The Governments of Guatemala and El Salvador Redouble the Persecution and Threats of Journalists Investigating Corruption

Juan Bautista Xol is a Guatemalan journalist of the Maya Q'eqchi' ethnic group who in October 2021 covered the police attack on a group of indigenous leaders protesting against a Russian mine that pollutes the country's largest lake and rivers in El Estor, a municipality in the northeastern mountains. Since then, the State of Guatemala has subjected him to permanent harassment.

Xol is one of five journalists, most of them Q'eqchi', who were in El Estor on the weekend of October 22 and 23, 2021 to cover the police assault. He and his other two indigenous colleagues, Carlos Choc Chub and Baudilio Choc, have since been criminalized. Agents of the State followed them, took photos of them that later appeared on websites denigrating them and accused of committing crimes, raided their homes. One of them, Carlos Choc, the Public Ministry (MP), in alliance with the Russian mine, wants to put him in jail.

At 7:02am on October 26, 2021, when the Guatemalan government had already decreed a state of siege in El Estor after the police violence, the harassment of Juan Bautista Xol began: while a pro-government television channel broadcast live images, dozens of agents from the National Civil Police (PNC), the MP and the state intelligence surrounded the journalist's house. A few minutes later she was raided and Xol and her family were held incommunicado for two hours. This is stated in a report of aggression prepared by Prensa Comunitaria, the independent media for which Xol works, and the Office of the Human Rights Procurator of Guatemala (PDH).

Before that raid, during the police assault, a Facebook page related to the Russian mine had uploaded photos of a hooded man who he claimed was journalist Xol, who, according to that publication, was about to attack the PNC. It was all a lie: Xol had been documenting police abuses all the time and broadcasting them live from his cell phone.

In a later testimony, Xol explained that during the raid the police forced his wife to unlock a cell phone on which the journalist kept photos of police abuses from the previous weekend.

“The PNC and the Public Prosecutor's Office held journalist Xol Coc and his family for approximately two hours. They make the family stay in the corridor during the break-in and prevent them from communicating via telephone. At approximately 9:30 the raid ends; the PNC and MP did not find any evidence or evidence and did not capture the journalist, but they did kidnap the phone of the couple Xol Coc saying that he would undergo an analysis,” says the assault report written by Prensa Comunitaria.

The only reason Juan Bautista Xol was not arrested is that the journalist, before the break-in, managed to communicate with someone who informed his colleagues of the imminent search. From Guatemala City, Prensa Comunitaria immediately made a public complaint, which raised alarms even abroad.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued an alert on Oct. 28. “Guatemalan authorities must stop the harassment of journalists covering these protests and ensure that the independent press can safely cover events of national and international interest,” the committee wrote in a statement.

At the same time that state agents entered the house of journalist Xol, another contingent of police officers, accompanied by employees of the Russian mine, forced their way into the home of Carlos Choc, another Q'eqchi' journalist. According to the testimonies of the neighbors, collected in the report prepared on this attack, the police did not find anyone in the house. Even so, they scrambled all of Choc's belongings, destroyed some of the furniture and made sure to leave one of the journalist's credentials they found there in view.

Carlos Choc has been pursued by the State of Guatemala since 2017, after journalist Maya Q'eqchi' first documented that the mine, owned by the Russian-Swiss company Solway, was polluting Lake Izabal and photographing the body of a fisherman who was murdered by the police in May of that year while protesting in El Estor against mine activities.

In retaliation, the Guatemalan MP opened criminal proceedings against Choc and ordered him an arrest warrant. In that case, finally, a judge from Puerto Barrios, the administrative capital of Izabal, the department of Guatemala where El Estor and the mine are located, ordered alternative measures to arrest and forced Choc to report to the headquarters of the Public Prosecutor's Office to sign once a month.

On March 6, 2022, 20 media outlets around the world, including Prensa Comunitaria, published several investigations, based on thousands of internal documents of the Russian mine and years of coverage in the territory, which reveal irregularities and human rights violations committed by miners in complicity with the Guatemalan government. Among them, the mine makes monthly payments to the PNC, which has served as an armed arm in evictions of indigenous communities, and that mining partner companies bribed Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei.

After that investigation, the MP, an ally of Giammattei, again attacked journalist Carlos Choc. Thirteen policemen accused Choc and 11 others of attacking them during the October riots. The only evidence presented is a medical report issued at the last minute that only attests to the fact that the cops had some scratches. What Choc did when according to the Public Prosecutor's Office assaulted the agents was to cover police abuses, as shown by videos and photos of him published.

