It all happened too fast.
I was sitting in a coffee shop in Guatemala City with fellow journalist José Luis Sanz, drinking a passion fruit and cardamom frozen drink. As usual, we had stored our phones in our backpacks in order to speak freely. It had been four years since we both discovered they had been tapped by Pegasus, a spyware sold only to governments.
When José turned on his phone, he showed me a message he had just received from another colleague. A source warned us that the attorney general’s office in El Salvador was preparing seven arrest warrants against members of the newsroom for crimes related to gangs. The message had a list of names. I saw mine.
Why We Wrote This
For the first time this century, authoritarian regimes outnumber democracies around the world. As these countries crack down on the press, many journalists are being forced into exile.
Three days earlier, we had published an investigation at El Faro, a leading investigative outlet in Central America – and it was going viral. I’m El Faro’s digital content editor, and José was the editor of the English section until 2024. In a three-part video interview with gang leaders, El Faro detailed the deals they had been making with the government of El Salvador, and how these deals gave gang members protection from government crackdowns. They should have been in jail, but instead they were talking to us, airing out their grievances from a negotiation that went sour, frustrated by how the government has publicly denied these talks ever took place. Our video detailed these secret deals.
We thought it would be scandalous. We thought the government would say we were collaborating with gang members because we agreed not to disclose the location of the interviews. We knew it would be dangerous, and that’s why four of us left El Salvador before publishing the three-part series.
Over the years, such departures had become standard security practices for journalists. We call them “preemptive exits” – a euphemism, because we never know what dangers, exactly, we are hoping to avoid.
El Faro was founded in the years following El Salvador’s civil war, and it has been publishing independent investigations since 1998 under right-wing and left-wing governments. I’ve worked there for the past decade. But government pressure has increased since President Nayib Bukele took office in 2019.
Within four months, El Faro journalists were banned from news conferences. Then came online harassment by Mr. Bukele and his officials. In subsequent years, El Faro journalists were spied on and subjected to criminal investigations for fabricated accusations of sexual harassment and a money-laundering investigation that includes four ongoing audits from the Finance Ministry. Charges have never been formally brought to court. Two foreign colleagues, who entered the country legally as tourists, were denied work permits and had to leave. El Faro moved its administration to Costa Rica in 2023 to ensure the Salvadoran government wouldn’t seize its assets.
But we persisted as reporters in El Salvador. We all lived in the capital, San Salvador. We have families, cars, and mortgages there, even if now we speak of our city in the past tense, as something far away.
I walked out of the coffee shop in Guatemala City, stunned. I got a cab to drop me a few blocks from where I was staying. Walking gave me a chance to think about how I was going to tell my wife and the rest of my family that I couldn’t return home. I was angry about my lack of foresight, having packed only a carry-on. I thought I would be back to my apartment in a week, tops. We left towels drying on a rack and food in the fridge. I had watered my plants just enough.
I left on April 30. I don’t know when I will be able to return home. I know it won’t be soon.
Our travails are not exceptional. Hundreds of journalists go into exile every year from places such as Ukraine, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Reporters Without Borders’ tally of exiled journalists in 2023 was 460 – likely an undercount, and more than double the number from 2022.
It’s also part of a global political upheaval. For the first time this century, there are more autocratic leaders in the world than democratic ones, according to this year’s Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, report. From Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, the ideal of democracy as an aspirational form of political organization is crumbling. And, with it, the protections for civil liberties and human rights are weakening, regardless of a country’s wealth, geographic location, or history.
“The idea that democracy is a form of government that always has ample popular support is basically a leap of faith,” says José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, a professor of political science at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, known as CIDE, in Mexico City.
Public support for democracy in Latin America dropped in 2013 – and has yet to recover. There’s a sense that democracy hasn’t delivered on its hefty promises of upward economic mobility or access to education, experts say. And in places like El Salvador, the population has openly supported this shift away from democratic norms as a sort of shortcut toward improved public security.
The actual meaning of democracy is changing, say experts such as Mollie Cohen, an assistant professor in the political science department at Purdue University. “In Venezuela, under Hugo Chávez, we saw people start to associate democracy with him. They approved democracy because it had produced this president who was giving them what they wanted,” Dr. Cohen says.
She adds, “When [citizens] are getting what they want, democracy is performing for them. The idea is shifting to become an indicator of support for the leader, rather than these vague ideas of institutions and rules.”
What happens when citizens are no longer getting what they want, but all checks on power have been removed? I’ve come to realize that once that sort of power comes knocking at your door, it’s already too late.
“A systemic pattern of criminalization”
May was the month of the great exile in El Salvador – the “biggest exodus of political exiles since the civil war,” according to a Los Angeles Times report of more than 100 journalists and human rights activists who have fled El Salvador as Mr. Bukele continues to jail his critics.
