The Salvadoran digital media El Faro, whose administrative and legal structure has been in Costa Rica since 2023, denounced on Thursday, May 7, 2026, that the Government of President Nayib Bukele has seized the personal assets of the shareholders of the company that created the media, in what it describes as the “most recent episode of a long fiscal persecution.”
“Determined to silence independent journalism, Nayib Bukele’s regime has crossed another red line in its attack against El Faro, seizing the personal assets of its partners,” the investigative outlet said in a statement.
The note detailed that between February and April 2026, “money was frozen in a bank account and a property belonging to two partners of Trípode SA de CV, the company that created El Faro.”
“In fiscal terms, it is a ‘preventive annotation’, that is, a reserve of individual assets, as a guarantee of payment, against the possible debts of a company,” the media stated and added that “it is the most recent episode of a long fiscal persecution against this media, which began in 2020 when Nayib Bukele said on national television that ‘they have a serious money laundering investigation.'”
According to The Lighthouse, “under orders” from Bukele, “the Ministry of Finance opened four audits against Trípode” and that “unable to support the presidential accusation of money laundering in any of the audits, the Treasury changed the accusation to tax evasion, in the four years audited.”
“We have appealed each of these conclusions and shown that they are not supported. But it is very difficult to defend oneself in a co-opted judicial system like that of El Salvador. Now the dictatorship has begun to proceed against the media’s shareholders,” he said in the statement.
An irregular process
El Faro denounced that “the entire process has been irregular since its beginning” and that the Treasury “violated the law to audit the years 2014 and 2016, because the period to do so had already expired.”
The media regretted that, despite the fact that “there is no final ruling from the four audits, they have proceeded to paralyze personal assets.”
“We cannot, therefore, consider the auditors’ conclusions as procedural errors, but as one more element in the long list of harassment, monitoring, interventions, attacks and smear campaigns against us for the journalism we do,” he said.
According to the media, the “attacks by the Bukele government against El Faro ALWAYS occur after publications by this media about its mafia pacts, its corruption, its interest in concentrating all power for itself and its close circles; and the effects that this has on the Salvadoran population.”
For its part, the Salvadoran Government has not reacted to the accusations, something it does not usually do officially.
In April 2023, El Faro announced that its administrative and legal structure was moving to Costa Rica after 25 years in El Salvador, a country in which, as indicated at that time, the outlet would continue doing journalism, due to the “lack of conditions to continue operating” in Salvadoran territory.
El Faro also noted this Thursday that a year has passed since part of its staff went into “forced exile.”
Reports from the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES) indicate that in 2025 alone, 43 journalists left the country for “reasons of harassment, surveillance, threats or under the typology of preventive exile due to fear of possible arbitrary capture.”
