El Salvador's new wave of political exiles say history is repeating itself

The fiercest voices of dissent against President Nayib Bukele have long feared a widespread crackdown. They weathered police raids on their homes, watched their friends being thrown into jail and jumped between safe houses so they can stay in El Salvador.

Then they received a warning: Leave immediately. It’s exile or prison.

A combination of high-profile detentions, a new “foreign agents” law, violent repression of peaceful protesters and the risk of imminent government detention has driven more than 100 political exiles to flee in recent months.

The biggest exodus of journalists, lawyers, academics, environmentalists and human rights activists in years is a dark reminder of the nation's brutal civil war decades ago, when tens of thousands of people are believed to have escaped. Exiles who spoke to The Associated Press say they are scattered across Central America and Mexico with little more than backpacks and a lingering question of where they will end up.

“We're living through a moment where history is repeating itself," said Ingrid Escobar, leader of the human rights legal group Socorro Juridico, who fled El Salvador with her two children.

“We've lost everything," she said.

Bukele's administration did not respond to requests for comment.

Bukele, 43, has long been criticized for chipping away at democracy and committing human rights abuses in his war on gangs, in which the government waived constitutional rights and arrested more than 1% of El Salvador's population.

Activists and journalists say for years they have faced mounting harassment and threats from the self-described “world's coolest dictator,” whose tongue-in-cheek social media persona, bet on bitcoin and tough-on-crime discourse has gained him the adoration of many on the American right.

Despite 60% of Salvadorans saying they fear publicly expressing political opinions in a recent poll, Bukele continues to enjoy soaring levels of approval because violence plummeted following his crackdown on gangs.

Escobar — one of the populist's most vocal critics — said that as her organization challenged the government through thousands of legal cases, police constantly surveilled her family, showing up outside her mother's house and her 7- and 11-year-old children's schools.

“One day, we'll have to leave this country,” she told them, hoping it wasn't true.

But things have reached an inflection point in recent months as Bukele grows emboldened by his alliance with President Donald Trump, namely due to the detention of hundreds of Venezuelan deportees in a Salvadoran prison made for gangs.

In May, the El Salvador government passed a “foreign agents” law resembling legislation used by Russia, Venezuela and Nicaragua to criminalize dissent by targeting organizations receiving overseas funding. Shortly after, police detained Ruth López, an anti-corruption lawyer at El Salvador's top human rights organization Cristosal, accusing her of corruption. López denies the allegations.

As police escorted her in shackles to a June court appearance, she shouted: “They’re not going to silence me! I want a public trial!"

Her detention came amid the arrests of several critics.

On Thursday, Cristosal announced it had quietly evacuated all of its staff to Guatemala and Honduras, and shut down operations in El Salvador.

“The justice system has been weaponized against us," said Cristosal leader Noah Bullock. “Nobody in El Salvador has any doubt that the government can detain whoever it wants and disappear them in prisons indefinitely."

Escobar soon received news that her name appears on a list with 11 other journalists and activists targeted for detention.

Escobar, who was about to enter treatment for sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, worried that if she was thrown in prison, she wouldn't receive care. Around a third of hundreds of deaths in prisons under Bukele were caused by a lack of medical attention.

“I asked myself one question: ‘If I stay, will I die?’” she said.

In June, she and her children slipped across the Guatemala border, flew to the U.S. and then to another Latin American country. She looks over her shoulder every day.

Many of the exiles asked AP to not disclose their locations, fearing they could be tracked down. Others who have fled were too scared to speak on the record, even anonymously.

Journalist Mónica Rodríguez, 40, and her husband, 37-year-old activist Steve Magaña, are in exile.

They were among a handful of people who documented on video Salvadoran police violently quashing a peaceful demonstration. Hundreds of protesters, including children and elderly people, wanted the president to stop the eviction of their rural community on a road near his house.

“It contradicted Bukele's discourse,” Rodríguez said. “They were repressing people and we were the ones evidencing it."

Bukele later posted on the social platform X that the community had been "manipulated" by NGOs and journalists, then announced the foreign agents law.

Soon came the arrests and more people fled the country. Rodríguez said police showed photos of her and her husband to the community, asking where they were.

Rodríguez and Magaña were already scared after masked police officers raided their home months earlier, seizing computers, cellphones, Magaña's credit cards and hard drives containing Rodríguez’s reporting materials.

The couple went into hiding, hopping between four safe houses in San Salvador before leaving the country. In June, the Association of Journalists in El Salvador reported that at least 40 journalists fled the country in a matter of weeks.

For some, including 55-year-old Jorge Beltrán, a reporter who served in the Salvadoran military during the civil war, it's a case of déjà vu.

Between 1979 and 1992, war raged between a repressive, U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas. While there's no universally agreed upon number, historians believe tens of thousands of political exiles fled, including opposition leaders, journalists and human rights activists. The U.N. estimates around 1 million people left the country over the course of the war.

“I never thought I'd live through something like that again," Beltrán said. "The armed conflict paved the way for a fledgling democracy we enjoyed for a few years. ... Something was achieved. And now we've lost it all.”

The journalist investigating corruption in El Salvador for the newspaper El Diario de Hoy said he pushed back against legal attacks before going into exile.

Beltrán was sued by a business owner with close ties to the government over “moral damages” for his investigation that uncovered evidence of corruption. He was ordered to pay $10 million by a Salvadoran court. Meanwhile, he said, officials constantly harassed him for not revealing his sources in stories about drug trafficking and continued forced disappearances.

He eventually received a call from a government official warning that police might come for him.

“I recommend you leave the country. You're one of the ‘objectives’ they're looking to silence,” Beltrán said he was told. “You can leave journalism, but they'll make you pay for what you already did.”

He left El Salvador alone with two bags of medicine for high blood pressure and his war injuries, a book about government repression and two letters from his wife and daughter saying they hoped they would meet again one day.

With bags still packed in another Central American country, he said he wants to seek asylum in Canada. Noting Trump and Bukele are allies, it's the only place in the hemisphere he thinks he will feel safe.

“Even here, I'm stuck behind bars,” he said, speaking from the home with barred windows where he's hiding. “Exile is a prison.”