In a June 13 statement, the Salvadoran Journalists Association, known by its Spanish acronym APES, said it documented the “forced displacement of approximately 40 journalists from the country, following multiple cases of harassment, intimidation, and arbitrary restrictions against journalists and media outlets.”
But it was activists who bore the brunt of the crackdown. Between May 12 and May 18, three human rights defenders were arrested: pastor José Ángel Pérez and lawyers Alejandro Henríquez and Ruth López. Ms. López was one of the most prominent voices denouncing corruption in the government. Mr. Pérez and Mr. Henríquez were assisting a group of campesinos (peasant farmers) fighting eviction from their farmland with legal and spiritual support. All three of them were declared “prisoners of conscience” by Amnesty International, which means they were deprived of their liberty solely because of their beliefs. They didn’t advocate violence or hatred, only due process, respect for the constitution, and the rights of communities.
“These detentions are not isolated events,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary-general, said in a statement. “They are part of a systematic pattern of criminalization that seeks to silence those who denounce abuses, demand justice, and demand transparency in public administration.” It’s the first time El Salvador has had prisoners of conscience since the end of its civil war in 1992.
The effects of the clampdown are still reverberating. Guillermo Cartagena, a young journalist who covered the joint trial of Mr. Pérez and Mr. Henríquez, reported that three uniformed police officers knocked on his door June 25, inquiring about basic utilities and the number of people who live in the house, according to APES. The officers stayed in the alley for more than an hour before asking questions to anyone else in the neighborhood, Mr. Cartagena observed. He left his home that day.
On July 16, the human rights organization Cristosal, for which Ms. López is the chief legal officer for anti-corruption, announced it closed operations in El Salvador after the government passed a Foreign Agents Law that will impose an additional 30% tax on nongovernment organizations.
“El Salvador is at a tipping point,” said Ana Piquer, a director at Amnesty International, in a statement. “The submission of the judiciary and the approval of regressive reforms have allowed the Bukele government to build an institutional and regulatory architecture designed to legalize the control, repression, and criminalization of people living in poverty and expressing dissent.”
Nearly 3 out of 4 people live in autocracies, and liberal democracy is the most uncommon regime in the world, per the 2024 V-Dem report, one of the most comprehensive democracy studies internationally. The favorite weapon of aspiring autocratic leaders, according to these experts, is media censorship, followed by the undermining of elections and civil society.
From Bukele confidant to political target
It didn’t happen fast at all for Bertha María Deleón.
The official date of her exile is Aug. 21, 2021. A lawyer, Ms. Deleón started counseling Mr. Bukele in 2015, four years before he became president of El Salvador. In a March 2019 photograph, she is shown arranging a stack of $50,000 in cash that Mr. Bukele took to a legal hearing – payment in a defamation complaint a month after being elected president.
Ms. Deleón settled that case, which had been weighing on Mr. Bukele as he ran for the country’s highest office. Although she was passed over for a Cabinet position, she remained close to Mr. Bukele – at first.
In his first weeks as president, Mr. Bukele took to Twitter, as it was called then, to fire people hired under previous administrations, citing their personal or family ties to opposition politicians. Ms. Deleón warned him to follow due process and that there was a possibility of facing lawsuits for his actions, she recalls. “He replied saying I was a party pooper. That was the first bitter taste,” she says.
For the first two years of Mr. Bukele’s term, Ms. Deleón called out the president publicly because she considered his approach a threat to democracy. She even ran for a legislative seat with an opposition party in 2021, but lost. Then, things turned sour.
“They sent a polling agency to ask questions only at my house. Two people on motorcycles followed me everywhere. They put drones on my patio. I suspected my phone and email were tapped. They attacked me on social media. I started to lose all my clients, because they knew of the enmity with the president. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live in peace in El Salvador if I didn’t line up,” Ms. Deleón told me by phone.
At one point, she was the subject of seven criminal investigations. She was convicted in absentia of child abuse in a case reported to authorities by her former partner after Ms. Deleón left the country with their daughter, a minor.
When Ernesto Muyshondt, a former mayor of San Salvador who used photos of himself together with Mr. Bukele in his campaign, was arrested in June 2021, Ms. Deleón was warned by contacts in the attorney general’s office that she was next.
“I knew it: I defended women who were criminalized by vengeance,” she says, believing it was payback for having offended Mr. Bukele.
Ms. Deleón now works in Mexico, in a program for the protection of Central American human rights defenders. “My job is to accompany people from Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, exiled like me, in their process of adapting to the city.”
I asked her whether she regrets speaking out.
