/Politics

A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus

May and June marked the great exodus of Salvadoran journalists and human rights and environmental activists. A growing exile had been trickling since Bukele came to power, but had never been as massive and evident as it is now.

Óscar Martínez and Carlos Martínez

Leer en español

One: Miscalculation

We figured we would spend only a few days out of the country. We figured that after publishing, after weighing the risks for a week and after some other issue distracted the Salvadoran dictatorship, we would land back at Monseñor Romero Airport, pass through Olocuilta for a meal of pupusas, sleep in our homes, pick up our pets, kiss our children. We saw ourselves back home that same May. We left with carry-on bags: No-one was carrying more than ten pairs of underwear. We placed our bets on that heartless construct we had invented for these situations, which had worked out fine so many times before: “preventive departure.” One of us, for the first time, mentioned that the dictatorship would make us pay dearly. But we kept repeating “preventive departure.” We kept repeating it a week later, two weeks later, a month after we could not return, and even now, although less so, when some have also begun to say “exile” and look for homes in other countries.

Loading...
1 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Some clothes, medicines, and books are the few things that the first journalists from El Faro took with them in their carry-on bags after leaving El Salvador preventively. Others were able to take computers and hard drives. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro


On the day we published, the main authors of a series of interviews with two 18th Street gang leaders were riding out a “preventive departure”, scattered across different cities: New York, Mexico City, Guatemala, Los Angeles. Preventive departures were always a sugar-coated euphemism for exile, although we never called it that. They were degradations of the normative and sad gray of exile. A little light at the end of the tunnel. A tunnel that is not accepted as such. The construction itself speaks more of a return than a departure: They were preventive. Just for a while, until we are back.

At 2 p.m. on Thursday, May 1, the first chapter aired, accompanied with English subtitles: “Charli’s Confessions: Interview with a Gang Leader on His Secret Pacts with Nayib Bukele.”

In El Salvador, the popular dictator Nayib Bukele is the lord of social media. Thumbs-up, hearts, comments, and views are the currency of his kingdom. His most popular video on YouTube, about the CECOT megaprison —the only one of the 22 Salvadoran prisons that Bukele wants the world to see— has 3.8 million views in two years. The second-most viewed video on his channel, titled “Why did we destroy the gravestones of gang members?”, has also reached three million eyeballs in the same span. It may not sound like much for a YouTuber who spends his life traveling around countries making faces at spicy food in Asia or learning how to say hello in Swahili, but it is a great deal for the dictator of a country like El Salvador, with around six million people. And that is just on his channel. On YouTube and all other social media platforms, Bukele is a brand, and it is not unusual for more than 100 videos featuring him to be posted on different channels in a single day. Posting about Bukele on social media means competing with hundreds of other people, some with millions of followers, others with barely a few family members.

Loading...
2 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Carlos Cartagena, alias Charli, leader of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang, told El Faro about the agreements struck between his gang and Nayib Bukele since the latter was a candidate for mayor of San Salvador in 2014. (Photo: Víctor Peña)El Faro


Within 24 hours, the first video interview —in which two gang members who escaped Bukele's state of exception, with the help of the Bukele government itself, confessed the details of a pact that lasted more than eight years with Bukele’s inner circle— had surpassed 326,000 views. Today, two months after its publication, the three installments have reached two million views on YouTube. On the newspaper’s other social media accounts, excerpts from the interview have been viewed more than 15 million times.

In the 93 minutes of the three episodes, revelations by the leaders from the 18th Street Revolucionarios machine-gunned the image of Bukele as a stern arch-enemy of the gangs: They said that the FMLN party had paid the gangs a quarter of a million dollars to get Bukele elected mayor of the capital when he was still claiming to be a leftist; that, as mayor, Bukele gave them jobs in San Salvador market in exchange for allowing him to operate; that, once president, the pact continued and included rules so that gang members could continue extorting and murdering; that they controlled the pandemic in their neighborhoods and also the distribution of aid vouchers; that the Bukele government helped both of them escape the country.

Abundant evidence already published by the newspaper lent credibility to the gang members’ claims, but in these times, it is clear that it is not the same to see an intelligence document with official stamps and signatures, or pictures from prison security cameras, as it is to see a famous fugitive gang leader saying it all on camera. Many people want reality to be revealed to them like a Netflix series. And many Salvadorans consumed the series of interviews in this way. Within minutes of publication, each episode reached thousands of views. By the time the series was finished, we had gained 50,000 new followers on our social media accounts.

Loading...
3 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Liro is another former leader of the 18th Street Revolucionarios who spoke about his gang's agreements and the officials acting under Nayib Bukele's orders. Liro explained that he left El Salvador through a blind spot, with the help of Carlos Marroquín, director of Social Fabric Reconstruction, who took him to Guatemala. (Photo: Víctor Peña)El Faro


To Bukele, who gives orders to his ministers via X; to Bukele, who is known to announce his most important political steps on Facebook Live; to Bukele, who deleted 144 tweets when it was no longer convenient for him to speak well of the free press, or to congratulate the “progress” that “can be seen everywhere” of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, or to commemorate Che Guevara’s birthday with a trite: “If I move forward, follow me; if I stop, push me; if I retreat, kill me”; that Bukele, the same as always, is loath to give an inch on social media. Before becoming all-powerful in the country, he already was on the country’s social media.

The videos of gang members’ confessions that we published conquered his kingdom for several days, just over a month after Bukele received more than 200 Venezuelans sent by Donald Trump to his mega-prison. Bukele, at Trump’s side, was in those days the victor over criminals, the owner of the continental prison. In the El Faro videos that went viral in May, however, he was what he had been for eight years: the gang members’ political partner.

Just three hours after publication, the director of Bukele’s State Intelligence Agency, Peter Dumas, posted on X: “You can’t throw mortars at those who have bombs”; and then, in response to a post by a fellow journalist, he insinuated that we were guilty of several crimes: “linked to gangs, drug trafficking, sexual abuse, human trafficking, and other crimes... You can't hide forever behind the invisible shield of ‘journalism.’”

