Reporting on El Salvador in exile

Hey there,

Many of you will have seen the pictures that have come out of El Salvador’s prisons in the past few months and years: thousands of men, stripped to their shorts, handcuffed and lined up like human dominoes. These haunting images are the result of President Nayib Bukele’s brutal crackdown on gangs.

The pictures have become even more prominent since Donald Trump made a deal with Bukele that’s led to thousands of deportees, including US citizens, ending up in the notorious Cecot prison.

Bukele is said to have overseen the arrest of more than 80,000 people. Maybe more. That’s just under the entire population of my hometown of Bath, and close to the number of people who can fill Wembley Stadium.

This mass detention campaign has been hugely controversial. People are being imprisoned without due process. There are no fair trials. And there are mounting reports of torture and widespread erosion of civil liberties.

Many people in El Salvador now live in fear. Not just of what might happen if they step out of line, but of what might happen even if they don’t. If the police receive the wrong tip-off, or target the wrong person, they can arrest them and there are few safeguards in place to protect people from state violence.

One of the few remaining mechanisms holding power to account is, you guessed it, investigative journalism.

For this edition, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking to the editor of the English-language publications at El Faro, a newsroom that’s been reporting fearlessly on what’s happening in El Salvador.

We’d exchanged a few emails before the interview, but hadn’t really discussed the impact of the work of El Faro. I came to the call with few expectations. What unfolded in the conversation genuinely shocked me.

Rather than try to paraphrase what he told me, I’ve left as much of his story as possible in his own words so you can hear, directly from him, what’s really going on.

“When we launched [the English edition] in 2019, it was just a newsletter and a few translations at the beginning. Now, it’s a full-fledged operation with original reporting, a podcast and a monthly digital magazine.

We have a mission to reach English-speaking audiences, policymakers, academics, NGOs, the diaspora and media. Much of our audience is in places like Washington DC, New York and California. We cover the region with depth and context, taking on issues that often go unreported.

El Faro has always been known for longform journalism on migration, organised crime and political corruption. In 2012, we revealed the first-ever evidence that the Salvadoran government was negotiating with gangs to reduce homicides. That was several administrations ago now.

Every major political party since then has done the same – striking secret pacts with criminal organisations in exchange for political benefit. These gangs, like MS-13 and 18th Street, used to control large swathes of Salvadoran territory. So politicians had an incentive to negotiate with them for their political benefit, and of course there was corruption and money on the table and all sorts of colourful things.

In 2020, we broke the story that President Nayib Bukele’s government was negotiating with MS-13 for a reduction in homicides. We later revealed that the negotiations included all three major gangs and that Bukele had actively concealed this from prosecutors.

Around the time of publishing, between 2020 and 2021, two-thirds of our newsroom had their phones infected with Pegasus spyware. I was one of them. It was discovered when one colleague’s phone started acting up. We sent our devices to the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and Access Now, who confirmed the infections. Many of these were likely “zero-click” attacks. We didn’t click anything. They just broke in.

We’ve since implemented secure channels and protocols, but nothing is foolproof. You can only make it harder for them, never impossible. As editor, that weighs on me – the safety of our team and our sources is paramount.

Up until this point, much of our reporting was in written form and dense. A specialised audience could take it and run with it, but for the general public it was a bit more challenging.

This changed in May 2025 when we released a three-part video interview with two former 18th Street gang leaders (now in hiding outside El Salvador). They spoke on camera, one fully identified by name and face. Their message was direct: “Bukele sells himself as the vanquisher of gangs. The man who changed the country. But we negotiated with him for years.” They said they had worked with him since his 2014 mayoral campaign. It wasn’t entirely new, we had already documented these negotiations, but what was new was the format: this was raw, face-to-camera testimony.

The videos set off this tremendous political earthquake. The interview had over 3m views across platforms. In a country of just over 6 million people, that’s enormous. It broke through propaganda and echo chambers. Even in Guatemala, where I now live, people in my soccer group were talking about it.

And then the repression began. Days after the videos went viral, the government arrested 18 bus drivers, one of whom died in custody, for allegedly defying a decree that had never been formally issued. It was based on a social media post from Bukele. In the coming weeks there would be more political arrests.

Around the same time, we learned that the Attorney General’s Office, which Bukele controls, was preparing arrest warrants for people credited on the video project. One of our photojournalists had just won a World Press Photo award, and now they were facing arrest.

It didn’t stop there. A group of campesinos, subsistence farmers, went to Bukele’s residence to protest their imminent eviction. Instead of receiving them, he deployed military police to break up the protest, the first time such force was used against demonstrators since the 1992 Peace Accords.

We realised these were no longer isolated threats. It was coordinated retaliation. Bukele was in a full fledged political crisis.

Then came our June issue: “Silencing Dissent: The Return of Political Prisoners in El Salvador.” Our reporter, Gabriel Labrador, investigated whether Bukele’s claims that there were no political prisoners held water. He documented dozens of cases. The article debunked a central tenet of Bukele’s international image. Once again, another balloon popped.

Many of us were attending a journalism forum in Costa Rica when we received word from diplomatic and other sources that the Salvadoran government had deployed a police operation to arrest every El Faro employee returning from the conference. That’s when the decision was made: they couldn’t go home.

I was expelled in 2021 from El Salvador, and I’m not a national. But dozens of my Salvadoran colleagues face exile, uprooting everything, their families, homes, healthcare and schools. Since early May, at least 40 journalists have fled El Salvador. We’re entering a new era for Salvadoran and Central American journalism.

We’re still reporting on El Salvador, even if we’re no longer all physically there right now. The goal isn’t to provoke President Bukele, it’s to inform the public and uphold their right to know what’s happening. When a government is obsessed with controlling the narrative, independent journalism inherently challenges that control. We don’t set out to cause problems. We start with the facts, but in a regime like this, truth itself is problematic.”

Despite the revelations that Bukele has negotiated with gangs and operated under false pretenses, Trump was still happy to make a deal with him and host him at the White House earlier this year. The two strongmen agreed that El Salvador will detain deported US immigrants, who are mostly Venezuelans, in exchange for payment. The deal hands Bukele legitimacy on the international stage, all but ensuring he’ll continue his repressive regime. But it’s some consolation to know Roman and his team are there to keep holding him accountable.

What I love about this newsletter is hearing from the underdogs. The ones who take on the powerful. Those who relentlessly chase the truth, bursting the carefully spun narratives of those in power.

Roman and El Faro embody that spirit. They’ve risked everything, and their grit and determination to keep going is extraordinarily cool.

By the way, last week’s poll was a bit of a slam dunk – almost all of you who voted said tech companies weren’t doing enough to keep their platforms safe.

Independent newsrooms are often the buffer between the public and authoritarianism, and what’s happening in El Salvador proves that. It’s one of the reasons why, here at the Bureau, we’re so focused on our mission to bring injustice to light. We make sure you always have an independent voice to turn to, arming you with the facts. If you want to support us, then why not contribute a few pounds a month and become a Bureau Insider today?

Take care,