MEXICO CITY — They have fled to Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica and Spain. Most left in a hurry with few possessions, unsure of when — or whether — they would be able to return home.
As El Salvador cracks down on dissent, jailing critics of President Nayib Bukele, droves of human rights activists, journalists and other members of civil society are leaving the country out of fear.
More than 100 people have fled in recent months — the biggest exodus of political exiles since the country’s bloody civil war. That puts El Salvador in the company of other authoritarian Latin American nations, including Nicaragua and Venezuela, where dissent has been criminalized and critics choose between prison and exile.
On Thursday, one of El Salvador’s most prominent human rights groups joined the flight. Cristosal, founded in 2000 by leaders of the Episcopal Church, announced that it had suspended its operations in the country, and that nearly two dozen of its staffers had left.
Cristosal has been a thorn in the side of Bukele, a charismatic populist who has embraced strongman tactics — and who has been emboldened by his close alliance with President Trump.
The group slammed Bukele’s unconstitutional run for a second presidential term last year. It has criticized El Salvador’s ongoing suspension of civil liberties as part of Bukele’s sweeping crackdown on gangs, and provided legal representation to hundreds of people it says were wrongly imprisoned in the country’s notorious jails.
Cristosal’s leaders have for years faced surveillance, police harassment and attacks by Bukele on social media.
But this year, authorities passed a new law that would impose a 30% tax on donations to nongovernmental organizations like Cristosal. And in May, police arrested Ruth Eleonora López, the leader of the group’s anti-corruption program, alleging she stole public funds during a stint working for the government years earlier. International rights organizations, including Amnesty International, say the charges are spurious and politically motivated and that López is being denied the right to a fair trial.
Her detention and the recent jailing of other outspoken Bukele critics, including constitutional lawyer Enrique Anaya, environmental activist Alejandro Henríquez and pastor José Ángel Pérez, prompted Cristosal to shutter its offices and remove its employees from the country, said the group’s director, Noah Bullock.
“There is no impartial institution where we can plead our case if and when the government decides to continue to persecute us and our staff,” Bullock said. “We can’t help anybody if we’re all in prison.”
Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party controls Congress and has purged the judiciary, replacing independent judges with loyalists.
Amid that concentration of power, independent journalism and civic groups “were the only pillar of democracy that remained,” Bullock said. He said the recent arrests send a clear message: “Democracy is over.”
“El Salvador is on a dark path,” said Ivania Cruz, an attorney who heads another nonprofit, the Unidad de Defensa de los Derechos Humanos y Comunitarios. She has been living in Spain with her son since February, when her group’s office was raided and one of her colleagues was arrested.
Cruz, too, had represented inmates swept up in Bukele’s mass imprisonment campaign, under which more than 85,000 people, or nearly 2% of El Salvador’s population, were locked up. “Bukele has criminalized us for defending the rights of the people,” she said.
Indefinite exile in a new country has not been easy, she said. “I came with only a small suitcase,” she said. “It’s hard knowing you can’t go home and you have no choice but to start a new life.”
Bukele has also waged a campaign against journalists.
An analysis by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and digital rights group Access Now found that more than two dozen journalists were surveilled for more than a year with the spyware Pegasus, whose Israeli developer sells exclusively to governments.
At least 40 journalists have fled the country, according to the organization that represents them in El Salvador. They include the reporters who documented the Bukele government’s negotiations with gangs, corruption in the awarding of public contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that Bukele and his family purchased 34 properties valued at more than $9 million during his first presidential term.
El Faro, the investigative news site that first exposed the gang negotiations, pulled its reporters out of the country after government sources warned that they were about to be arrested.
“We know what’s coming: exile or prison,” editor-in-chief Oscar Martínez said in an interview published by the Committee to Protect Journalists earlier this year. “As long as we have time, we’ll keep reporting.”
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