El Salvador
El Salvador has one of the most rapidly deteriorating media environments in the Americas. Under President Nayib Bukele, in office since 2019 and serving a second term since 2024, the country has been governed under a state of emergency in force since March 2022, and the space for independent journalism has narrowed sharply. In the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index, El Salvador ranked 143rd of 180 countries with a score of 38.88, in the “very serious” band, down eight places from 135th in 2025 and more than 100 places below where it stood in 2014. RSF and other press-freedom organisations have documented a sustained campaign of pressure on critical media, including punitive tax and legal action, asset freezes affecting the investigative outlet El Faro, surveillance concerns, and a 2025 Foreign Agents Law imposing a 30% levy on foreign-sourced funding. Press-freedom groups reported that dozens of Salvadoran journalists were forced into exile in 2025.
The governing project dominates the state. Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party holds 54 of the 60 seats in the 2024-2027 Legislative Assembly, leaving only a small opposition presence, and the executive has consolidated influence over the judiciary, the prosecutor’s office and other institutions. In that context, the state’s own media operate as instruments of official communication rather than as a public-service counterweight, and there is no domestic legal framework guaranteeing the editorial independence of any state-linked outlet.
SMM maps five state-linked outlets in El Salvador, and all are either State-Controlled or Captured Public/State-Managed. There is no independent state-funded or independent state-managed outlet anywhere in the country’s public-media space, the structural opposite of neighbouring Costa Rica. The five outlets fall into two groups distinguished by how the state controls them.
Three are State-Controlled (SC). The Sistema Nacional de Medios Públicos (SINAMP), running Canal 10, Radio Nacional and the Noticiero El Salvador news brand, is operated directly by the Presidency’s communications apparatus. Diario El Salvador, the state-owned daily, is run through a publishing house tied to the Presidency and financed through opaque state-owned energy-sector subsidiaries. The legislative broadcasters, Televisión Legislativa and Radio Legislativa, are institutional media of the Legislative Assembly. Although the legislative outlets are formally a parliamentary service rather than an executive one, the Assembly is dominated by the president’s own party, so in practice all three SC outlets answer to the same governing movement.
Two are Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu). Grupo Samix, a network of commercial radio stations, and Grupo Órbita, a media group spanning the digital newspaper La Página, Órbita FM and Órbita TV, are both formerly private outlets seized in corruption and money-laundering proceedings and placed under the administration of the state asset-management body CONAB. They were not created by the state, but they are held and run under state administration, their finances are undisclosed, and journalists report pressure to provide favourable coverage of the authorities. Both were added to the State Media Monitor in 2025.
The central finding for El Salvador is the completeness of state capture across the mapped space. Whether through direct executive ownership, a party-dominated legislature or state administration of seized assets, the entire mapped state-media sector is aligned with the governing project, and none of it is insulated by an independent statute, board or oversight mechanism. That uniform capture, set against the sharp decline in press freedom, places El Salvador at the opposite end of the Central American spectrum from Costa Rica, which retains a genuinely independent public outlet alongside its captured one.