That same night, a source with detailed internal knowledge warned us that the Attorney General’s Office was preparing at least seven arrest warrants against members of the newsroom for crimes related to gangs.Since the state of exception was installed in March 2022, due process has been suspended for anyone accused of gang membership: trials are secret, judges are faceless, there can be a single trial for up to 900 defendants, preventive detention is unlimited, and in many cases —when we were able to obtain 690 initial charges against those arrested— the evidence is so flimsy that sometimes they simply say that the detainee was arrested for appearing “nervous.”

The fate suggested by the warning we received —one already suffered by tens of thousands of innocent people among the more than 85,000 arrested during the regime— did not threaten a public and scandalous trial, but rather a life in Bukele’s prisons. We have published several atrocities from these prisons: that their director, Osiris Luna Meza, together with his mother, stole $1.6 million dollars’ worth of sacks of food intended to alleviate hunger during the pandemic, and used prisoners to repackage them; that torture in prison is systematic; that one of the torturers is a guard known as “Montaña,” whose name is William Ernesto Magaña Rodríguez, and that according to one of the inmates who suffered at his hands, he used to say a phrase before torturing: “It smells like rats here, and I like to kill rats”; that they use black bags to suffocate and painful techniques to hang bodies; that several people with no criminal record or tattoos of any kind have emerged from these dungeons dead with signs of torture, and without having been convicted of anything at all; that the regime’s forensic doctors simply sanitize the autopsies with the refrain: “death by pulmonary edema,” which is almost as specific as saying that someone died because they stopped living.

“Can you imagine how Montaña would receive us in prison?” asked one of our colleagues.

Read also

The preventive nature of our departure began to be overshadowed by uncertainty. A few days away is manageable; a few weeks away makes you think about the bare minimum: your bills in El Salvador, that doctor’s appointment, your daughter’s school event; imagining more than a month without being able to return causes your thought process to short-circuit.

A few hours after publishing, we all regretted the sobriety of our suitcases. “We’re screwed,” said a colleague in a virtual meeting, summing up the collective thought. But the logic remained the same: to return soon. Report what happened, alert international organizations, publicly confront the threats, give interviews about what we discovered, and come back. The trip was still called “preventive”; we just had to remind the dictatorship of that.

Loading...
4 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Bukele has kept Osiris Luna, director of the Bureau of Prisons, in his post during his six years as president, including his unconstitutional reelection. Luna has been the subject of several journalistic publications exposing his corruption. He has been sanctioned by the United States for participating in a pact with gangs. (Photo: Víctor Peña)El Faro


The Bukele government resorted to its lowest tactics. Dozens of YouTubers and self-proclaimed “political analysts” came out to accuse us of being gang members and speculate about the crimes we had to pay for. They demanded our arrest. Through all the smoke and mirrors, the dozens of documents published by El Faro, other media outlets, and the U.S. government that validated the statements of the two gang members in our interviews no longer mattered.

All that mattered was the affront to the king.

We clung to what we had: a state institutional framework that had long since collapsed. On our behalf, a lawyer went to the Attorney General’s Office to file a formal request for information about allegations against us. The prosecutors had 15 business days to respond. From the moment the letters were written, we suspected that those 15 days, and however many more were needed, would be filled with institutional silence. We were not mistaken.

Exile in the Bukele era did not begin to emerge after Charli’s publication. This was not a starting point for anything, but rather a more visible and abundant continuation of what was already happening away from the spotlight.

Perhaps the first case that resonated internationally was that of the Anti-Mafia Group prosecutors. When Bukele did not yet control the Attorney General’s Office, before May 2021, a group of investigators led by German Arriaza had gathered evidence that the government had established a pact with gangs, and that during the pandemic there were numerous cases of corruption involving public officials. The file, which included wiretaps of high-level officials, was so monumental that it was dubbed “Cathedral”. But on May 1, 2021, Bukele used his newly-won absolute legislative majority to illegally dismiss the attorney general and appoint a loyalist. The new prosecutor, Rodolfo Delgado, launched a crackdown on his subordinates, the Cathedral prosecutors. He raided their offices. In December of that year, Arriaza, the former head of the disgraced group, told Reuters that he and other members of his team were in exile, fleeing political persecution by the Bukele regime. “I was a government prosecutor for over 18 years, have prosecuted corruption cases across the political spectrum —politicians, judges, police, gangs members, narcos— but this is the first time I felt I had to leave,” Arriaza told Reuters.

Former officials from various political parties, a couple of Bukele’s former allies, and more than a dozen journalists (according to information from the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association, APES) had already left the country by 2023 on extended trips or in exile not announced publicly. In August 2022, the Spanish newspaper El País published a report titled “Los exiliados de Bukele”, Bukele’s exiles. In it, journalist Jacobo García described the situation as “a silent trickle that friends only hear about when the phone rings on the other end to say, ‘I left, too.’”

That is what it was, a trickle. Among Salvadorans, the word exile barely appeared in confidential conversations. Unflattering terms proliferated: preventive departure, partial exile, forced expatriation. “I'm going to cool off for a while.”

Loading...
5 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
On Monday, May 3, representatives of the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association, APES, submitted a request for information to the Attorney General’s Office about possible arrest warrants against seven journalists from El Faro. Two months later, there has been no response. (Photo: APES)


Some former officials whose corruption was widely documented, such as former President Mauricio Funes, did a disservice to the fledgling national narrative by selling themselves as exiles when, in their case, they had long since fled accusations of multimillion-dollar looting and taken refuge under Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship to guarantee their impunity. Funes hid in the neighboring dictatorship since 2016, when he was granted asylum, and when Bukele was still mayor of the Salvadoran capital. He died there in January of this year. Few wanted to publicly label themselves with the tainted word: exile.

