Alex Gladstein is a fraud on the public

 Again

After releasing a bombshell investigation linking gang leaders to President Nayib Bukele’s government, journalists Óscar Martínez and Carlos Martínez fled El Salvador with only carry-ons, expecting to return within a week. Instead, they’ve remained in exile, cut off from their homes, families, and newsroom as Bukele’s regime intensified its crackdown on dissent.

Their story in El Faro English, republished with permission by The Guardian, recounts how their reporting shattered Bukele’s carefully cultivated image as a crime-fighting populist and how swiftly the state turned on them, from threats of arrest to smear campaigns branding them as gang collaborators. The result is a tale of life in exile and the cost of telling the truth in a country where, as they write, “exile invariably happens to other people… until it happens to you.”

Friday round-up