El Salvador: El Faro newspaper closed its website for a day in protest against the censorship of Nayib Bukele

After the government of El Salvador approved amendments to the Penal Code to imprison anyone who disseminates information that allegedly reproduces gang messages, journalists in the Central American country took different steps to express their concern.

In the case of the newspaper El Faro, it launched on Thursday an unprecedented measure of protest in its 24-year history, which implies the closure of its website for a whole day, in rejection of censorship.

When readers try to access your website, they find a message on a black background under the title: No to censorship: “For many years now, our readers have encountered critical journalism with a declared intention to understand the political and social phenomena that determine the lives of Salvadorans and Central Americans”, the statement begins.

“Among them we have also explained to the gangs, their origin and their excessive development in northern Central America, how they subdued a huge part of the population and also with which politicians and governments they secretly agreed with for more than a decade. Without an independent press, citizens would never have heard about these pacts. To continue to explain this, to continue to reveal those pacts, is now a crime that can be punishable by up to 15 years in prison in El Salvador,” they continue.

In the text, they further state that the amendments to the Penal Code are a “gag to freedom of the press and freedom of expression”. The message was replicated on all the newspaper's social networks.

“What should Salvadorans know about gangs? Nothing, according to the regime,” he continues.

Finally, journalists say that, in a democracy, it is not the power that decides what is published and what is not published.

“(The) new law, at the express request of the President of the Republic, comes when democratic life has already been dismantled and the regime is trying to hide by all means its own negotiations with criminal groups and their corruption,” they say.

“That is why today, in protest against this gag law, we have closed our front page. El Salvador paid a heavy price to obtain our freedoms. We cannot allow them to be taken away from us by a regime that seeks to keep citizens in the dark. Tomorrow you can find here what we have done and continue to do: journalism. Today we protest”, closes the text.

El Salvador is under a regime of emergency following a wave of murders in late March and, in addition to this extraordinary measure, Congress approved, on Bukele's proposal, the tightening of sentences for gang members and endorsed trying teenagers as adults.

The new package of amendments prohibits the media from “the reproduction and transmission to the general population of messages or communications originating or allegedly originating from such criminal groups, which could cause anxiety and panic among the population”.

With Bukele's initiative, which compared his decision to the German fight against Nazism, graffiti or “any visual expression” that “explicitly or implicitly conveys messages” from gangs were also declared illegal.

In different communities in El Salvador, it is common to observe graffiti to mark a kind of border between areas with the presence of opposing gang groups.

The president of the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES), Cesar Fagoaga, told a press conference on Wednesday that he is now “trying to believe in a completely wrong way that the press is, or has been, a spokesperson for gangs.” He added that “not only is it affecting us, it is affecting the information of the population. What this reform seeks is for people to censor themselves and not to say anything.”

The relationship between the press and Bukele has been tense since the beginning of its administration.

APES called the amendments to the Penal Code “a clear attempt to censor the media.” He argued that the reforms “threaten to jail the media and journalists who report on a reality that the current administration, obsessed with propaganda and misrepresentation, seeks to hide.”

“What we are seeing is another step towards violating press freedom, it is a pure act of censorship,” added APES rapporteur Serafín Valencia.

“What the government and the Legislative Assembly want is for citizens not to know the reality they are living in,” said lawyer Eduardo Escobar of the NGO Acción Ciudadana.

For her part, criminal lawyer Tahnya Pastor explained that “the reforms establish a direct ban on the media from producing messages allegedly from gangs that could generate anxiety and panic among the population.” However, he pointed out that this is not a completely open ban, since, for example, it is not forbidden to write a book about gangs, “but to transmit messages to confirm control, the sovereignty of gangs, to avoid anxiety.”

He explained that these reforms criminalize those using social media who post videos of gangs showing their weapons and threatening the government and the population, or messages of alleged curfews in specific areas of the country.

In addition to the above-mentioned changes, a law was passed to allow the State to use property, money, firearms, securities and other assets that have been seized from criminal groups and are in the custody of the Public Prosecutor's Office, the police and the courts of justice. These assets will be used to combat organized crime.

(With information from EFE and AP)

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