El Salvador has had a long history of mass exile. It is estimated that more than a million people fled the country during the 12 years of civil war. Although the vast majority were not officially granted that status, they were people fleeing death, forced recruitment, and political persecution by death squads. The mass exodus also occurred, for other reasons, during the first decades of this century, when thousands fled the criminal brutality of gangs. In 2019 alone, the year Bukele became president, 54,300 Salvadorans sought refuge in different countries, 16 percent more applications than the previous year, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

“It’s embarrassing to call yourself exiled because of a couple of tweets from an official and information leaked to us by an internal source,” said one of the colleagues who signed El Faro’s interviews with gang members, assuming in his restraint the full historical weight of a country that understands exile as the ultimate strategy in the face of a dodged bullet, a sharpened machete, a clandestine prison.

A week after publication, seven El Faro journalists were still out of the country with no return date. We were still thinking of returning soon. “I’ll be back on May 14, I already have my ticket,” said one, and the rest agreed to try around the same time. The departure was still preventive, but exile was beginning to be a whisper in our minds. We kept miscalculating. As the weeks passed, we would not return, but dozens of other journalists and human rights activists would leave the country after seeing police patrols loitering around their homes, or learning that they were on arrest lists, or receiving urgent warnings from sources, or under pressure from family members, or simply out of fear.

Or simply because they had a long memory. On April 20, 2022, Ernesto Castro, Bukele’s loyal squire, childhood friend, and president of the Legislative Assembly, was explicit in response to various international allegations of harassment of journalists. From the podium of the highest state body, in the middle of a plenary session, he shouted at journalists while waving his arms in the air: “They'’e asking for asylum. Give them asylum and have them leave already. It’s not like they contribute anything here. If you want to go, leave!”

In short, at that moment, a week after publishing the interviews with the gang members, we were still miscalculating.

Two: A Dark May

The idea of returning on May 14 was ruled out within days: The same source continued to assure us that we would be arrested upon entering El Salvador, and we had not been able to find a new source to corroborate this.

For years now, finding sources in El Salvador has been a thorny endeavor. Bukele has publicly expressed his hatred for the newspaper, as well as for other media outlets, and in 2020 he even accused us of money laundering on national television. The next year, he expelled two foreign journalists from El Faro from the country on the grounds that they could not prove they were journalists, despite the fact that one of them had a long list of international awards. Anyone who follows the country’s political developments knows that Bukele has declared us his enemies and, on more than one occasion, “enemies of the people.” If anyone had any doubts that talking to us could be a problem, they were probably dispelled when we revealed that 22 members of the newspaper had been hacked with Pegasus spyware for 17 months between June 2020 and November 2021. “If you find Pegasus, you know that person has been hacked by a government,” explained John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto’s cybersecurity lab, which examined our devices and discovered 226 hacks.

That money-laundering accusation left the media outlet in an exotic situation: In April 2023, we moved our legal status to Costa Rica to distance the administration from Bukele’s attacks, his total power, and the five audits that the Treasury Ministry launched against the media outlet. For the past few years, most of us have been journalists in El Salvador working for an exiled newspaper. El Faro’s first exile was El Faro itself.

Obtaining sources, understandably, became increasingly difficult after Bukele came to power. It also became more expensive: What used to cost us a cup of coffee now involves a whole strategy that, if we are inside the country, includes renting apartments and cars for 24 hours so we can meet; or meetings in foreign cities, if the case is very sensitive and sources only agree to speak outside the country.

Even so, during those days we spoke with several sources, police officers, prosecutors, and investigators close to those institutions, and they all told us that if there were arrest warrants, only a select few would know about them and that they did not have access to that information.

We needed time to discern, and there was a perfect excuse: Between June 4 and 5, we would be hosting the Central American Journalism Forum in San José, Costa Rica. We decided that some of us would go, leaving the rest in other cities, and continue hunting for information.

In El Salvador, the wake of the published videos continued to dominate the discussion on social media. Bukele, as he often does, reacted with a gimmick: Five days after our publication, on May 5, he ordered free public transportation for six days throughout the country, claiming that the closure of the important Los Chorros highway warranted it, even though it only affected a small part of the territory.

This triggered a series of events, each more alarming than the last. The first day of free public transportation was chaotic: Dozens of Salvadorans hung from the few buses that were running, as if they were migrants clinging to a freight train crossing Mexico. Those images were splashed across the news, newspapers, and social media. Bukele blamed the transport workers who decided not to send out their vehicles because they had no certainty of payment from the state other than the order he had given. No decree, just a post to social media, very much in his style. Bukele resorted to his favorite tactic: He ordered their arrest. The police and the prosecutor’s office, faithful tools of the dictatorship, captured 12 businessmen in just a few hours, including two who had come to negotiate at Casa Presidencial. One of them, José Roberto Jaco, 64, died in custody five days after his capture. The family declined to give details about his death.

We watched from afar with great surprise, but also with a touch of naïvety. We thought it was clearly the dictatorship distracting itself, looking the other way, and the country gradually losing interest in interviews with gang members, turning to the latest scandal in a country in perpetual cardiac arrest.

logo-undefined
Todos los viernes recibe las noticias más relevantes de la semana y recomendaciones.

Instead, May raged on unabated. On the night of Monday the 12th, some 300 families from the poorest sector of the country gathered outside the perimeter wall of the luxurious private residential complex where Bukele lives with his family, the same complex he is expanding with more than $1.4 million in public funds. Outside the wall is a post for soldiers and an armored vehicle. The families, with signs, children, and elderly people, asked Bukele to please help them not be evicted from the El Bosque community. Bukele sent the Military Police to break up the demonstration and arrest five community leaders, including an evangelical pastor and an environmental lawyer with a solid track record in the country. Images of children and elderly women crying and begging the military to release their leaders flooded social media once again.

