The most important thing journalism can do in a dictatorship is to tell the truth

When the trust pitch is the newsroom itself - surveilled, audited, relocated.

El Faro did not run a campaign. El Faro is the campaign. Founded in 1998 after the Salvadoran civil war, it became the leading digital investigative newsroom in Central America. By the late 2010s, under President Nayib Bukele, the environment for independent journalism in El Salvador deteriorated into open hostility - presidential broadcasts naming the press as enemies of the people, smear campaigns, aggressive tax audits, intimidation.

Between 2020 and 2021, researchers at the Citizen Lab documented one of the most obsessive cases of state digital surveillance ever recorded against a single newsroom. At least 22 current and former El Faro journalists had been targeted with Pegasus, the military-grade spyware sold by Israel’s NSO Group. Phones harvested. Sources exposed. The contents of the newsroom under live surveillance.

In 2023, El Faro relocated its administrative and legal headquarters to San José, Costa Rica, while keeping reporters on the ground in San Salvador. The trust pitch is intrinsic to the relocation. Carlos Dada, the editor, put it plainly: the most important thing journalism can do in a dictatorship is to tell the truth. The brand proposition is the absolute refusal to yield. Vulnerability is converted into legitimacy. The newsroom is the slogan, the slogan is the operation, and the operation continues from a different country because there is no other way to keep doing it.

Sources: reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk ↗elfaro.net ↗commons.wikimedia.org ↗