“In the countless insomnia nights of exile, I thought, ‘Why is this happening to me? Why did I lose everything, my house, my car, my job, contact with my family?’ But not even on my worst nights have I regretted it. I did the right thing in [leaving]. I didn’t have a choice.”
This wave of global democratic backsliding looks different
Even if the signs of political repression have been there for years, Mr. Bukele is still immensely popular in El Salvador. Several polls from June show his approval rating at 80% or higher.
This comes as the gangs that terrorized the country for decades have been dismantled through a policy of mass incarceration.
One in every 57 Salvadorans is now in prison, the highest rate in the world. The law that allows it is known as a “State of Exception,” which suspends constitutional rights – including the right to an attorney and privacy of communications. The measure has been extended 41 times since it was first deployed in 2022.
These moves broke the gangs’ territorial control. Millions of Salvadorans say they no longer make extortion payments to gangs, and now feel safe from crime in their communities. The murder rate has plummeted. There were nearly 2,400 murders in 2019 when Mr. Bukele took office; last year, there were only 51, according to official figures. His State of Exception is credited for the dramatic shift.
On July 10, during a prime-time newscast on the state-run television channel, a video montage showed citizens at a bus stop in Soyapango, a populous town 5 miles outside San Salvador.
“You wouldn’t have ever thought of pulling out your cellphone before,” said a man named Carlos Reyes, during the report.
“After being one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America, it’s a great accomplishment to now be the safest. The government has gotten its act together, and as a citizen, you appreciate that,” said another man, William Ceron.
Mr. Bukele has no real opposition. In 2021, his party won a majority in the legislature, which he used to change all five members of the Constitutional Court and the attorney general, who was investigating him at the time.
It was Mr. Bukele’s new attorney general, Rodolfo Delgado, who arrested critics and launched the May legal case against El Faro. It was those replacement justices who made the decision to allow Mr. Bukele to run for reelection in 2024, despite six constitutional prohibitions. It was his legislative supermajority that reformed the country’s constitution to allow indefinite presidential reelection, extend the terms from five to six years, and eliminate election runoffs. If Mr. Bukele wins the next election, in 2027, he will secure at least a 14-year period as president.
The current wave of global democratic backsliding doesn’t come through military coups and revolutions, as in the 1970s, says Dr. Aguilar, who is also a research fellow for the V-Dem report on democracy. It starts with elections.
“The military juntas, Pinochet, Castro, or Videla were leaders who based their legitimacy on the motherland, revolution, or socialism. But the new autocrats base their legitimacy on elections,” he says.
In exchange, these leaders give citizens symbolic, material, and ideological goods – such as public safety, baskets of food, stimulus checks, or a sense of power via community-level leadership positions.
Salvador Melendez/AP/File
“In El Salvador, it might be public security. Maybe in other countries, it’s ideological, nationalist values,” Dr. Aguilar says. Voters understand that the election “is rigged, but they consider the exchanged goods more valuable than their capacity to change a politician in the future.”
Dr. Aguilar spoke from Mexico, where President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo holds an approval rating of nearly 75% in her first year. The V-Dem report characterizes Mexico as a “grey zone” regime, meaning it’s becoming autocratic.
This shift includes a reform that allows for the popular election of tens of thousands of judges – all the way up to the Supreme Court. It was framed by the ruling party as a way to further democratize the justice system to better serve the Mexican public, but in the first batch of voting, only 13% of the electorate participated (compared with more than 60% in Mexico’s 2024 presidential election). One-fifth of ballots were spoiled, or submitted in protest without selecting a specific judicial candidate.
As a result, Mexico’s Supreme Court is now composed of a majority of justices with close ties to the ruling party, according to the think tank International Crisis Group. Observers said they “[do] not recommend this model of selecting judges be replicated [in] other countries.” The reform is the equivalent of a constitutional change that will make political competition “very hard” in the future, Dr. Aguilar says.
“A political system that allows elections, but where there’s no chance to compete successfully with the official party, is not a democracy,” he continues. “Mexicans know a lot about that because we had a political system for over [70] years where elections were held every time the calendar marked it. But power didn’t come from the polls.”
Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa famously described that 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party as “the perfect dictatorship.”
When crackdowns hit close to home
This idea of exchanging legal rights for security is more appealing when it’s not your own personal rights being taken away.
“People started to notice: ‘When I go to the attorney general, the public defender’s office, the ombudsman, they don’t help.’ They don’t, because they are all run by people from the official party,” says Rudy Joya, a lawyer who is co-founder of the Unit for the Defense of Human and Community Rights in El Salvador (UNIDEHC).
“People didn’t feel free to file complaints against a mayor, a congressman, an official, or a public employee because they thought they were going to favor the political group in government. So social movements were considered an alternative for communities and families,” he says.
