“Am I Now in Exile?”
The journalists forced out of Bukele’s El Salvador.
SEPTEMBER 16, 2025
I. Miscalculation
We figured we would spend only a few days out of the country. We figured that within a week of publishing, some other issue would distract the Salvadoran dictatorship. We would weigh the risks of returning and would then go back. We would land at Monseñor Romero Airport, pass through Olocuilta for a meal of pupusas, sleep in our homes, pick up our pets, kiss our children. We left with carry-on bags: No one was carrying more than 10 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.
The first installment in our series of videos — titled “Charli’s Confessions: Interview with a Gang Leader on His Secret Pacts with Nayib Bukele” — was published by our newspaper, El Faro, on Thursday, May 1 at 2 p.m., with English subtitles. The journalists who had interviewed the two leaders of the 18th Street gang in El Salvador were riding out a “preventive departure” in different cities: New York, Mexico City, Guatemala, L.A.
In El Salvador, the popular dictator Nayib Bukele is the king 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 Salvadoran prison that Bukele wants the world to see — has racked up 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 reached 3 million views in the same span. It may not sound like much for a YouTuber who travels 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 a population of only around 6 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 by his supporters on different channels in a single day.
The first video was an interview with two gang members who had escaped the country with the Bukele government’s help. They confessed the details of a pact with the dictator’s inner circle that had lasted more than eight years. Within 24 hours, the video surpassed 326,000 views. Two months later, the three installments of the interview series had reached 2 million views on YouTube. On the newspaper’s other social media accounts, excerpts from the interview were viewed more than 15 million times.
Over the course of the three episodes, some 93 minutes in total, revelations by the leaders from the 18th Street Revolucionarios machine-gunned the image of Bukele as the arch-enemy of the gangs: Bukele’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party, they said, had paid the gangs a quarter of a million dollars to get Bukele elected mayor of the capital (where he served from 2015 to 2018) when he was still claiming to be a leftist. The pact continued once he became president and included loopholes that allowed gang members to continue extorting and murdering without fear of punishment. The gang members also said the Bukele government had ultimately helped both of them escape the country.
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.”
Abundant evidence previously published by El Faro lent credibility to the gang members’ claims, but in these times, an intelligence document with official stamps and signatures or pictures from prison security cameras have less weight than a famous fugitive gang leader saying it himself on camera. Many people want reality to be revealed to them like in a Netflix series.
Social media is Bukele’s kingdom — he gives orders to his ministers via X, announces his most important political decisions on Facebook Live. The videos of gang members’ confessions conquered that 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, had wanted to be seen as the victor over criminals, the owner of the toughest prison. In the El Faro videos he was shown as he really is: 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.” 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 the evidence is so flimsy that sometimes they simply say that the detainee was arrested for appearing “nervous.”
We all regretted how little we had packed in our suitcases. “We’re screwed,” said a colleague in a virtual meeting, summing up the collective mood. But the plan remained the same: to return soon.
The warning we received suggested that we were facing a fate already suffered by tens of thousands of innocent people among the more than 85,000 arrested during the regime: not 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 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 barely more specific than saying that someone died because they stopped living.
The temporary nature of our departure began to be overshadowed by uncertainty. A few days away is manageable, a few weeks away makes you start to think about 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 how little we had packed in our suitcases. “We’re screwed,” said a colleague in a virtual meeting, summing up the collective mood. But the plan 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 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. 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.
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.
We were not the first people to be forced out of the country under Bukele, because of the uncovering of inconvenient truths. Rather, our plight was the continuation of something that had been happening away from the spotlight for years.
A week after publication, seven El Faro journalists were still out of the country, but expecting to return 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. Still, exile was beginning to be a whisper in our minds.
As the weeks passed, we would not return, and 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 they left because they were under pressure from family members, or simply out of fear.
II. 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 contradict this.
For years now, finding sources in El Salvador has been a thorny endeavor. Bukele has publicly expressed his hatred for El Faro, as well as for other media outlets, and in 2020 he even accused us of money laundering on national television. (The accusation forced El Faro to move its legal status to Costa Rica in 2023; the newspaper itself is essentially in exile.)
The next year, Bukele expelled two foreign journalists working for El Faro from the country on the grounds that they could not prove they were journalists, despite the fact that one of them had won a long list of international awards. Bukele has declared us his enemies and, on more than one occasion, “enemies of the people.” If anyone had doubts that talking to us could be a problem, they were probably dispelled when we revealed that 22 employees at the newspaper had been hacked with Pegasus spyware between June 2020 and November 2021. “If you find Pegasus, you know that person has been hacked by a government,” said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto’s cybersecurity lab, which examined our devices and discovered 226 hacks.
Obtaining sources not only became more difficult under Bukele, 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 people in safe places without being followed; or setting up 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 government institutions. 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 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.
