BONN, Germany - Amid what he fears is his country’s direction toward a “full-fledged dictatorship”, El Salvador journalist Oscar Martinez said “silence is not an option”, when he received here Monday the Deutsche Welle (DW) Freedom of Speech Award 2023.

“Do not abandon us, for we will continue to inform you. Do not abandon us, for the powerful are coming after us. Silence is not an option”, Martinez, an investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of the online platform El Faro in his home country, said in a speech.

DW conferred the honor on Martinez in recognition of his and the El Faro staff’s “exemplary and courageous journalism… despite the personal danger they experience,” Peter Limbourg, director general of the German public broadcaster, said at the awarding ceremony which capped the first of the two-day Global Media Forum 2023.

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“Freedom of expression and opinion in El Salvador are in peril, which makes trustworthy journalism even more important,” he said.

DW said Martinez has “reported on state corruption and extrajudicial killings by the police”, among the pressing topics he had researched on.

"El Faro uncovered the negotiations of President Bukele's government with the criminal organization MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha), which is active in North and Central America, exposing government collusion with the organization on sentence mitigation, changes in jurisdiction, and evasion of U.S. extradition requests. These findings were confirmed by the indictment of members of the MS-13 organization in a U.S. court," DW said in a previous statement.

The Freedom of Speech Award has been presented by DW since 2015 to draw attention to restricted press freedom, according to the media organization.

Associated Press journalist and novelist Mstyslav Chernov, and freelance photojournalist Evgeniy Maloletka, whose images helped convey to the world what was happening on the ground as Russia invaded Ukraine, received last year’s Freedom of Speech Award.

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