In early June, a career journalist in El Salvador received a call from a government source. Their name was on a list of more than a dozen individuals the administration of President Nayib Bukele planned to have arrested. “I left the country the next morning,” they tell Rolling Stone. “I didn’t know that at the same time, others were getting the same warning — colleagues and other people in civil society.” 

“As an investigative journalist, I asked myself many questions and had many doubts [about leaving],” they say, “but in a country that has no guarantees, no rule of law, and no fair trials, I couldn’t just wait and see.” 

The reporter — who had covered the corruption, abuses, and public deceptions orchestrated by the Bukele administration — is part of a growing exodus of journalists, activists, human rights advocates, and nonprofit organizations fleeing El Salvador. The mass exile is taking place in the backdrop of an alliance between Bukele and President Donald Trump’s administration, and the rapid devolution of U.S. support for humanitarian rights and grassroots organizations operating around the globe.

“They wanted us all to run,” says Noah Bullock, director of the Central American human rights organization Cristosal. “They created conditions where there were really no better options. Hundreds of people left the country in the last month.”

Cristosal made the decision in May to evacuate their staff and cease operations within El Salvador after 25 years working in the country. On Thursday, the organization is holding a press conference in Guatemala City to explain their decision, and discuss how they will continue their work in exile. The move came shortly after the arbitrary detention of their Chief Legal Officer for Anti-Corruption Ruth Lopez, an internationally renowned attorney who remains imprisoned by the Bukele regime along with scores of other political prisoners. 

Bullock and other exiles who spoke to Rolling Stone emphasize that they are leaving in order to continue to do their work in the most effective way they can.

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“It’s not about putting more martyrs on the table,” says one Cristosal employee, who asked to remain anonymous. “We left to better protect Ruth. Prisoners cannot protect Ruth. [When we are] free, we can continue demanding — as have the organizations that have had to leave Nicaragua and Venezuela — denouncing, and fighting for the freedom of those detained, and that is what we are doing.” 

Journalists and others operating in Latin and Central America long ago learned to dance along the lines of repressive governments, organized crime, corruption, and the threat of violent retribution in response to their work. Those who spoke to Rolling Stone — some under conditions of anonymity to protect themselves and their families — say that Bukele has transformed the expected atmospheric anxiety of their careers into a more acute sense of dread and paranoia. 

In the vein of Trumpism, the self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” — who was elected in 2019 and modified the Salvadoran constitution in 2024 to allow him to serve a second term — quickly cast members of the press and human rights groups as the enemies of progress under Bukele’s righteously ordained command. Outlets were barred from press conferences, subjected to frivolous financial audits and investigations by the administration, and attacked regularly by the president and his allies. Prominent members of the media and outspoken critics of Bukele discovered in 2022 that they were the victims of a mass, covert, digital surveillance program using the NSO spyware software Pegasus. 

The forced exile of some of the only voices publicly attempting to hold Bukele’s government accountable is taking place in the context of a global surge of right-wing authoritarians whose strategies for consolidating power regularly overlap. It’s within this global fraternity of strongmen — which also includes Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and India’s Narendra Modi — that Trump and Bukele have bonded over their shared visions of themselves as national saviors unaccountable to the laws of their nations.

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“The point isn’t that Trump is a ‘Latin American’ dictator — or an Eastern European one like Orban — the point is that they are all, along with the people who work under them, part of contemporary right-wing networks,” explains Patrick Iber, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s a dynamic system for mutual support. And it is one in which authoritarian ideas get reinforced, enemies get defined, and the leaders get to imagine themselves as engaged in a project of national redemption.” 

Central to Trump’s national redemption project is to rid the United States of undocumented immigrants. Bukele has been there to help.

In March, the Trump administration handed over 200 mostly Venezuelan deportees to the physical custody of El Salvador, and made a show of having them frogmarched, manhandled, and humiliated at Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). The high-security prison complex has served as the primary propaganda stage for Bukele’s anti-crime crackdown, and is the public face of a carceral system notorious for human rights violations, enforced disappearances, torture, and the frequent deaths of inmates. 

