Fernanda castro
They have been spying on us for 17 months.
They have been able to download everything we have on our phones during 2020 and 2021: photos, conversations, emails.
If they wanted to, they knew where we were thanks to geolocation, and also when they wanted to, they extracted what they wanted from the devices of 22 people from the Salvadoran newspaper where I work,
El Faro
.
We have done journalism, exposed government corruption and negotiations with gangs as they were in and out of our phones as they pleased.
The question is an elephant in the room: who? In a conversation with colleagues I would say it in a much more forceful way. This being a publication and living under an authoritarian and aggressive state like that of my country, I will say it like this: we were intervened with Pegasus. NSO Group, the Israeli company that owns Pegasus, has stated that it only sells its spyware to governments. The Government of El Salvador has shown an obsessive interest throughout these years in knowing with whom we speak and what investigations we are working on. They even tend to attack us before we publish weighty investigations from national networks, press conferences starring the president, Nayib Bukele, or from government-sponsored media.The most intense periods of interventions occurred around publications such as the negotiations between this Government and the gangs, the theft of food destined for the emergency due to the pandemic, the secret plans with Bitcoin or the hidden cabinet of Venezuelans that governs with Bukele. White, bottled and tastes like milk: it is hard for me to imagine that the interventions come from an actor other than the Salvadoran State. It is also difficult for the international expert organizations that conducted the analysis of our devices to conclude something different.It is difficult for me to imagine that the interventions come from an actor other than the Salvadoran State. It is also difficult for the international expert organizations that conducted the analysis of our devices to conclude something different.It is difficult for me to imagine that the interventions come from an actor other than the Salvadoran State. It is also difficult for the international expert organizations that conducted the analysis of our devices to conclude something different.
I do not see the Honduran Government dedicating itself in a meticulous way to direct 226 interventions on the telephones of the members of
El Faro
.
I cannot imagine even the United States Government so interested as to spend millions of dollars to find out what new case of corruption of the Salvadoran Government we will publish.
The intervention was obsessive.
The best example is Carlos Martínez, who has participated in the discovery of all negotiations between governments and gangs from 2012 to the present day, and who was intermittently spied on for approximately 269 days.
Many months for uninterrupted periods.
That is, while doing journalism, but also while agreeing where to have dinner with her partner, calling her mother or sending a photograph of her vacation to the family chat.
They entered everywhere: there was not an area of the newspaper in which someone was not intervened.
Thus, they spied on the director, Carlos Dada, for around 167 days, even when he was out of the country, in Mexico, but also on the administrative manager and the marketing manager and the person in charge of digital strategy and the head of development.
As the editor-in-chief, I am the one who adds more intervention events than approximate days of infection.
In total, 42 events.
They entered, extracted, left, repeated every day.
They spied on me all that time.
It's frustrating to say.
It generates fear and anger.
But the most important thing is to assume what happened.
I take it this way: they know some of my sources, they know what happens internally in the newspaper, they know my closest family environment, they know who my best friends are, they know who I love, they know where I am going, they know with whom I go, they know how to hurt me.
And I also assume: they are going to use it to harm me, to harm us.
To hurt
El Faro
.
No state invests millions of dollars in espionage to put that information in the last drawer.
I am writing this a few hours after publishing the report where we will demonstrate the massive intervention with Pegasus to which this newspaper has been subjected.
In these weeks we have shared this information with the team.
I must be frank: there is fear. We have been victims of attacks, monitoring, accusations of different crimes, tax audits, persecution of our sources, tax subpoenas, harassment of those who buy advertising from us, leaks that they are coming for us, that already, that night they will take us out of our beds and lock us up with any crime invented by the prosecutor imposed by this regime. There is fear, because they never stop, because something new always happens, because now we know this.
I must be frank: there is satiety. Much fed up. More and more difficulties. How the hell do you do journalism under the intervention of Pegasus? How do you coordinate a newsroom without a mobile phone and with a pandemic? How do you apply a security scheme to go out on the field if telephones are unsafe territory? We are working on it, we coordinate with international organizations and with foreign journalists who have already suffered this, we have notions, we will make a plan, we will find the answers, all of them. But there is satiety, I cannot deny it.
Now, yes, I also want to say another thing, one last thing, so that our readers, our allies, our sources can hear it, so that whoever should hear it can hear it, especially those who have tried so hard to listen to us in secret: We are not going to stop.
We are journalists, we understand the importance of journalism at this time and we will do journalism.
Today we will publish that we were intervened.
Tomorrow we will go out and do journalism.
Óscar Martínez
is a journalist, editor-in-chief of the Salvadoran newspaper 'El Faro'
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