After ten months of state of exception, El Salvador seems to have destroyed the territorial reach and centralized leadership of the notorious MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. El Faro verified their withdrawal from communities across the country and with a veteran leader of one of the groups. To achieve it, the Bukele administration, who secretly negotiated with the gangs for three years, unleashed mass human rights violations that have raised concerns on the side effects and sustainability of the new scenario.

In October 2020, the Bukele administration obtained three spyware tools from an intermediary firm of an Israeli ex-special operations official close to the Salvadoran president. The first registered deployment of Pegasus in the country occurred four months prior.

When a spike in homicides in November 2021 put Nayib Bukele’s negotiations with El Salvador’s gangs in crisis, officials mediated with the criminal organizations to curb the violence. While police documents ascribed the death of 45 people to differences between MS-13 and 18th Street, a source from the Mara Salvatrucha asserted that they were caused by a rift inside the gang over how the negotiations were conducted.

When Nayib Bukele’s signature Chivo Wallet crashed two days after launch, an American developer was brought in to put out the flames. The story he told to a Texas court is one of amateur coding, millions of dollars of taxpayer money, improvised decision-making, and removal of money laundering firewalls when the bitcoin trading software came to a grinding halt after just 150 downloads.

The same day Nayib Bukele staged a military siege of the gang bastion Soyapango, Xiomara Castro deployed police and military in 162 of Honduras’ most marginalized urban communities after decreeing a state of exception. The suspension of constitutional guarantees goes even further than in the Salvadoran model.

On behalf of 15 members of El Faro, lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute sued the Israeli surveillance company NSO for allegedly selling a program that hacked the phones of 22 members of El Faro between June 2020 and November 2021. The lawsuit asks the court to order NSO Group to disclose the name of its client in El Salvador. This is the first time that journalists targeted by NSO spyware, including a U.S. national, file suit in the U.S.

On November 7, the Police and Army violently evicted the Garifuna community in Punta Gorda, Roatán, defying ancestral land rights promised by Honduran law since 1995. It’s the first removal of a Garifuna community under President Xiomara Castro.

Official documents obtained by El Faro through Guacamaya Leaks show not only that Élmer Canales Rivera, “Crook,” was freed from prison in November 2021, but that his exit was registered in emails, police profiles, and other reports from the National Civil Police of El Salvador. These documents also reveal that, hours before the senior MS-13 leader's release, a police team arrived at Zacatecoluca Prison to serve him an additional outstanding arrest warrant, but a member of the unit told El Faro that prison authorities did not let them enter. Despite the fact that Canales was released by the Bukele administration, the Police have requested help from foreign partners to recapture him.

On Monday the Biden administration expanded Trump-era sanctions to the Nicaraguan economy, cutting off the country’s lucrative gold industry from U.S. markets as Managua deepens energy cooperation with Moscow and Tehran. The administration, aware that other Central American leaders are watching, says it will study similar moves against other industries bankrolling Ortega.

In the first 24 hours of the three-day massacre that put an end to the Bukele administration’s gang negotiations and ushered in the state of exception, the Salvadoran Prison Bureau took four top leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha out of maximum-security prison to a private hospital, internal documents report.