From the publication of interviews with gang members, to the chaos in public transportation, and now the military repression of dozens of poor families, Bukele had had a terrible month. His reign on social media had been disrupted, and his flock was no longer looking where he wanted them to look.

Loading...
6 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
On May 30, Alejandro Henríquez and José Ángel Pérez were sentenced to six months in detention. Both were arrested for representing the El Bosque community while its residents sought eviction relief from Bukele. (Photo: AFP)


But Bukele has a long history of preferring to flee by running forward, even if he has to invent an absurd route. A day after the protest in front of his residential complex, called Los Sueños, Bukele set the tone from his X account. He said, without showing any evidence, that we had witnessed “how humble people were manipulated by self-proclaimed leftist groups and globalist NGOs, whose only real goal is to attack the government.” Then, running forward with long strides, he said that he would thus send a Foreign Agents Bill to the Assembly to impose a 30 percent tax on all international donations or payments to organizations or individuals that his government considers foreign agents. With those funds, he said, he would pay off the debt of the El Bosque cooperative, and thus the NGOs would “finally fulfill their supposed purpose of helping the people” and “everyone would win.” A week later, his Assembly passed the law.

We, from the outside, no longer understood anything. We no longer knew how to make sense of this unique maelstrom of repression. Now, not only did we know we were being persecuted for publishing the interviews with the gang members, but we also calculated that we met all the broad criteria for being considered foreign agents and faced an unviable financial future, risking fines of between $100,000 and $250,000 — sums of money that no journalist at El Faro, and almost no-one in the country, has ever had in their life.

More reasons, and stronger ones, to stay out. It was the first time since we left the country that one of our colleagues said it loud and clear: “We must not return to El Salvador.”

Loading...
7 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
On May 20, Bukele's Legislative Assembly unanimously approved, without much discussion, the Foreign Agents Law, which seeks to silence and criminalize voices critical of the government.


We were counting all the money we did not have when Sunday, May 18, arrived. Those recently jailed remained in jail, the Foreign Agents Law was days away from coming into effect, and we still had the same information: Anyone who returns will be arrested. In the afternoon, the second semifinal of the national soccer tournament was played, and Alianza, as expected, advanced to the final.

After midnight, the newspaper’s group chats began to buzz insistently: “Ruth López has been arrested.” One of the reactions in a chat was naïve: “Shit, it can’t be!”

A few minutes earlier, using deception and falsehoods, police officers had forced anti-corruption lawyer Ruth López out of her home. Once outside, they told her she was under arrest and forced her to change out of her pajamas on the street. López recorded the audio of the moment on her phone. “Hurry up, put your pants on,” one of the police officers ordered. “Have some decency, this is all going to end, you can’t lend yourselves to this,” López replied, in a phrase that almost immediately became a slogan among the opposition to the dictatorship: “Have some decency.”

López, who together with her organization Cristosal has exposed dozens of cases of corruption in Bukele’s government, remains in prison on accusations of corruption while she was an advisor to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. Her trial, like that of all those arrested mentioned in this text, is secret, as is the alleged evidence that the prosecution claims to have.

López’s arrest was interpreted by us and dozens of colleagues as an ultimatum from the regime. Bukele, after a disastrous month for his image, was not willing to tolerate any more affronts. López was one of the most internationally recognized voices, listed by the BBC in 2024 as one of the 100 most influential women in the world.

In Bukele’s narrative, there are no activists, journalists, cooperatives, or environmentalists. There are opponents. Anyone who does not think like him is lumped together. That makes it easier to attack them.

López’s arrest, which sparked a wave of international outrage that Bukele continues to ignore, was the final straw: Returning was foolish. There were no guarantees. Leaving was becoming increasingly necessary for several colleagues from other media outlets. Everyone began to recount their grievances: “I’ve published a ton of articles on this government’s corruption. Do you think I should leave?” asked a colleague from San Salvador via chat.

Loading...
8 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Ruth López was brought before a judge 18 days after her arrest. Her detention was a wake-up call for many activists and journalists who also decided to leave the country. (Photo: Marvin Recinos)AFP


Our plan remained the same: meet in San José, put our heads together, organize a collective trip back. By then, some colleagues at the newspaper had already decided not to return. Others remained determined to go back. Meanwhile, we were preparing the second issue of El Faro’s monthly magazine. It was titled: “Silencing Dissent: The Return of Political Prisoners in El Salvador.” It had been just 20 days since we left.

Sergio

The day he left El Salvador indefinitely was Wednesday, May 21, 2025. He had not slept at home for three nights for fear of being captured.

Four years earlier, Sergio Arauz got married on a cliff overlooking the sea, all smiles, all nerves, wearing a white guayabera shirt and brown leather sandals that were very expensive and that he didn't care much for, chosen at the time by his girlfriend so that he would look the part at that tropical wedding. As the Pacific turned orange, they exchanged their vows. She, a visionary, promised him: “I choose you so that when the time comes to resist, we resist together. I choose you so that when we have to run, we run together. I promise to be brave.”

In early May 2025, Sergio was president of the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES), deputy editor of El Faro, and ran a business that he and his wife had dreamed of even before they were married on that cliff, and which they cherished like a child. Then the revelations made by the gang members set the stage on fire, and the threats against the authors of the investigation multiplied until they crystallized into very precise information: The dictatorship was preparing to make arrests. Sergio’s phone began to buzz non-stop.