It was here that the Trump administration chose to stage one of the first public performances of its crackdown on alleged criminal immigration. In the dead of night, the president invoked an archaic law — the Alien Enemies Act — to grant himself wartime powers to summarily deport undocumented migrants under the guise that they were “foreign invaders.” The vast majority of the deportees sent to CECOT had no criminal record, and hundreds remain trapped in the prison system without access to legal representation. The American government, despite paying El Salvador unspecified millions to house their prisoners, has continuously insisted that the fate of those deported rests in the hands of El Salvador, while Bukele’s government — in response to an inquiry by the United Nations Office Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances — has said the detainees are under the control of the United States. 

The partnership gave Americans a window into the dysfunction within El Salvador, but it was only a snapshot of Bukele’s wholesale dissolution of democratic governance, the dismantling of institutional protections for civil and humanitarian rights, and the end of the freedom to dissent. Activists, lawyers, journalists, and human rights advocates who spoke out have been systematically targeted and harassed — to the point they have now been forced to flee the country, lest they become one of the thousands of political prisoners lost in the Salvadoran justice system. 

Gabriel Labrador, a veteran journalist who has now left El Salvador, notes that Bukele’s antipathy towards members of the press began even before his presidency. “As the mayor of San Salvador, for example, he prohibited certain journalists from entering his press conferences, and began to use the refrain that all politicians use when the press criticizes them … that the media had a hidden agenda against him, and that media criticism of him was motivated by special interests.” 

The rhetoric was decidedly Trumpist. Civil rights defenders and reporters pointing to violations being committed by the Bukele government — or reporting on the deals he made with transnational cartels in order to lower crime rates — were accused of being in cahoots with his political opposition, or of defending and supporting gang violence in El Salvador. 

In 2020, Labrador went viral after confronting Bukele about the state of civil rights in the nation at a nationally televised press conference in which the president attacked El Faro — a long-running independent Salvadoran news outlet, which has been forced to relocate significant portions of its staff — and several journalists who worked there. “I suffered a lot of attacks on social media [as a result of that incident] but at that press conference, a guard from the presidential battalion — of the president’s security — approached me and said I had no right to speak to the president like that. When I brought the recorder closer to him so he could repeat it, well, he walked away,” Labrador says. 

Moments like that were not uncommon. The sources who spoke to Rolling Stone recalled that they and their colleagues were tailed, harassed, and had police and other law enforcement appear at the homes of family or their workplace asking strange questions. Bullock recounted that a contractor who had worked with Cristosal had been abducted and interrogated in an unmarked vehicle for hours, others had had their homes searched and devices seized.

“I’ve been followed, strangers have followed me, suspicious cars have followed me,” one journalist, who worked at multiple independent news outlets before leaving El Salvador in June, tells Rolling Stone. “They’ve taken my picture, officials have held press conferences to defame my work. And so it’s been very incremental.” 

Monica Rodriguez, a radio journalist with over 15 years of experience, recounts how in December of last year, her home was raided by police and agents of the Salvadoran attorney general’s office. Rodriguez and her partner were told that they had been accused of fraud. Law enforcement agents claimed that they couldn’t provide her any additional information because the case was under seal, and after conducting an invasive search of her home, they seized a trove of electronic devices, hard drives, and other electronics containing material relevant to her work as a journalist. 

“The events that night were supposed to result in our arrest,” she said. “In the end we concluded that perhaps they didn’t detain us because we managed to make a fuss, and our colleagues managed to get out the word about what was happening to us.” 

In May, years of mounting pressure finally erupted. 

Rodriguez left El Salvador after covering protests against the eviction of agricultural communities from a series of collectives granted to them in the aftermath of the Salvadoran Civil War. The protests, which took place near Bukele’s presidential palace, were met with an intense police response, which Rodriguez and her colleagues livestreamed.

“I think we were there at the right time to be able to denounce what these rural families were being put through,” she recalls. “What we did was show what was happening. I think it showed the most repressive face of Nayib Bukele’s government.” 

Rodriguez received a tip-off days later indicating that she and her colleagues had been photographed at the protest and were being profiled by government officials as targets for arrest. “We left with practically only the clothes we were wearing, our bag, and some other things,” she says. 

Several individuals at Cristosal were tipped off by acquaintances or sources in the Bukele administration who warned them that members of the organization would be arrested, or that their offices would be raided. Most of the journalists who spoke to Rolling Stone received similar tip-offs about being on lists created by the regime. “We’re in a way better spot than lots of other people who don’t have the advantage of organizational backing in their exile,” Bullock says, adding that the tip-offs felt more than anything like an intentional “common pattern” used by the regime to “create an environment of fear” among Bukele’s critics.

