I sincerely hope -- tempered by reality, of course -- that this is not a preview of what's to come here.

In early June, a career journalist in El Salvador received a call from a government source. Their name was on a list of more than a dozen individuals the administration of President Nayib Bukele planned to have arrested. “I left the country the next morning,” they tell Rolling Stone. “I didn’t know that at the same time, others were getting the same warning — colleagues and other people in civil society.”

“As an investigative journalist, I asked myself many questions and had many doubts [about leaving],” they say, “but in a country that has no guarantees, no rule of law, and no fair trials, I couldn’t just wait and see.”

The reporter — who had covered the corruption, abuses, and public deceptions orchestrated by the Bukele administration — is part of a growing exodus of journalists, activists, human rights advocates, and nonprofit organizations fleeing El Salvador. The mass exile is taking place in the backdrop of an alliance between Bukele and President Donald Trump’s administration, and the rapid devolution of U.S. support for humanitarian rights and grassroots organizations operating around the globe.

“They wanted us all to run,” says Noah Bullock, director of the Central American human rights organization Cristosal. “They created conditions where there were really no better options. Hundreds of people left the country in the last month.”