Bukele’s new Legislative Assembly reformed a law that threatens press freedom

SAN SALVADOR.- According to the reform presented by the deputy Christian Guevara, leader of the group of the New Ideas party, now print media in The Savior They will not have tariff exemptions i.e. they will not enjoy tax benefits and will have to pay taxes on the raw material, machinery and equipment they import.

The reform also establishes that “they will not benefit from exceptions to income tax for income from these sources, nor exceptions to the tax on transfers of goods and services.

The text was approved with 68 of the 84 deputies The New Ideas parties, Grand Alliance for National Unity (WIN), National conciliation party (PCN), Christian Democrat Party (PDC) and the leftist Farabundo Martí facade Para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), approved the reform of the printing law in force for 70 years.

The text must be sanctioned by the President Nayib Bukele and if it goes ahead, it will enter into force eight days after its publication in the Official Journal.

The president’s relationship with the press when his leadership is criticized has been strained since the start of his term and he tends to categorically reject any questioning.. Some journalists publicly denounced government harassment and last February Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures to 34 employees of digital newspaper Lighthouse after considering that they were in a serious and urgent situation risk of irreparable violation of their rights due to threats to their work.

Lighthouse says that since Bukele took office his journalists have faced blockades of press conferences, threats from government institutions that have hampered the journalistic work of oversight and accountability, smear campaigns through from anonymous articles published in state-sponsored media, to stigma and harassment in the press conferences, journalist tracking and newspaper accounting audits that go beyond taxation.

In the proposal presented by Guevara, he declares that “it is unfair that VAT (value added tax) is applied to products in the basic basket, and that certain written communication media are exempt from this payment; It is unfair that a poor country where people have basic needs is granted a tax exemption»Said Guevara.

Guevara said Salvadoran newspapers sold over 170,000 copies a day, generating over $ 80,000, “280 million in a decade, all without paying a single penny in tax.” For her part, MP Anabel Belloso, from the FMLN party, recalled that the initiative has been under discussion for many years and that the necessary votes have never been obtained to carry out the reform. “As FMLN, we have always believed in building a more progressive tax policy,” Belloso commented.

however, Assistant of our time, John Wright, What expressed opposition to the initiative and claimed that those who promoted reform for newspapers to pay taxes “The only thing that interests them is revenge and persecution”.

For his part, for the deputy Roméo Auërbach, the GANA party is not a question of revenge. “We are not interested in what they publish, nobody reads them and nobody believes them. It’s not about revenge because we don’t need it, it’s about tax justice ”, for her part, Dania González, one of“ making the poor poorer and the rich richer, because they made the law at their convenience ”.

THE NATION