Some journalists were able to reach out to the Salvadoran Association of Journalists, who’ve helped develop protocols for reporters who are threatened or otherwise harassed. Most left by land, either driving or taking buses out of the country in order to minimize potential contact with law enforcement. In some cases they left behind family, parents, partners, and pets, with the hope that they would find a way to extricate them from El Salvador once they had established themselves abroad. Most do not anticipate being able to return to the country of their birth. 

“It hurts me to think that I probably won’t be able to bury my parents,” one journalist says. “That I am taking my child away from their country.” 

One social services nonprofit worker, who has fled the country and asked not to be identified, tells Rolling Stone that the exact number of political exiles can be hard to pinpoint, because many organizations and individuals are ensuring they, their families, and their staff are out of the country before going public. In a way, “the impact of this exile is quite minuscule in terms of the amount of people,” they say. “But in social terms, in terms of what it implies for democracy, it is great.” 

The journalists and activists who spoke to Rolling Stone almost universally cited the arrest of a dozen high-level executives at several bus companies in early May as the first detonation in a chain reaction that would result in their exile. One of the men detained, Roberto Jaco of Seisabus, died while in custody. 

Days later, the Salvadoran government detained Lopez, the renowned anti-corruption lawyer and prominent Bukele critic. Lopez remained missing within the Salvadoran penal system for days following her arrest, and was ultimately charged with embezzlement in a case international human rights groups have condemned as a politically motivated farce. Lopez’s arrest was followed by the detention of constitutional lawyer Enrique Anaya — who had publicly defended Lopez following her arrest, and who was also charged with financial crimes. Alejandro Henríquez, an environmental lawyer protesting the forced eviction of over 300 families from several agricultural collectives outside of the president’s mansion, and José Ángel Pérez, an evangelical pastor and president of the El Bosque cooperative, were arrested that same month. 

“Them going after Ruth, getting involved with this lawyer who had enough recognition, not only nationally but especially internationally,” was a wake up call, the nonprofit worker says. “That was like the first blow of feeling like ‘They are going to do this, if they have done this [to her] they can do anything, [and then] with Enrique Anaya it became clear they wouldn’t stop … they’re going after anyone — whoever speaks out, whoever denounced them, whoever they want.” 

The Salvadoran government simultaneously implemented a “foreign agents law,” targeting non-governmental organizations. The broadly worded legislation requires all entities operating in El Salvador who receive funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents,” prohibits them from participating in “activities with political or other purposes” or from “affecting the public order,” and subjects all funds, goods, or other payments and transfers received by the organization to a 30 percent tax. The government has the power to designate an entity a foreign agent, and the ability to level hefty fines or impose the “suspension or cancellation” of the legal status of noncompliant organizations. The law also opens the door for the Salvadoran government to pursue criminal complaints against NGOs under existing anti-money laundering statues, laws that have already been weaponized to target activists and media outlets on an individual basis. It’s a play Latin-American civil society has seen before. The measure is eerily similar to a law implemented by Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega in 2021. 

“Ruth, combined with the foreign agents law, it just becomes absolutely clear that there’s no place for us even to defend ourselves,” Bullock says. “Staying is suicide. We’re clearly the target of the repression [and] the way that the case was conducted, it’s clear that there’s no possibility of any judicial defense.” 

Congress has considered handing similar powers to Trump through measures like the “nonprofit killer” provision, which was almost included in the “Big Beautiful Bill” the president signed into law earlier this month. The provision would have allowed the Treasury Secretary to arbitrarily revoke nonprofits’ tax-exempt status by labeling them “terrorist supporting organizations.” Meanwhile, Trump’s deportation machine is already operating well outside of the bounds of established immigration law and due process rights. In the construction of the so-called Alligator Alcatraz — a migrant detention camp in the hostile backwaters of the Florida Everglades — Republicans have engineered their own Potemkin detainment center. The camp is  ready-made for camera crews and GOP lawmakers eager to mock the migrants that pass through its tents, while those detainees’ lawyers are unable to reach them. 

The judicial system Bukele has built in El Salvador operates in an even darker void. Inmates have extremely limited contact, if any, with family, legal representation or advocates. Trials — if the detained person manages to get one — are conducted away from the public eye, as is the case with Lopez. El Salvador now has the highest population of prisoners per capita in the world. Hundreds of prisoners have died in the custody of the regime, allegations of torture and abuse abound. Any voice of dissent has been systematically neutered. 