Judge Aníbal Arteaga, from Puerto Barrios, signed arrest warrants for Choc and the other defendants. According to documents revealed in the investigation into the Russian mine and the government, Judge Arteaga is on a list of officials to whom the miner gave gifts every year. And according to the same Public Prosecutor's Office, Arteaga has been an accomplice of drug traffickers, so there is a pending trial (judges have jurisdiction in Guatemala).

CPJ, from New York, has also warned about the danger in which the State of Guatemala has placed journalist Carlos Choc.

The Guatemalan State's aggressions on independent journalism are not limited to El Estor and the Russian mine. In 2021, the MP criminalized and imprisoned Anastasia Mejía, a community journalist Maya Quiché whom CPJ had recognized with a press freedom award.

On April 4, Juan Luis Font, a renowned journalist and television presenter based in the Guatemalan capital, announced on his Twitter account that he was temporarily leaving the country after the MP subjected him to criminal prosecution. Font has also been a critical voice for the Giammattei government and Attorney General Consuelo Porras, whom the United States has appointed as a corrupt and undemocratic agent in Central America.

The situation of freedom of information has worsened markedly in Guatemala in recent months. The PDH and Prensa Comunitaria's freedom of expression program documented 125 attacks in 2021, an average of one assault every three days. Between January and March 2022, there is, on average, one aggression every two days.

The situation in the neighbouring nation, El Salvador, is not better. There, President Nayib Bukele abandons a crusade to stifle access to public information and silence the independent press that has revealed, among other things, the corruption of the government and the agreement it maintains with the MS13 and Barrio 18 gangs, responsible for most of the murders in the country.

On Thursday, April 7, the digital newspaper El Faro, one of the most critical of President Bukele and whose journalism unveiled the gang pact and multiple cases of government corruption, did something that it had not done in 24 years of existence: closing its cover to publish an editorial in which it denounces the persecution of Bukele and the onslaught presidential opposition against journalism.

A day earlier, on April 6, Bukele's deputies had approved legal reforms in Congress that allow the government to persecute anyone who talks about gangs, the territorial control they exercise over large areas of El Salvador and the government's inability to contain violence when the pact it maintains with the gangs are distorted, as happened on the last weekend of March, when one of these distortions left 87 bodies in 72 hours in the country's streets and neighborhoods.

“It is an arbitrary reform that opens the door to censorship. There is not much interpretation needed when people who say that gangs exercise territorial control in the country are being sentenced to 15 and 20 years in prison,” said Nelson Rauda, a journalist from El Faro and secretary of minutes of the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES), in a chat with Infobae.

Rauda points out that the “spirit of the legislator” - the intention of the deputies - in this case is clear after the public statements of some congressmen of the Bukele party. Jorge Castro, from Nuevas Ideas, loyal to the president, had asked, before the reforms, to legislate so that there would be “legal consequences” for the media publishing about Bukele's pact with the gangs.

Everything is disguised as an attempt to legislate in order, according to the Bukelite deputies, to avoid something they call the apology of crime. The point is, in fact, to hide the government's relationship with the gangs, something that, according to at least two federal agents consulted by Infobae in Washington, is about to bring criminal charges from the Department of Justice to two Bukele officials designated to coordinate the pact.

In December 2021, the United States Department of Justice sanctioned Osiris Luna and Carlos Marroquín, officials close to Bukele, whom it indicated to coordinate the gang agreement on behalf of the president. Soon after, the Reuters agency revealed that the US government was preparing a criminal case for that.

In El Salvador, with the new measures of the Bukele deputies, talking about this pact and the control that gangs have over large parts of the country is already a crime for which a journalist can go to prison and stay there for between 15 and 20 years.

Everything is now at the discretion of the Attorney General, the police officers and the judges and magistrates who, in El Salvador, work in the service of President Nayib Bukele, to whom the independent press is allergic.

“They have gathered all the tools to criminalize us. That is the explicit intention. They are just waiting to take the next step, which is to put a journalist in jail,” says Nelson Rauda, from El Faro and APES. He adds: “There is no institution that prevents this. No one prevents it. There is no independent judiciary. Everything is in your hands.” According to Rauda, what Bukele and his government want to continue strengthening is a narrative according to which there are no gangs in El Salvador.

In general, attacks on the Salvadoran press have increased rapidly since Bukele became president. In 2020, the first full year of bukelist management, APES recorded 125 attacks, about 40% more than the previous year. In 2021 there were 219 attacks and there were 30 of them until April 5.

And just as journalist Juan Luis Font had to leave Guatemala, there are already Salvadoran journalists who have had to leave their country so that they are not put in prisons controlled by Bukele officials or by gang members with whom these officials are allies. APES records three cases of forced displacement of journalists, but Rauda warns that there may be more. An independent count by Infobae puts the figure on half a dozen Salvadoran journalists in exile.

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