Latest news with #ElFaro
Washington Post
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Bukele's crackdown pushes top Salvadoran journalists to flee
SAN SALVADOR — Their news site had just exposed details of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's alleged deals with the country's gangs. Now the three journalists were faced with a choice they had long dreaded. El Faro — Spanish for lighthouse — is the premier independent investigative news outlet in El Salvador. The staff had received word that Bukele's increasingly authoritarian government might be preparing warrants to arrest seven of its journalists.
New York Times
04-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The World Is Finally Seeing How Dangerous President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador Really Is
In May 2020, during the height of Covid, El Salvador was under a military-enforced lockdown. At a news conference, I asked President Nayib Bukele a straightforward question about meeting with the business community about reopening the economy. Mr. Bukele bristled and criticized the founder of El Faro, the news outlet where I work. Afterward, I received death threats from Mr. Bukele's supporters. One that still stands out was written on Twitter by someone outside the country: 'I want to go back to El Salvador so badly and shoot you 3 times in the head so you stop being a fool.' The reaction was typical of a certain strain of Mr. Bukele's followers, who treat criticism of the president as an unforgivable sin. After six years, he is still wildly popular, with a national approval rating of over 80 percent. Much of the diaspora is devoted to him as well. While the idealized version of him — an efficient, eloquent leader who has reduced crime in the country and is committed to fighting corruption — sounds great, the reality is that he is a mercurial and unrestrained politician who controls every institution at the expense of the country's democracy. Now he has become President Trump's jailer, welcoming deportees from the United States to be imprisoned in El Salvador's brutal prison system. Venezuelan and American families, whose loved ones have been sent to these prisons, are now going through what many families here have gone through since Mr. Bukele came to power — feeling the terrifying arbitrariness of his regime, his self-interested way of ruling, his cruelty. Many are now realizing what some of us have warned people about for years: that even if Mr. Bukele has ironically called himself the 'coolest dictator in the world,' he's a dictator nonetheless. The so-called Bukele model of national security is built on thousands of cases like that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was improperly expelled to El Salvador in March. In 2022, Mr. Bukele declared a state of exception — still in effect — to weaken the country's powerful gangs and lower the soaring crime and murder rate. It has also eroded Salvadorans' constitutional rights, and thousands of people with no criminal records have been arrested in a sweeping operation that eventually dismantled the gangs' territorial control and drastically reduced homicides. Since the state of exception began, around 80,000 people have been arrested and imprisoned in El Salvador. Mr. Bukele admitted last year that 8,000 innocent people were arrested and released in the sweep, but civil society groups say the number is much higher. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Gulf News
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf News
See the Winners of the 2025 World Press Photo Contest
The contest received over 59,000 entries from 3,778 photographers across 141 countries Last updated: 1/12 World Press Photo of the Year Finalist: Chinese migrants warm themselves under a cold rain after crossing the US-Mexico border in Campo, California. Photo by John Moore 2/12 World Press Photo of the Year Finalist: Droughts in the Amazon- A young man brings food to his mother, who lives in Manacapuru, Amazonas, Brazil. The village was once accessible by boat, but because of the drought, he must walk two kilometres along the dry riverbed of the Solimões River to reach her. Musuk Nolte 3/12 Long-Term Projects: Life and Death in a Country Without Constitutional Rights by Carlos Barrera, El Salvador, El Faro, NPR. Carlos Barrera 4/12 Singles: Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump by Jabin Botsford, United States, for The Washington Post. Members of the United States Secret Service help Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump off-stage moments after a bullet from an attempted assassin hit his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, United States. Jabin Botsford 5/12 Beyond the Trenches by Florian Bachmeier, Germany. Anhelina (6), who is traumatized and suffers panic attacks after having to flee her village, lies in bed in her new home, in Borshchivka, Ukraine. Florian Bachmeier 6/12 Bodybuilder Tamale Safalu trains in front of his home in Kampala, Uganda. Marijn Fidder, 7/12 A kolbar follows an arduous mountainpath. Kolbars' packs can weigh around 50 kg, and crossings take an average of eight to 12 hours. Kurdistan, Iran. Ebrahim Alipoor 8/12 A man sprays alcohol toward long-tailed macaques to keep them from stealing goods near Phra Prang Sam Yot temple, a monkey hotspot in Lopburi, Thailand. Chalinee Thirasupa 9/12 Residents carry their belongings as the river swells, in Ilagan City, Isabela, northern Philippines, following heavy rains from Typhoon Toraji. The typhoon knocked down trees, caused power outages, and blocked roads with debris, complicating relief efforts. Noel Celis 10/12 A Boeing 727-200 still surrounded by floodwaters weeks after the flood at Salgado Filho International Airport in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Anselmo Cunha 11/12 People glance anxiously upwards during an Israeli drone strike, as they take refuge away from buildings in Beirut's Dahiyeh neighborhood, Lebanon. Jets and drones often fly at low altitudes, causing fear and distress. Murat Şengül 12/12 People vandalize a statue of former Bangladesh president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who had resigned following weeks of unrest, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Suvra Kanti Das
New York Times
28-01-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Mauricio Funes, Salvadoran President Who Fled to Nicaragua, Dies at 65
