The digital environment claims that tax auditors manipulated the financial information provided. For APES, “The government uses state institutions to persecute those media that are not comfortable with that.”
The digital newspaper El Faro denounced, through an editorial published on Wednesday, that the government of President Nayib Bukele he continues his attacks on his journalistic work.
In the text entitled “The government is filing another case against El Faro”, the media denounces that the government unfoundedly accuses them of evading taxes for 33.7 thousand USD, after receiving the preliminary conclusions of an audit to which the Ministry of Finance has been receiving the media for almost a year.
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In these conclusions, according to the editorial El Faro, the Treasury states that the media avoided taxes in 2017 for income in 2018. “This absurdity has only one explanation: the mission of the Treasury auditors investigating us since July 2020 is not to take care of state interests or to pursue the evaders, but to comply with the attack orders issued by the Presidential House ”, it can be read in the text.
El Faro claims that “in his undemocratic obsession with destroying critical voices or those who do not pay homage to him, President Nayib Bukele is pressuring his entire state apparatus to function as a machine of persecution and to denigrate those voices.”
Lawyers Tripod, the company that owns El Faro, They had already filed an appeal for protection before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, in September 2020, because of the harassment they faced the Treasury.
On that occasion, the lawyers stated that the aforementioned ministry submitted an audit to the newspaper which “includes requests for information that exceed the tax interest, such as the complete books of the minutes of the Board of Directors of El Faro, which include discussions on a nature editorial or interim reports on the execution of projects with foundations and organizations of international cooperation ”.
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In addition to the allegation of alleged tax evasion, the newspaper also denounces that, “with an even weaker existence”, the Treasury “also accuses them of not declaring alleged subscription revenues” to its citizen excavation program.
According to the Treasury, the media must declare those single contributions as fixed monthly income and pay the related taxes, with which, according to the editorial, “it is an action that leads to betrayal”, as such income does not exist.
Faced with the accusations made by the Ministry of Finance, El Faro states that it has all the documentation in order, reiterating at the same time that for 20 years it has paid in due time all the taxes imposed by law.
“Those auditors, it must be repeated, are acting according to higher orders, in order to mount a case to support the a priori verdict that the president himself announced in September 2020,” the editorial states, in a clear reference to the statements on who made them. he gave. Bukele on a national chain and in which he stated that in El Faro there are indications of a serious case of money laundering.
For the media, the Ministry of Finance has made efforts to build a version that supports the words of the president, but they lack evidence and arguments, according to the newspaper.
“Nayib Bukele’s presidency aims to silence us. And since all his espionage systems, defamation networks, information hiding, slander and threats have not been enough to silence us, he is now resorting to cases where they are against us, “the media said in its editorial .
The new accusations against El Faro worry the Salvadoran journalistic union
In light of what has happened, the El Salvadoran Association of Journalists (APES) is concerned that the government continues to attack the independent press.
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“It is clear how Nayib Bukele’s government is using state institutions to persecute those media outlets that, in his words, are uncomfortable,” the union’s representative, Angélica Cárcamo, said in an interview with EFE.
For Cárcamo, “that kind of gadgets that are invented is worrying” and “I am very sorry for this situation that is happening, which is not typical of democratic governments.”
“Here what is being tried is to establish a narrative from the Government according to which the media, El Faro as an example, avoids taxes. What we will try to do is to establish a narrative of that style that discredits the media “, said the communicator.
In early February, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted preventive protection measures in favor of 34 members of El Faro, who warned that “they will be subjected to harassment, threats, intimidation and stigmatization.”
In early March, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) in El Salvador admitted an amparo lawsuit against the Treasury for allegedly using an audit to try to obtain information on “editorial line, journalistic methodology, sources and investigations.” in progress ”by El Faro.