip, it is a big lie.
This issue includes a special episode of our weekly podcast, Central America in Minutes, on the now more than 1,000 days without freedom for Jose Rubén Zamora, Guatemala’s top publisher. From our archive we have translated A Western Called Honduras, a chronicle of corruption, violence, and political jockeying inside the Honduran National Police — particularly relevant given the electoral process unfolding this year under a state of exception in the country’s two largest cities. We hereby launch The Tertulia, a monthly space for essays bridging academic knowledge of Central America in the isthmus and the English-speaking world. Our first piece in the series is The Books the CIA Burned in Guatemala, published in Spanish in 2015 by Guatemalan historian José Cal, which we expect will couple well with our chronicle of the Benedicto Lucas genocide trial.
Last, we offer a poem by premier Central American poet and Nicaraguan exile Gioconda Belli: In the Name of the Fatherland, a previously unpublished piece released in El Faro in 2023. We translated it just one month ago, on April 18, the seventh anniversary of the start of the mass uprising in Nicaragua. We hope her words, a call to resist compulsory obedience of despots, will be a balm for a world in the clutches of authoritarianism beyond Central American borders.
We leave you with this inaugural issue of Central America Monthly, an initiative by El Faro English to ask deeper questions and obtain sharper journalistic answers. Every week, we will keep producing our flagship newsletter and podcast. Starting on the 15th of every month, we invite you to take a beat from the breakneck pace of social media crisis-chasing to join us in this dialogue, which we hope will be at once engaging and long-lasting.
With this new venture, El Faro English hopes to cut deeper into increasingly choppy seas, casting a brighter and longer beacon over Central America.