The Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro said Thursday that two of its members’ assets, including a bank account and a property, were frozen by the government of President Nayib Bukele, in what the outlet’s leadership denounced as an escalation of political persecution for its reporting on government corruption.
El Faro Director Carlos Dada said in a news conference Thursday that the measures are political rather than fiscal in nature, and represent “another level of attack against us with a clear purpose.” Dada said the moves are “political measures trying to silence us.”
The outlet learned of the asset freeze through the bank and property registry, according to Dada, rather than through a formal notification from the Salvadoran government. El Faro has been subject to ongoing audits by Salvadoran authorities since 2020, with the government alleging the outlet has evaded $200,000 in taxes. Dada denied the tax evasion allegation.
The latest action comes shortly after El Faro released a documentary with PBS Frontline examining negotiations between Bukele’s administration and criminal gangs, a subject the outlet has reported on extensively. Bukele, who rose to power on an anti-corruption platform in 2019, has called the outlet’s reporting “fake news” in the past. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Associated Press.
The pressure on El Faro extends beyond financial measures. The outlet’s journalists have been targets of spyware attacks, and Pegasus software was detected on more than 20 of its journalists’ iPhones in 2022. The journalists sued Israel-based NSO Group in U.S. federal court later that year. In 2023, El Faro moved its headquarters to Costa Rica, and all of its staff members currently live in exile outside El Salvador because of what the outlet describes as a repressive climate.
Bukele’s broader crackdown on dissent has intensified since he declared a state of exception in 2022, which remains in effect and has resulted in the imprisonment of more than 91,000 people. Human rights groups have criticized the mass detentions and the erosion of legal protections.
In 2025, Salvadoran authorities arrested prominent human rights activist Ruth López, who remains in prison a year later without a trial and with limited access to family and legal counsel. Shortly after López’s arrest, in July 2025, the human rights organization where she worked — Cristosal — announced it was leaving El Salvador because of mounting harassment and legal threats.
Claudia Paz y Paz, the director of the Costa Rican-based Center for Justice and International Law, which is representing El Faro in its case before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, said in Thursday’s news conference that the asset freeze constitutes “retaliation” for El Faro’s work and that it seeks to “silence the voices of journalists.”
The practice of launching audits and confiscating assets has been used to intimidate critics in other parts of the region, most notably in Nicaragua under President Daniel Ortega.