“There’s no effective [polictical] opposition to Bukele,” Michael Paarlberg, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and an expert in Latin American politics and migration tells Rolling Stone. NGOs and independent media outlets are “a potential check on his rule, so that’s who he’s going after next.” 

“Another parallel to Trump — and not just Trump, but Orban, and like all of them — is that as [Bukele] talks, he uses words like ‘globalist,’ he talks a lot about George Soros,” Paarlberg adds. “It’s just something that they throw out there because it’s a dog whistle to the global far right, to be able to say, like, ‘Look, we’re part of this fight too.’ But it goes into his narrative that anyone who opposes him must be a foreign agent, you know, must be doing it because they’re paid to right, and so the foreign agent law is meant to not just intimidate or jail these NGOs, but also to discredit them and make it seem like they are acting as puppets of the U.S. or these shadowy global networks and the press.” 

While nonprofits operating in the United States have yet to see themselves targeted en masse, the warning signs are there at home and abroad. Trump’s first months in office saw the dissolution of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under accusations that the organization was little more than a money laundering scheme for global nonprofits. The administration has ordered an audit of all NGOs receiving government funding and grants, and cut out those whose activities do not align with “goals and priorities,” of the administration, leading to a chain reaction of death, disease, and starvation around the world. 

As the Trump administration and Elon Musk took the proverbial chainsaw to government spending, Cristosal was one of a torrent of nonprofits that lost funding amid the administration’s dismantling of USAID. A letter of termination reviewed by Rolling Stone informed the organization in February that a $3.8 million grant funding their anti-corruption work in El Salvador had been terminated. Indirectly, the administration was fulfilling a request made by Bukele in his first call to Trump following the 2024 election. 

“We began to restructure and downsize in November,” Bullock says, indicating that Cristosal and other organizations anticipated a period of foreign aid austerity under Trump. In January, we got the formal notifications, and so we reduced our staff by like 60 percent — and not all of that was U.S. funded staff, but overall changes in order to adapt.”

“Once our contracts were canceled, [they] said that they evaluated our projects and they were ‘no longer aligned with U.S. national interests,’” he adds. “That’s a big message, right? They told us in writing that this type of work is no longer in their interest.” 

If it’s no longer in the interest of the United States to support the protection of human rights and the development of robust civil society groups in its own hemisphere and beyond, autocrats like Bukele are all too happy to take advantage of the American withdrawal. 

“Politicians, one of the things that they do — if they are doing their job well — is tell a story to the people, so that people can understand the actions that the government is taking,” Iber, of the University of Wisconsin, explains. In El Salvador Bukele’s story is a “salvation narrative. It’s that he has rescued the country from a dire situation,” in regards to the gangs, violence, and the economy. There are aspects to Bukele’s story he’d rather not have told: his reported deals with gang members, the corruption in his own administration, the crimes he’s committed against the untold number of innocents lost in his prisons.

“That’s the kind of megalomania of power that you can see in somebody like Bukele and in somebody like Trump,” Iber says. “They’re not really capable of taking on alternative information and dealing with it in a sophisticated way. They reject alternate stories and accuse the people who are providing them of undermining the nation in some way, because of their identification of themselves with the national project and with the restoration of national greatness in one way or another.”

Trump and Bukele mirror each other most closely in their ability to exploit visual propaganda and public narratives about crime as a vehicle to undermine the very foundations of their nation’s governmental systems, as well as the legitimacy of their critics: governmental, journalistic, charitable, or otherwise. 

In El Salvador, “nobody doubts that if you speak out, you’ll suffer a consequence. If you’re an organization and you decide to do activities that aren’t sanctioned by the president, you will get canceled. You’ll get fined. They’ll take all of your assets, and they can put you in jail. And there’s really nothing you can do about it.” 

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There is nothing you can do besides protect yourself, protect your colleagues, work from afar, and hope that one day you can return to the nation you fled and hope to rebuild. In the meantime, many are pained by the notion of having to leave the detained behind, with the hope that their continued efforts and international pressure will secure their well-being. 

“Our priority now is defending Ruth,” Bullock says. “That’s the last thing we as her colleagues and friends and family can ever let go of. But at the same time, I can’t do anything for Ruth if I’m in prison.”