Lies Upon Lies to Protect Mafia Dealings

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The security minister of the Salvadoran dictatorship, Gustavo Villatoro, accompanied his announcement of the recent capture of a gang member with a series of lies and slanderous accusations against this newspaper.

Villatoro did not directly name El Faro. That task was left to lower-level propagandists: Diario El Salvador, legislators, social media teams. But he referred to our May 2025 interview with the recently captured gang member and published an image from it, claiming that we had offered him asylum in Mexico in exchange for speaking with us.

The man in question is Remberto Colindres Rajo, alias “Little Man” or “Liro,” a member of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang who granted us the interview as a three-part video series titled Charli’s Confessions: Interview with Gang Leader on His Secret Pacts with Nayib Bukele.

The series went viral, picked up by media outlets in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. In it, Liro expands on the revelations made by Carlos Cartagena, alias “Charli.” He details the agreements his gang reached with Nayib Bukele over eight years, beginning when Bukele was a candidate for mayor of San Salvador for the FMLN.

That publication marked the beginning of the exile of several El Faro journalists, after they learned of a plan to capture them at El Salvador’s airport.

El Faro does not and cannot offer asylum or “safety in Mexico” to anyone — neither in Mexico nor in any other country. Such protections are granted by governments, not by journalists or this newspaper.

The minister knows this. His intention is to defame us, accusing us of protecting gang members in order to avoid answering all the unanswered questions that have arisen since we published those materials. The only concession made to Liro —as our journalists state in the videos— was to not show his face on screen, though his tattoos and gang nickname were revealed.

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The publication included extensive interviews we conducted separately with the two gang members from the 18th Street Revolucionarios.

Charli confirmed that he had been arrested under the state of exception. We confirmed his arrest through police records and obtained a photograph of him at the police station where he was taken, in which he appears shirtless, showing his gang tattoo on his chest.

The police released him just a few hours after his arrest, following a mysterious call from someone with enough power within the government to order the release of a gang member with a long criminal record and a national leadership role in his criminal organization.

Liro confessed in the interview that, during the state of exception, he was warned by Carlos Marroquín —director of Tejido Social and Bukele’s chief representative in negotiations with the gangs— that he should leave the country to escape the security regime that the government itself had imposed.

According to Liro, Marroquín personally drove him to a roadside motel in Sonsonate, where he left him for a few hours, then returned for him and took him to a blind spot on the border with Guatemala, where he smuggled him across.

Minister Villatoro, why don’t you explain to us why Charli was released during the state of exception? Aren’t you interested in verifying whether Liro escaped because an official smuggled him out through an irregular crossing point?

How is it that Élmer Canales Rivera, alias “Crook” —one of the MS-13 leaders who was serving a sentence of more than 40 years and was supposed to be incarcerated in a Salvadoran prison— was found at large in Mexico in 2022?

If the minister were truly interested in fighting criminals and investigating complicity, he would have already started by cleaning house. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Salvadoran officials transported Crook to the Guatemalan border and gave him money and a weapon. Won’t the minister investigate that?

This newspaper has published audio recordings in which the director of Tejido Social himself, Carlos Marroquín, confesses to having released Crook and personally transported him to the border. We documented, through posts on Canales’s partner’s social media accounts, his entire journey from San Salvador to Mexico, which began with a stay in a luxury apartment in the Escalón neighborhood.

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We documented, through audio recordings of phone calls, how the head of the Elite Division against Organized Crime (DECO) at the National Civil Police, Chief Inspector Raúl Eduardo Reyes Escuintla, offered millions and other benefits to a fugitive gang leader to help them negotiate with a Mexican cartel a plan to recover Crook, after having illegally released him prior to the state of exception.

We published, along with photographs from the maximum-security prison’s internal surveillance system, images of the government negotiator Marroquín entering prison accompanied by hooded gang leaders to design the pact between the Bukele administration and the criminals.

There’s more: on March 25, 2022, just hours before MS-13 launched the bloody weekend that left 87 Salvadorans dead, the gang’s top leader, Borromeo Enrique Henríquez, alias El Diablito de Hollywood, along with three other gang leaders, was transferred from a maximum-security prison to a hospital, where he was able to have contact with people on the outside.

Why was Diablito transferred to the hospital? Did he go there to give orders to start the massacre, or did he try to stop it?

Transfers out of correctional facilities, such as those of Crook and Diablito, were authorized by the director of prisons, Osiris Luna Meza, one of the most heavily sanctioned officials of the dictatorship, who currently serves as Deputy Minister of Security and Justice. In other words, he is Minister Villatoro’s second-in-command.

Osiris Luna was a key figure in the pact between Bukele and the gangs. He controlled the prisons where officials met secretly with gang members. He himself handed over evidence of that pact to the U.S. Embassy, which El Faro had access to and published in 2021.

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Luna is sanctioned by the United States government precisely for implementing the pact with criminal groups, just like Marroquín. But he is also the one who authorizes and oversees the practices of systematic torture in prisons carried out by fully identified prison guards. Does Minister Villatoro have anything to say to us about this?

Did the minister know that there are at least two legislators from the ruling party, Nuevas Ideas, who actively participated in his government’s pact with the gangs, advocating for greater benefits for criminals? Their names are Dennis Salinas and Víctor Martínez, alias Scar, the alternate legislator for Suecy Callejas.

Charli identified them in the photos of prison admissions that Osiris Luna handed over to the U.S. Embassy. El Faro also identified them in the prison documents that we published in 2020, when we conducted that investigation while we were under surveillance by Pegasus.

A minister truly interested in combating criminal networks should answer all these questions, because these networks are right under his nose. Instead, he uses the machinery of the state to spread lies against a news outlet. This confirms that his fight is not against crime, but against those who expose the truth about a mafia regime, of which he is a key part.

A year and a half after sitting down to talk with us, Colindres Rajo, alias “Liro,” is once again in the hands of the Salvadoran government, after being captured by Mexican authorities. The gang member did not have asylum.