Loading...
9 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Sergio Arauz, 46, is deputy editor-in-chief and a member of the security committee at El Faro. He is also president of the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association. Since the first emergency evacuations of El Faro journalists in May 2025, he has had intense days of phone calls trying to protect the safety of dozens of journalists. On June 26, 2025, in the space of 10 minutes, he made three phone calls and sent at least two voice messages. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro


Local and international media, press agencies, the diplomatic corps, national, regional, and global human rights and press freedom organizations; lawyers, people with certainties and delusions, sources who knew or claimed to know, colleagues in flames, family members, and friends... all fired away at the same phone. Sergio, with both hands, approved statements, gave interviews, and, on Tuesday, May 6, standing on the sidewalk in front of the Attorney General’s Office —a spot known as the “wolf’s mouth”— accompanied by a handful of human rights defenders, launched into an outburst: “There are no constitutional guarantees in this country. We are under a state of exception. There is no presumption of innocence, there is no right to due process, there is no judicial independence, there is basically no democracy — and the Attorney General’s Office acts, essentially, under remote control, at the order of the president.”

All of this could have been said more nicely, less harshly, further away from the Attorney General’s Office, with one foot already out of the country and not on that sidewalk, barefaced, in front of a sea of microphones and cameras.

That same day, Sergio’s plan had fallen through: Of the seven people who signed the interview with the gang members, three had decided to remain in the country, trusting that if they kept a low profile, no one would notice them. When they realized that the water around them was boiling, they turned to the president of APES, who had devised a plan to get them out of the country: They would be accompanied by members of an embassy, who at the last minute backed out and left him hanging. “There was a climate of fear, of panic,” he recalls. At the last minute, a providential ace appeared up his sleeve and he managed to coordinate another plan, the execution of which he prefers to keep secret. The three journalists managed to leave the country.

In the days that followed, Sergio says, he began to feel like a ghost, like something frightening, something out of place, whose appearance horrified family and friends, who threw their hands up in horror when they saw him: “Why didn’t you leave?”

Sergio is friendly and engaging, easy to talk to. He can go on for hours about the best way to roast coffee beans, the virtues of yellowfin tuna, or the use of complex databases to drag the corrupt out of their hiding places, which is why he finds friends of all stripes, seemingly under each rock he overturns. One day, he went to dinner at a restaurant where he was sure to find someone to chat with, and sure enough, he ran into one of those talkers he usually talks to about everything and nothing, but the conversation was short: “What are you doing here?!” That friend did not sit down at his table. The feeling crept in that the usual places are the same, and at once different. He ate dinner alone.

Loading...
10 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Sergio Arauz is also part of the group of journalists who left El Salvador because of threats of arrest. He has not returned to the country since May 21 and does not plan to do so anytime soon. From abroad, he coordinates assistance for dozens of Salvadoran journalists who have information about arrest warrants against them or who have been visited by police at their homes. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro


A week later, another emergency arose: another colleague who was writing a detailed article about political prisoners in El Salvador had to be taken out of the country, and he accompanied him on Wednesday, May 14. He returned exhausted four days later, on Sunday, May 18, the same day that the police captured Ruth López. But Sergio did not find out until the next day: He had fallen like a stone into his bed and woke up at 5 a.m. to his phone ringing out of control. His blood ran cold; he was in disbelief. That was the last time he would wake up in his home.

He turned to his sources to gauge his own level of risk, and one of them showed him a message that came from deep within the security apparatus. The message cannot be reproduced because it would reveal the source, but in essence it said that “Don Mariano” and “Chirriplín” were in charge of mounting a surveillance operation against certain journalists, including Sergio.

He knew those names: “Don Mariano” is José Mariano Santos Guzmán, an ex-guerrilla and former head of the Metropolitan Police Force of the mayor’s office in Nuevo Cuscatlán, where Bukele began his political career; “Chirriplín” is Deputy Police Commissioner Carlos Roberto Hernández, who was an advisor to Bukele’s minister of justice and public security and now works in the security area of the Legislative Assembly controlled by Bukele. Both names had been mentioned to Sergio by Alejandro Muyshondt, the former presidential adviser who wound up dead and apparently tortured after denouncing corruption and drug trafficking in ruling-party circles. “Alejandro had told me that those two people belonged to extremely dangerous structures,” he says.

For the next three nights, he slept in semi-hiding in a hotel room, where friends sneaked in to feed him, alert to real and imagined noises, dreaming fitfully of his home and enslaved to his ringing phone, tending to the anxieties of others. On Wednesday, May 21, he left the country accompanied by a colleague from the newspaper.

Sitting in a pizzeria in a foreign capital, his phone buzzed like a fly every few minutes. He wrote messages, read them, approved statements, monitored the departure of colleagues, and organized documents. In the chaos, he is the king of certainties —or their lesser substitutes— and everyone turns to him. That day, he was planning meetings, managing funds, wandering around like a lost soul, and when he hung up a call, he discovered photojournalist Carlos Barrera taking pictures of him. He didn’t like it. He gestured for him to put the camera down. “Let’s go get a coffee, pájaro.”

In a few days, his wife would arrive to fulfill the promise she made to him from a cliff one afternoon while the Pacific was painted orange.

Three: Here We Go

There were no new developments. There was no new information. There were, however, many interviews with media outlets from different parts of the world where we reported on the findings of what had been published. There were meetings with international organizations that listened with concern to what we had to say. There were embassies in different countries that welcomed us and asked what they could do. We replied that we did not really know — that, if they could obtain information about our possible capture, it would be very helpful. But no-one had told us to come back, that the worst would not happen. After what happened to Ruth López, many people told us not to go, that it was completely stupid, but these were interpretations, readings of a country that has been stifling criticism for years.

It is not as if there was much room for maneuver. Days after those meetings with the embassies, the European Union issued a statement regretting the passage of the Foreign Agents Law. Bukele responded on X: “EU: El Salvador regrets that a bloc which is aging, overregulated, energy-dependent, tech-lagging, and led by unelected bureaucrats still insists on lecturing the rest of the world.”

On June 1, commemorating one year since his unconstitutional re-election, Bukele appeared on national television from the National Theater, surrounded by his deputies, his loyal magistrates and prosecutor, and many soldiers. In an 80-minute address, he said that he did not care if they called him a dictator, that the country’s supposedly independent press was made up of “political activists who are doing business.”

