Fear of Speech
and threats against the press in the United States and El Salvador
Not glossophobia — or fear of speaking — but logophobia. Fear of truth, fear of the word.
My friends and former colleagues at the Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro are in danger because of what they’ve written, because they’ve reported the news. They’re in danger because the people in power are afraid of what they themselves have done.
Seven reporters at El Faro have recently fled the country after receiving credible threats of being arrested. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has been targeting El Faro’s journalists — along with other independent media, critics, and human rights workers — for years, including by unleashing the invasive Israeli spyware, Pegasus, to surveil and intimidate them. Journalists in the country have been harassed, threatened, robbed, followed by drones, have had their homes broken into, and have been forced to flee.
I’ve been writing about the danger members at El Faro face for a decade. The inconvenient (to the powers that be) stories change, but the relationship hasn’t: corrupt government tries to illegally take power or cover up malfeasance, the reporters at El Faro expose those machinations, and then the threats rain down.
The most recent round of reporting that incited the intimidation is about Bukele publicly talking very tough on the gangs but privately negotiating with them, trading improved prison conditions and sometimes money for votes and PR. El Faro got the scoop, collected evidence, did extensive interviews, corroborated and fact-checked it all, gave officials a chance to explain, and then published.
That is bird-dogging, not bear-poking. And for it they fear for their lives.
The events come at a critical time not only for El Salvador, but for US-Salvadoran relations. The Trump administration has been leaning hard on Bukele to stage a power grab and affect deportations.
Why is the US relying on El Salvador? Why is Trump so chummy with Bukele?
That’s what I address in a recent article for New York Review. To understand why El Salvador, why Bukele, why the gulag and why now, you need to understand the profound recent changes El Salvador has undergone and what role the United States has had in El Salvador over the past few years and going back the last three-quarters of a century.
One of the key continuities is forced disappearances, which have long been used in El Salvador as a deterrent, as a means of population control, and a general fear tactic to shore up power. Trump is now taking up the stratagem.
Since Bukele took office in 2019, he has rewritten the constitution, purged the judiciary of critical judges, stormed the legislative halls with armed soldiers, fired the attorney general, arrested prominent human rights lawyers, commandeered an illegal second term in office, vilified the free press, and launched an anti-gang campaign by staging mass arrests and eliminating due process, and taken to arresting critics and prominent human rights attorneys.
In just the last four years, El Salvador had traded the highest homicide rate in the world for the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. In a country of six million, about one in every fifty people is imprisoned; less than a quarter of them have received a sentence.
What stands out from all of that has been Bukele’s flagship megaprison, the aforementioned gulag, the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. When it opened in 2023, his administration boasted that people held there “would not again have contact with the outside world.” In CECOT people are humiliated, tortured, overcrowded, underfed, and killed. At capacity, which is 40,000 — or roughly six times bigger than the largest prison in the United States — CECOT would “set records for deliberately designed overcrowding,” according to the Financial Times, giving each inmate “less than half the minimum [space] required under EU law to transport midsized cattle by road.”
And that is where the Trump administration has paid Bukele at least six million dollars to take into custody 288 Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants — the majority of whom have no criminal records.
El Faro’s Nelson Rauda wrote about one of them, Venezuelan Jesús Alberto Ríos Andrade, whose U.S. citizen wife, Angie González, only learned what had happened to him, where he had been sent, after CBS published a leaked list of their names. “I’m an American. I have the right to be told where my husband is,” González told Rauda.
One disturbing statistic that captures the state of affairs in El Salvador: during the decade-plus long Civil War that ended in 1992, approximately 9,000 people were disappeared in the country. Those disappearances were, though long after the war had ended, condemned by the United States, as well as by international human rights commissions. Since Bukele took office in 2019, one organization working in El Salvador has tallied almost 6,500 reports of disappeared persons. Instead of condemnation, the Trump administration is funding CECOT and urging Bukele to build more such prisons.
Such spectacle — of CECOT, of unidentified masked agents whisking people off US streets — fits neatly into the paradigm of forced disappearance, which combines a disconcerting mix of high-visibility (the arrest, the show of force, the megaprison) and invisibility (the grievous unknown of where or even if someone is). Of those 288 people rendered to El Salvador from the United States, researchers and journalists have identified only 258 of them.
Who are the unnamed thirty? They are a threat, a warning. “The constant pain of not knowing a loved one’s whereabouts, amid an endless search for any clue that might lead to finding them, is a feeling many in Latin America know too well,” writes Venezuelan scholar of the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA, Carolina Jiménez Sandoval. U.S. residents are now beginning to feel that pain, Sandoval argues.
In a recent webinar hosted by WOLA about the rise of the Trump administration’s use of enforced disappearances, Argentine scholar Juan Méndez, a former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment — and who was himself arrested and tortured in the 1970s by the military junta in Argentina — called for civil society, journalists, politicians and people of conscience to stand up against the disappearances. Emphasizing the importance of calling out the harms being enacted, Méndez said, “Storytelling can begin immediately.”
And it should begin immediately. The challenge is overcoming the silence that the US and El Salvador —through deportations, through CECOT, through their double threat—are violently imposing on the victims. The challenge is posed to and will be overcome, principally, by the free press. By journalists like those at El Faro.
The challenge is overcoming Trump and Bukele’s logophobia.
For all their bumptious jingoistic pomp and bluster, these men are scared. They’re scared of the truth, and they’re scared of words.
They’re logophobes.
AZ Lu
A recent scoop of mine: about a Senator and local officials secretly trying to woo a missile manufacturer to Tucson. Read it here.
What I’m reading
Between it all, I’ve been reading a lot — for my work and for my soul. Here are some recent favorites.
John Williams’ Stoner, Roberto Bolaño’s Cowboy Graves, and the magisterial Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, by David S. Reynolds. The latter has been a companion to me for the past year. I read it, savored it, slowly. It’s changed how I understand this country — which is a shift I’m still processing.
I’ll leave you with some Claudio Magris, whose Danube is a weird, wise, wildly erudite, esoteric, and sometimes stunning book.
“When Buffeto II, my highly esteemed guinea-pig, gnaws at the cover of Genealogy of Morals, raising his dusty, decorous whiskers to the height of the bottom shelf, loyalty to Nietzsche teaches me to let him be, and in fact to rejoice in his tranquil familiarity with the world beyond good and evil.”