Mauricio Funes, a former president of El Salvador and a one-time television journalist who fled to Nicaragua to escape corruption investigations, died there on Jan. 21, in Managua. He was 65. His death, in a hospital, was announced by Nicaragua's health ministry, which attributed his death only to 'a grave chronic illness.' El Faro, a Costa Rica-based, El Salvador-centered news website, said Mr. Funes had been hospitalized after a heart attack on Jan. 8. Mr. Funes was considered a fresh start for his war-battered country when, pledging to tackle endemic crime and poverty, he was elected as El Salvador's first modern-day leftist president in 2009. But by the time he fled for Nicaragua in 2016, two years after leaving office, Salvadoran prosecutors were looking into the embezzlement of some $351 million in state funds on his watch. In May 2023, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 14 years in prison for allowing the country's criminal gangs, the so-called Maras, to 'strengthen their financial and territorial grip, in exchange for a reduction in the murder rate,' according to El Salvador's public prosecutor. Shortly afterward, Mr. Funes was sentenced to six more years for evading $85,000 in taxes. A year later, in June 2024, he was given an additional eight-year prison sentence for awarding a construction contract for a bridge to a Guatemalan company in exchange for a private plane. He was under five different investigations at his death. The stolen money fueled a lavish lifestyle: a fleet of 15 vehicles, 92 firearms and 'dozens of watches from high-end brands such as Rolex, Patek Philippe and Cartier,' El Faro reported, adding that it had also verified purchases of jewelry, clothing and vacations to Disney World. 'The evidence is massive regarding his behavior,' Ludovico Feoli, director of the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University, said in an interview. 'It's sort of tragic. The moral of the story is that he had the potential to really make a difference. He showed that the left could be as corrupt as the right.' Mr. Funes insisted that his flight to Nicaragua, and the subsequent granting of citizenship to him by its president, Daniel Ortega, in 2019, did not constitute an evasion of justice. He considered himself a victim of a 'selective and fraudulent justice,' he told an interviewer in October. His exile had nonetheless been a steep fall for Mr. Funes, who had been a star of El Salvador's media and had used his television celebrity to vault to his troubled country's presidency. As a broadcast journalist, he angered the country's far-right, U.S.-supported government with his sharp coverage of the Salvadoran civil war, which lasted from 1979 to 1992 and killed some 70,000 people. The government was supported by the country's oligarchs in its fight against leftist rebels, a conflict fueled by El Salvador's longstanding economic inequality. Mr. Funes was sympathetic to the left. A United Nations-backed commission later found that 85 percent of the violence was committed by government forces. Mr. Funes's downfall 'contributed to the discredit of the political parties' in El Salvador, Mr. Feoli, of Tulane, said. 'If you look at what's happened since, it's hard not to draw a line between that behavior and the rise of Bukele,' he added, referring Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's current, far-right populist president who is admired by President Trump. Mr. Bukele has imprisoned tens of thousands of Salvadorans, most without trial. Mr. Funes was a correspondent for CNN in El Salvador from 1991 to 2007. In 1994, he was awarded Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Prize for journalism. Fired by the Mexican-owned Canal 12 station in 2005 for his independent style of reporting, he began preparing for a career in politics two years later, becoming the candidate in 2007 of a leftist coalition that included the historic revolutionary party the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). He won the 2009 election for a five-year term with nearly 52 percent of the vote, defeating the far-right party Arena after its two decades in power and promising reconciliation. But by 2011, on the occasion of a visit by President Barack Obama, the country was still beset by gang violence, including killings. 'The answer is not the prison state, but the social state, whose benefits will reach all sectors of society, ' he told the Paris newspaper Le Monde. Speaking of the gangs, he added, 'Repression, yes, but also and above all prevention.' In a country where remittances from citizens abroad made up a substantial share of the national economy, he told Le Monde, the 'obligation of the Salvadoran state was to insure education and health for all, offering possibilities for people to stay here.' In his first years in office, he partly delivered on his promises, providing school supplies and uniforms, building hospitals and reducing the price of medicine. He made conciliatory speeches, apologizing for the right-wing government's massacres of civilians during the civil war and, in 2010, for the assassination in 1980 of Archbishop Óscar Romero, a fierce critic of that regime. But Mr. Funes soon fell victim to the vice that habitually afflicts his country's leaders, according to El Salvador's prosecutors: corruption. In one month, his credit card spending equaled what he had previously earned in a year, $41,000, according to El Faro. And whatever negotiations he conducted with gangs were ineffectual. By 2015, killings had reached a rate of 100 per 100,000 people, the highest in Central America. Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena was born in San Salvador, the capital, on Oct. 18, 1959, a son of Roberto Funes, an accountant, and Maria Mirna Cartagena, a secretary. He attended secondary school at the Colegio Externado San José in San Salvador, where he later became a teacher, and studied at the Universidad Centroamericana Jose Simeon Canas, also in the capital, but did not graduate. Mr. Funes became a television reporter for El Salvador's educational channel in 1986. A year later, he went to work for the private Canal 12, where he covered politics, earning a reputation for his interviews with leftist leaders and crusading investigative journalism. A wide following helped attract the attention of FMLN officials. His marriage to Vanda Pignato ended in divorce in 2014. His survivors include his sons, Carlos, Diego and Gabriel; and a brother, Guillermo Funes Cartagena. Mr. Funes's fall from grace perplexed many of those who knew him. 'Over the years I have spoken to some of his closest officials,' the Salvadoran political journalist Oscar Martinez wrote after Mr. Funes's death, 'and when I explored the question of what happened to the great political promise of the postwar period, the answer was as disappointing as the plunder: he was blinded by luxury, vice and waste.'