Why such insistence on returning? It is not entirely clear. Perhaps it was what remains when everything is uncertain: a dose of excitement at seeing colleagues whom we had not seen for a month, a few good doses of caustic humor about our circumstances: “I can't come back on a plane other than the one he’s going on?” joked one, and the rest laughed. But none of that could mask the gravity of the moment: fears for our families, the prospect of a life in prison with no chance of a fair trial, and the overwhelming shadow cast by the capture of Ruth López, who had spent 48 hours without her family even knowing her whereabouts. These were at the heart of that cocktail of emotions.

Even so, the decision had been made: Seven members of El Faro would travel at 3:05 p.m. on Saturday, June 7, on Avianca flight 638 to El Salvador, where we would land at 4:35 p.m.

On the afternoon of the sixth, we closed the Central American Journalism Forum in Costa Rica.

The last discussion was titled “Under Fire: How Does Central American Journalism Survive?” It ended around nine o’clock at night, and then a diplomat asked us to leave the closing cocktail party and speak privately.

“I have information from two independent sources that tomorrow you will be captured at the airport in El Salvador,” the diplomat told us. “Starting tonight, a police deployment is waiting for you. Don’t travel.”

The metaphor of a bucket of cold water is very inadequate. It was far from invigorating: It was, said one of the journalists, as if you suddenly grew a hump and your body weighed more. The fatigue ignored by the excitement of returning suddenly returned, and slipped through the lips of one of us: “Shit!”

Loading...
11 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Electronic ticket for Avianca flight 638, which the members of El Faro were supposed to board from San José, Costa Rica, to San Salvador on June 7, 2025. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro


Until then, we had been putting off an act that never left our mental horizon: returning. This was the opposite act: canceling the return. No longer postponing it, but canceling it outright. Losing a plane ticket is the most material way of not returning. A plane ticket is an urgent appointment that no one wants to miss. It is an act of which one is a part: One has one’s assigned seat and QR code, one has packed one’s suitcase and checked forty times that one’s passport is in the small pocket of one’s backpack. One is on that plane even before boarding.

At 8:45 p.m. on Friday, June 6, the only sources who responded to us in El Salvador said they could not find out anything on such short notice and that the airport, controlled by Nayib Bukele’s childhood friend Federico Anliker, and where even the lease for the premises where the dictator’s coffee, Bean of Fire, is sold has been declared an official secret, is a bunker in terms of information. Two sources told us that, if anything was indeed planned, they had no way to know.

With nothing but the guarantee of condemnation hanging over our heads and a blurry plane ticket in hand, the day ended.

Loading...
12 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Enrique Anaya, a constitutional lawyer and critic of Bukele's administration, was arrested on the afternoon of Saturday, June 7, three days after participating in the TCS interview Frente a Frente. His trial is also being held in secret, imposed by the ruling party. (Photo: Marvin Recinos)AFP


Nobody boarded the plane. We were unable to obtain any further information, and the diplomat was very generous in revealing the details he could about his sources. The information seemed credible to us. The shaky construction of “preventive departure” finally blew up in our faces in a thousand tiny fragments, and there was only one word left, either as an accepted category or in the middle of a naïve question: Am I an exile as of tonight?

Ingrid

The day she left El Salvador indefinitely was Sunday, June 8, 2025. Police officers were on the prowl around her home. She had not slept there for 15 nights for fear of being captured.

One day in April 2025, uniformed police officers knocked on Ingrid Escobar’s door with a rather ridiculous question: “Could you come out and tell us how to get to San Antonio Abad Street on foot?” Ridiculous because it is hard to believe that police officers would be looking for one of the busiest streets in San Salvador; that they would take their search to a dead-end alley; that they would be so lost that they would feel the urgent need to knock on the door of the last house on that alley, which just happens to be the home of one of the most vocal and combative human rights defenders against the regime. Ingrid played along, watching from the window. Seeing that she was not coming out, the police left on foot to continue their ridiculous search. But they did not get there on foot: surveillance cameras in her alley showed the same police officers hiding a red car in a nearby lot that serves as a workshop. When they finished their alleged search for a way to get to San Antonio Abad Street on foot, they got into their car and left.

Loading...
13 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Ingrid Escobar remained in Guatemala for three days with her two children before leaving. In addition to her work, she is raising her children alone. She regrets leaving the country now because she had a stable life. “I had a full life in my country, defending human rights for 13 years. My children have good grades in school. I had no reason to leave my country,” she said. Photo by El Faro: Carlos Barrera.


Ingrid is the director of Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, an institution dedicated to accompanying the families of people who have been captured under the state of exception and publicly denouncing the abuses and humiliations of all kinds suffered by those captured. She keeps a detailed account of those who have died at the hands of the state, compiles and organizes testimonies of torture, provides legal advice, files complaints with international organizations, organizes the families of detainees, gives press conferences…. But hers is an austere office, a room inside a house where other social organizations work, a crossroads for mothers, workers, students, and campesina women looking for some strand of hope of recovering their loved ones.

She is a natural fighter: She does not mince her words when it comes to lambasting the president, congressmen, ministers, or police chiefs. She participates, megaphone in hand, in every march there is, and lives under constant harassment from the dictatorship’s most despicable trolls. The police have not been shy about following her, circling around her office, and showing up at her home on absurd pretexts. Ingrid is not easily intimidated.

But when Ruth López was arrested, something changed: “I never thought that the Bukele regime would be capable of arresting women human rights defenders, because all those arrested were men. When I saw Ruth being arrested, it was a terrible blow.” And there was another event that broke her: On June 2, she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. “I always knew that prison was a possibility, and I was prepared to endure it, but healthy. Sick, it would be very easy for them to kill me; all they would have to do is do nothing, let me die and then say, ‘She was already sick.’” But even so, she decided to stay.

She left her home and went with her two children —a girl of 11 and a boy of nine— to another place, where they tried to continue on with their lives for a few days, which then continued on.