UNIDEHC started taking cases of evictions, police harassment, and arbitrary detentions. “Lots of people come to our office saying, ‘I voted for [Mr. Bukele], for his party, for the mayor,” Mr. Joya continues. “But now I regret it because they arrested my son, who is not even a gang member, or because they want to evict me from my community.”
Salvador Melendez/AP/File
Dr. Cohen, who was a research fellow at the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, thinks people have three options when a government moves toward autocracy.
“In very broad terms, you can exit, you can double down on your loyalty, or you can voice your opinion,” she says.
The exit usually comes in the form of migration and exile. Paying lip service is a partial explanation for Bukele’s staggering popularity: June polling data found 60% of respondents fear consequences if they speak out against the president or his government. This widespread fear makes polls in El Salvador unreliable, experts say.
Mr. Bukele “has been pretty effective at trying to stifle dissent and has done a very good job of limiting people’s ability to hold him accountable,” says Dr. Cohen. But, she warns, “People bide their time, lay low, and follow this loyalty trajectory where they whisper to their friends that they’re unhappy. But people are pretty clever and look for openings to express that discontent.”
Mr. Joya left El Salvador on Feb. 9, planning a trip to Spain, France, and England to meet with European legislators and human rights organizations to discuss El Salvador. But on Feb. 25, community leaders fighting the eviction of 250 families in La Floresta, about 25 miles southwest of the capital, were arrested. That included Fidel Zavala, who became a spokesperson for UNIDEHC after witnessing torture in Salvadoran prisons.
The community leaders and their lawyers are accused of trying to sell land they don’t own and of illicit associations, a charge frequently brought against gang members. In this case, the charge is because UNIDEHC was not formally registered as an organization in El Salvador, instead operating under the umbrella of an existing legal office.
Mr. Joya has been exiled since February. The defenders became the defendants.
“We left our homes, jobs, family, all of our stuff there in El Salvador,” says Mr. Joya. “Everybody’s desire is to come back, right? But we can’t right now. I believe we can do more out here than locked up without due process.”
What comes after exile?
An exiled journalist is almost a cliché, it’s that common. It’s not necessarily a comfort to meet more and more members of this club, but in conversations with those who have already been through it, I find I’m able to start picturing a clearer image of what lies ahead.
Recently, I learned about the story of las carpetas, the more than 135,000 Puerto Ricans spied on by both the U.S. Justice Department and the commonwealth’s police in the 1980s for supporting Puerto Rican independence.
At a diner on New York’s Upper West Side on a July afternoon, my former Columbia University journalism school classmate, Maso Dávila, told me about this history and her father’s part in it. Her dad, also a journalist, became an exile from Puerto Rico following his inclusion on a list of subversives. Through Ms. Dávila, he relayed a simple message to me, one that has stuck:
Hay después, or, “There’s an after.”
What comes after exile? Wilfredo Miranda Aburto, a Nicaraguan journalist who was exiled in February 2023, told me the first thing for him was a phase of “camping, where you wander from one place to the next, still thinking you will come back, until you accept the new reality and establish yourself somewhere.”
I did the math while talking to him on the phone: I’ve visited eight U.S. states since I left El Salvador, sleeping in two hotels, a rental apartment, the houses of two relatives, and the guest room of a college
professor. Camping seems like an apt description. My colleagues are scattered throughout the Americas and beyond, figuring things out in rentals and relatives’ homes, applying for asylum, and, in some cases, looking for jobs. Some are leaving journalism behind.
Mr. Miranda told me the worst part comes next: “It’s an open door to your relatives dying without you being able to attend their funerals, being estranged from your family because their lives go on and you are no longer there.”
For some years, I’ve dreaded asking questions of Nicaraguans because they jokingly told me and my colleagues in El Salvador that they came from the future. They knew what would happen next for us.
Is there anything good that comes from exile? “You keep your freedom, man, and the possibility to keep doing journalism,” Mr. Miranda says.
I press on because I don’t see any other way forward. Some feel a certain freedom once the worst-case scenario has already taken place. The answer for me depends on the day. But it’s a point of pride to persist after paying such a high cost for being a journalist.
“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what,” Harper Lee wrote in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” But the finish line is hard to see when it comes to exile.
However, I sometimes feel I have nothing left to give.
In early August, I’m sitting in my temporary Manhattan apartment finishing this story, packing my bags to move again.
I’m collecting paperwork to rent an apartment in a city and country where I’ve never lived, where I don’t have a credit score, all while reading rejection messages from landlords who “feel more comfortable leasing to nationals.”
On days like this, which are frequent when in exile, I just cling to those two words:
Hay después.
