The digital media claims that the Treasury auditors have manipulated the financial information delivered. For APES, “the government is using state institutions to prosecute those media that are uncomfortable with it.”
The digital newspaper El Far denounced, through an editorial published on Wednesday, that the government of President Nayib Bukele he continues with his attacks on his journalistic work.
In the text entitled “The Government makes another case against El Far”, the media denounces that the government unfoundedly accuses them of evading taxes for $ 33,700, after having received the preliminary conclusions of an audit in which the medium was submitted by the Ministry of Finance for almost a year.
You can read: Nayib Bukele “must respect media freedom,” says Joe Biden’s adviser
In these conclusions, according to the editorial of El Far, the Treasury states that the environment evaded taxes in 2017 for income in 2018. “This absurdity has only one explanation: the mission of the auditors of the Treasury we are being investigated since July 2020 is not to take care of the interests of the state or prosecute evaders, but to comply with the attack orders issued by the Presidential House, ”the text reads.
El Far maintains that “in his anti-democratic obsession with destroying critical voices or not paying tribute to him, President Nayib Bukele is pressuring his entire state apparatus to function as a machinery of persecution and denigration of those voices.”
The lawyers of Tripod, the company that owns the lighthouse, they had already applied for an appeal before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, in September of the year 2020, by the harassment that faced from part of Property.
On this occasion, the lawyers stated that the said ministry had subjected the newspaper to an audit that “included requests for information that exceed the tax interest, such as the complete books of minutes of the Board of Directors of the Lighthouse, which include discussions of an editorial nature, or interim reports on the implementation of projects with foundations and international cooperation bodies “.
You may be interested: The U.S. government points out that the Bukele government threatens journalism
In addition to the charge of alleged tax evasion, the newspaper also alleges that, “with even weaker support,” Treasury “also accuses them of failing to declare alleged subscription revenue” to its Citizen Excavation program.
According to the Treasury, the media must declare these single contributions as a fixed monthly income and pay the consequent taxes, thereby, and according to the publisher “it is an action that leads to treason,” as such income does not exist .
Faced with the accusations made by the Ministry of Finance, El Far claims that he has all the documentation in order, while reiterating that for 20 years he has paid on time all the taxes required by law.
“These auditors, it must be repeated, act following higher orders, in order to mount a case that supports the a priori verdict that the president himself announced in September 2020,” says the publisher, in a clear reference to the statements given by Bukele on a national network and in which he stated that there were indications of a serious case of money laundering in El Far.
In the middle, the Ministry of Finance has struggled to build a version that upholds the president’s words, however, they have no evidence and arguments, according to the newspaper.
“The presidency of Nayib Bukele aims to silence us. And since all its systems of espionage, defamation networks, information concealment, slander and threats, have not been enough to silence us, now he is resorting to mounting cases against us, “the media outlet said in its editorial.
New accusations against El Far worry Salvadoran journalistic guild
Faced with the facts, the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES) considers it worrying that the government continues to attack the independent press.
Read also: No breakthrough law to protect journalists
“It is clear that the Nayib Bukele government is using state institutions to persecute those media that are, in his words, uncomfortable,” said the union’s representative, Angelica Cárcamo, in an interview with the EFE agency.
For Cárcamo, “this kind of artifacts that are being 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 to do is to establish a narrative from the Government that the media, El Far as an example, are evading taxes. What is going to be tried is to establish a narrative of this style that discredits the media of communication, “said the communicator.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary protection measures in early February in favor of 34 members of the Lighthouse who, he warned, “would be the object of harassment, threats, intimidation and stigmatization.”
In early March, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) El Salvador admitted a lawsuit against the Treasury for allegedly using an audit to try to obtain information from the “editorial line, journalistic methodology , sources and ongoing research “by El Far.