politics

Excerpts:

An internationally acclaimed digital news outlet in El Salvador said Monday that the administration of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is preparing to arrest a number of its journalists following the publication of an interview with two former gang leaders who shed new light on a power-sharing agreement with the U.S.-backed leader and self-described "world's coolest dictator."

"A reliable source in El Salvador told El Faro that the Bukele-controlled Attorney General's Office is preparing at least seven arrest warrants for members of El Faro," the outlet reported. "The source reached out following the publication of an interview with two former leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios on Bukele's yearslong relationship to gangs."

"If carried out, the warrants are the first time in decades that prosecutors seek to press charges against individual journalists for their journalistic labors," El Faro added.

As El Faro reported:

At the heart of the threat of arrests is irony: El Faro was only able to interview the two Revolucionarios because they escaped El Salvador with the complicity of Bukele.

One, who goes by "Liro Man," recounts that he was taken to Guatemala, through a blind spot in the Salvadoran border, by Bukele gang negotiator Carlos Marroquín; the other, Carlos Cartagena, or "Charli," was arrested on a warrant in April 2022, early in the state of exception, but quickly released after the police received a call at the station and backed off.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Salvadorans were being rounded up without due process, on charges of belonging to gangs.

The video interview explains the dichotomy: For years, Salvadoran gang leaders cut covert deals with the entourage of Nayib Bukele. In their interview with El Faro, the two Revolucionarios say the FMLN party, to which the now-president belonged a decade ago, paid a quarter of a million dollars to the gangs during the 2014 campaign in exchange for vote coercion in gang-controlled communities, on behalf of Bukele for San Salvador mayor and Salvador Sánchez Cerén as president.

"This support, the sources say, was key to Bukele's ascent to power," El Faro noted. "You're going to tell your mom and your wife's family that they have to vote for Nayib. If you don't do it, we'll kill them," Liro Man says the gang members told their communities in that election. Of Bukele, he added, 'he knew he had to get to the gangs in order to get to where he is.'"

Part of the deal was a tacit "no body, no crime" policy under which gang leaders agreed to hide their victims' corpses as Bukele boasted of a historic reduction in homicides in a country once known as the world's murder capital.