Loading...
14 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Ingrid Escobar is the director of Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, an organization founded in July 2022 that provides legal assistance to relatives of people imprisoned by the emergency regime. Ingrid, one of the critical voices of the Bukele dictatorship, left El Salvador on June 8 after receiving information that she would soon be arrested. She does not have an exact date in mind for her return. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro


Two days after receiving her diagnosis, Ruth’s hearing took place. Ingrid thought, “They won’t be able to keep Ruth in prison because of the scandal that has been created. They’ll let her out after giving her a scare.” But she was wrong. That same day, security cameras at her home recorded four motorized police officers with their sirens on, encircling her house. She reported it publicly. That same day, the police also showed up at her mother’s house.

She moved again. She went into hiding. Life was distressing: her two children, the threat implicit in Ruth’s imprisonment, cancer, the police…. But she decided to stay.

On Saturday, June 7, the same day that lawyer Enrique Anaya was arrested, an old friend —who we will only say has access to privileged information— took a risk by calling her to warn her: “They’re going to arrest you on Sunday.” She was scheduled to undergo surgery on Monday to have a tumor removed. She packed a change of clothes for each child in two backpacks, made a makeshift suitcase for herself, and went to pick them up from school, where they were participating in a spiritual retreat. “Hello, children, do you remember what I told you? Well, the time has come.” Ingrid’s eldest daughter is a classmate of the daughter of Christian Guevara, the head of the ruling-party legislative bloc, sanctioned by the United States for being a “corrupt and anti-democratic actor.” Ingrid tries to shake off the bitter but futile thought that it is her daughter who must leave everything behind and flee like an outlaw because she has a mother who is a human rights defender.

That day they slept in a safehouse. On Sunday, at 3 a.m., they set off on their journey. She remembers a feeling when she escaped the country: breathing. “Maybe I was already used to living in the midst of that... that garbage, that horrible tension, that when I set foot outside I felt like a terrible weight had been lifted off my shoulders,” she recalls.

Now, in another country, she is trying to pick up the pieces of her life and answer a question: “How did I get here?” Meanwhile, her eldest daughter, on the tremulous edge of adolescence, misses her friends, her volleyball team, her school... her world. The boy jokes with caustic humor: “This happened to us because you were a defender. Why did you have to be a defender?” Ingrid summons all her strength and tells them, perhaps tells herself: “Think about what Monsignor Romero would have done. You have to follow his example,” quoting the bishop who was shot to death for not remaining silent in the face of the abominations of his time. And so the days go by, overcoming the shock, crying in secret, finding themselves in a strange city. “My work invaded my children’s entire lives,” she chastises herself.

She managed to raise the money —through a collection among friends, acquaintances, and relatives— to have the surgery she had to leave behind in El Salvador. She likes her doctor, who is Venezuelan and also had to leave his country. She feels they speak a common language.

She does not know when she will tell her children about the cancer.

Four: Exiled?

Some of us flew to Guatemala. I suppose there was an ulterior motive: to be closer to our country, three hours by car from our border. A hidden desire still throbbed: to return.

As the days passed, more colleagues from El Faro and other media outlets arrived in Guatemala. Some calculated that, if they had not been able to catch those on flight 638, perhaps the dictatorship would try again; others saw patrols loitering around their homes or police knocking on their doors with implausible questions: “We have a report that a car has been stolen. Who lives here?” Others received a direct call from a trusted source: “Get out of your house, they’re coming for you tonight.”

On June 13, APES issued a statement: “APES reports mass exodus of journalists and denounces human rights violations.” The union reported the forced departure of 40 journalists from El Salvador.

One night, 25 colleagues from five different Salvadoran media outlets gathered at a house in Guatemala City. We exchanged information in a circle of long faces and haggard eyes. The information was the same. All of our colleagues’ sources interpreted a logic that mirrored that of the dictatorship: Journalists had not understood the message behind the arrest of Ruth López, and now they had to learn the hard way. “I don't know what I’m going to do,” said one colleague. “And I don't think anyone knows what the hell they’re going to do. At least when you decide to do something, tell the rest of us, because we’re all walking in the dark here.”

Almost two months after publishing the interviews with the gang members, from exile, several of us still do not call ourselves exiles. We still think about returning.

Jorge

The day he left El Salvador indefinitely was Saturday, June 14, 2025. His sources were very emphatic: leave and do it by land. He feared being captured.

Jorge Beltrán Luna was the first Salvadoran journalist to experience firsthand —on his face— the sense of impunity of Bukele’s police force toward the press: a deputy police inspector, annoyed by Jorge’s presence at a crime scene, slapped him with the simple and pedestrian purpose of making him leave, of making him not see, of making him not be there. In July 2021, a corpse was found floating in the Acelhuate River, in a country that was already being touted as a place transformed by Bukele’s secret plans. The corpse was a transgression of the official narrative, and the police officer considered that it was worth a timely slap. Jorge was filming when it happened, so the blow was recorded on video and then reported on newspaper El Diario de Hoy’s social media. Nothing happened. No-one apologized. Instead a swarm of trolls applauded and celebrated the act, asking for more.

Loading...
15 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Jorge Beltrán Luna, 56, a journalist for El Diario de Hoy, left El Salvador on June 14 after receiving warnings that he would be captured. In his luggage, he carried three months’ medication and letters from his family that he did not dare finish reading. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro


Jorge is a police reporter. Throughout his career, he has built up an intricate network of sources within the Police, the Army, and the Attorney General’s Office. He has a keen sense for detecting anomalies within these bodies: officer transfers, internal struggles, palace intrigues, promotions, demotions.

Most of the reporters who have had to flee in recent days were teenagers when the Salvadoran Civil War ended. Jorge fought in that war: He was part of the National Guard. “I joined when I was 17, and by 18 I had already been shot in the leg,” he says. “I’ve had my share of hard knocks in life.”