In El Salvador, the published videos continued to dominate the discussion on social media. Bukele, as he often does, reacted with a gimmick designed to boost his popularity: 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.
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 transportation companies that decided not to operate 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 the arrest of the owners of these companies. The police and the prosecutor’s office, faithful tools of the dictatorship, captured 13 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. We saw the country gradually losing interest in the interviews with gang members, turning to the latest scandal in a country in perpetual cardiac arrest.
On May 12, some 300 families from the poorest parts of the country who were facing eviction from their homes gathered outside the wall surrounding 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. The families, with signs, children, and elderly people, asked Bukele to please prevent the evictions. Bukele sent the Military Police to break up the demonstration and arrest five community leaders, including an evangelical pastor and an environmental lawyer. Images of children and elderly women crying and begging the military to release their leaders flooded social media once again.
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.”
From the publication of interviews with gang members, to the chaos in public transportation, to 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.
A day later, Bukele set the tone from his X account. He said, without providing any evidence, that “humble people” had been “manipulated by self-proclaimed leftist groups and globalist NGOs, whose only real goal is to attack the government.” He would send a Foreign Agents
Bill to the legislative assembly to impose a 30 percent tax on all international donations or payments to organizations or individuals considered by his government to be “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.” 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. Not only did we not know if we were being persecuted for publishing the interviews with the gang members, but we now most likely would also be considered foreign agents and could face fines of between $100,000 and $250,000 — sums of money that no journalist at El Faro possesses. 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.”
On May 18, just 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,” López replied, in a phrase that almost immediately became a slogan among the opposition to the dictatorship.
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 and counted as an enemy.
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 adviser to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the country’s highest authority on electoral matters. Her trial remained secret, as did 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 speaking out against his regime; in 2024,the BBC listed her 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 and counted as an enemy.
Several colleagues from other media outlets started to feel as though they should leave. “I’ve published a ton of articles on this government’s corruption. Do you think I should leave?” asked a journalist from San Salvador in a chat.
By then, some colleagues at the newspaper had already decided not to return. Others remained determined to go back. Meanwhile, we were preparing the new 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.
III. 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 discussed the findings we had 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, if we were to return, it would be very helpful. No one had told us to come back, that the worst would not happen.
On June 1, commemorating one year since his unconstitutional reelection, 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 did we still insist that we would, somehow, return? 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?” someone said jokingly about their colleague, and the rest of us 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.
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 June 6, 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 9 p.m., and then a diplomat asked us to leave the closing cocktail party and speak privately.
The shaky construction of “preventive departure” finally blew up in our faces in a thousand tiny fragments, and there was only one word left to describe our situation. For many of us, it was still part of a naïve question: Am I now in exile?
“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 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.
Until then, we had been postponing an act that never left our minds: returning. Now we were canceling it outright. We had packed our suitcases, been assigned a seat, checked 40 times that our passports were in our backpacks. In our minds, we were basically already on that plane.
At 8:45 p.m. on 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, is a bunker in terms of information. Two sources told us that, if anything had been planned, they had no way to know.
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 to describe our situation. For many of us, it was still part of a naïve question: Am I now in exile?
IV. 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 had calculated that, if the government had not been able to catch those it was expecting to arrive on our flight, perhaps it would try to arrest other journalists; others had noticed patrols loitering around their homes or had police knocking on their doors with implausible questions: “We have a report that a car has been stolen. Who lives here?” Others had received a direct call from a trusted source: “Get out of your house, they’re coming for you tonight.” On June 13, the Journalists Association of El Salvador (APES) 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. “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, several of us still did not call ourselves exiles. We still thought about returning.
V. A Gathering with El Nuevo
A group of Salvadoran journalists 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, for the foreseeable future, our homeland was forbidden, distant, hostile.
One was planning to sell his house to find another place, in another land, to call home; another was desperately 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 trying to figure out what to do with the small business they had opened in El Salvador a year ago that was just starting to bear fruit. 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 has had a suitcase packed and ready to go ever since Bukele, in September 2021, congratulated himself publicly for not using tear gas against a protest march, “...for now.” And yet, on June 7, when someone warned him that police patrols were loitering around his house, he forgot to take it with him. Since then, he had been on the run, staying with friends, with his phone turned off. He sneaked back home briefly to pick up the suitcase and pack a few extra things. Looking around at the room, the bed, the kitchen, he thought: “This 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. El Nuevo arrived 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.
He took a bite of a hamburger, sipped a beer reflectively, 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 had said goodbye to his daughter. Emotion welled up in his eyes as he recalled her words of farewell: “I have the feeling that, just like in video games, one life has ended for you. I hope the other one works out.” That night, at Shakespeare’s, the future was just as inscrutable for us all.
PHOTO: Miguel Dominguez on Unsplash
✺ Published in The Dial