Suffice it to say that Jorge is not a man who shies away from conflict. In January 2022, he revisited a report published in the Mexican magazine Proceso, which linked private-security businessman Jacobo Fauster to a network of Israeli companies that had sold equipment to Mexican governments to spy on journalists and opponents. Fauster is the stepfather of El Salvador’s intelligence director, Peter Dumas. A year after the publication, Fauster sued Jorge and El Diario de Hoy, demanding $5 million from each of them for “moral damages,” without specifying how his morals had been tarnished. A judge dismissed the claim but ordered the newspaper to remove the article from its website and social media. Another drop in the bucket.

In November 2024, Jorge published an article warning of a scheme to traffic Indian nationals through El Salvador’s Monseñor Óscar Romero International Airport. In his article, a source assured him that flights of Indians were arriving regularly, and were then being moved by human trafficking networks to the United States. He believed that this was impossible without the complicity of immigration authorities. After publishing the article, he was summoned by prosecutors with a single, explicit purpose: They wanted Jorge to reveal his source. When he refused, he asserts that the prosecutor warned him: “Since you have not wanted to cooperate, we will have to keep bothering you.”

By then, Jorge began to consider leaving the country and sounded out his sister, who lives in the United States, about the idea of moving north: “She told me that I could quickly find a job at McDonald’s, and that you can live on what you earn there. Of course, I wouldn’t be working as a journalist.” He does not say this with horror, but rather clinically, as an option to consider.

It was not the slap, nor Fauster, nor the warning from the prosecutor that made him certain he had to leave his country without a return ticket. It was the arrest of Ruth López. “Ruth was internationally recognized and had a great reputation. I thought: If they can do that to her, what can’t they do to me?” He also thought that Bukele’s government would not be able to sustain the lawyer’s arrest: “This guy is going to have to spit her out, because it will be a thorn in his side,” he thought, like so many others. But there was no course-correction: Ruth was behind bars, and Jorge’s stress overtook his body, leaving his stomach rigid, with tension dealing punches to his chest.

He activated his network of sources, about which he is very cautious when speaking, turned on his trained radar, and the resulting oracle was dire: “Leave, leave by land. Even if you keep quiet, they can charge you for what you’ve already done.”

He did what everyone else did: He called Sergio Arauz, who got him a way out. “When I crossed Río Paz, I knew I wasn’t coming back,” he says. He took a suitcase with five pairs of pants, some T-shirts, the book “La Última Guinda”, and a handful of medicines that he considers essential, calculating that they will last at least three months — which is, for now, as far into the future as he can see.

He does not consider himself defeated. He will look for a way to continue being a journalist and will try to avoid McDonald’s to the extent possible.

Five: A Gathering with El Nuevo

A group of Salvadoran journalists had met at the Shakespeare Pub in Guatemala City to share our sorrows and wash them down with more than one beer. The seven of us had accepted that we were now living in exile — that, for the foreseeable future, our homeland was forbidden, distant, hostile.

It was a fact accepted with no small amount of pain, but accepted nonetheless. One was planning to sell his house to find another place, in another land, to call home; another was trembling with the horrible withdrawal symptoms of missing his son and counting the minutes until he could hug his little boy; another had been abandoned by his partner of many years upon learning he was being persecuted; another was thinking of renting out his house and blessing the exaggerated Salvadoran real estate bubble; another had opened a small business in El Salvador just a year ago that was just starting to bear fruit, and was now trying to figure out what the hell to do with it. Some just drank beer.

That is where we were when El Nuevo announced he was coming. He prefers that his name not be mentioned in this story, for fear that the dictatorship will take it out on his partner, who is also a journalist.

El Nuevo is a veteran journalist and a meticulous and orderly man. He is forward-thinking. On September 15, 2021, Nayib Bukele congratulated himself for not using tear gas against a protest march, adding “...for now.” So El Nuevo, a quick thinker, packed a basic suitcase that he never let out of his sight, in case the dictator suffered a sudden psychotic episode, and that episode caught him on the street. In fact, he hardly ever let go of that suitcase: On Saturday, June 7, he forgot it and missed it when someone warned him that police patrols were loitering around his house. Since then, he had been on the run, staying with friends, with his phone turned off. It was not the first scare, nor was it the best time to play crazy with those suspicious patrol cars, or with that unlicensed Cherokee with tinted windows parked in front of his house.

On one of these occasions, he sneaked back home briefly to pick up his exile suitcase and add a few extra things, and that is when he became aware of things, of those transparencies that barely exist in everyday life: that room, that bed, that wall, that stove. “This,” he thought, “is the last time I’ll turn off the stove.” And he left.

He caught a bus and left El Salvador: “When I crossed Río Paz, I thought: Who knows when I’ll cross this river in the opposite direction?” Arriving in Guatemala, he found out that a group of colleagues were having a drink at the Shakespeare Pub and decided to go there in search of company. But El Nuevo arrived emotionally late, with the look that the rest of us had had for weeks: that of a boxer getting up after a knockout. Exile invariably happens to other people in other countries in other times... until it happens to you. He tried a joke by way of greeting: “Now they're going to accuse me of illicit association.” He did not laugh.

Loading...
16 - A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
Carlos Martínez, a journalist with El Faro, says goodbye in Guatemala City to one of his colleagues who accompanied him to a talk in which they discussed all their fears and uncertainties, but also reminded themselves that they must continue to report the news. (Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro


He reflexively took a bite of a hamburger, sipped a beer, and said aloud to himself: “It’s tough because you’re convinced that your life and your reason for living is to serve there.”

There, he said. Not here.

Before leaving El Salvador, he said goodbye to his daughter. He remembers her words as she bid him farewell: “I have the feeling that, just like in video games, one life has ended for you. I hope the other one works out for you.” Emotion welled up in his eyes. That night, at Shakespeare’s, the future was just as inscrutable for us all.