🎙Interview: Daniel Alvarenga

Meet the host of Humo: Murder and Silence in El Salvador.

Daniel Alvarenga is wearing a denim jacket and glasses. Daniel has a beard and a mustache and is smiling. A skyline is in the background.

Daniel Alvarenga is a queer Salvadoran journalist based out of Washington, DC. He was born and raised in Southern California to refugee parents who fled the civil war in El Salvador. He covers issues pertaining to immigration, racial equity, and Latinx cultures – with a special emphasis on Central America and its diasporas. He previously worked for Al Jazeera and Telemundo and has written for Rolling Stone and the Washington Post.

---

Learn more about the Humo podcast by visiting the Humo website.

Can you first talk about the inclusion of the word “Humo” in the title. What does the word mean in this context?

Humo means smoke in Spanish. And this podcast is all about how El Salvador’s government creates a smokescreen of repression, corruption and lies that leads to disappeared people without justice or accountability. There’s so much misinformation about the country – people think it's a paradise with bitcoin as the national currency that’s vanquished gang violence. The truth of what’s really going is seemingly shrouded in smoke, or Humo.

When you started your career in journalism, you were told that there wasn’t an audience for these stories—ones about Salvadorans. Can you elaborate on that and whether you believe this has changed?

I was told there wasn’t an audience for Central American stories, period. Then when inhumane Trump-era policies mobilized Americans around children in cages, the same liberal newsroom exploited my area expertise on the region. But later immigration and Central America fell out of the news cycle and I felt like I was back at square one. I was later told by a Hispanic newsroom to make my Central American centered stories more broadly “Latino” to appeal to their audience. 

So, yeah I’d say nothing changed. The same human rights problems persist. El Salvador and its siblings fall in and out of the public interest because to really understand the root causes is to grapple with an unforgivable legacy of American imperialism. And like, we can’t have that!

In terms of storytelling, you connect your family history to the murders and disappearances at the center of this story. Why did you feel it was important to tie your stories together?

I’m not particularly unique among Salvadorans. We all have lost someone in our families, whether we’re aware of it or not, to disappearances at some point through U.S.-backed military dictatorships, the war in the 1980s or the gang war of the last three decades. Salvadorans are a very transnational people. 2 million Salvadorans live in the U.S. – an equivalent to a third of El Salvador’s current population. Salvadorans are displaced in large numbers, so I think it’s important to connect the dots and see each other in our stories. And also to remind American listeners that Salvadorans are the 3rd largest Latinx group in the U.S., we’re in your cities and we’re connected to all this stuff, this HUMO stuff. 

Your show touches on many different themes, but three of the biggest that stood out to me were: the long lasting trauma of the civil war in El Salvador, the safety issues experienced by journalists, and government corruption. 

I’d like to focus on the journalist safety issue because we seem to be seeing a rise of this problem globally. You talk about spyware being used to target journalists, government officials and others spreading rumors about journalists on social media, and also a law called “the state of exception” restricting coverage about gangs. So two questions:

• Have you observed journalists in the U.S. experiencing similar circumstances?

• How can the public—whether in El Salvador or other countries—support journalists facing these issues?

Freedom of the press in El Salvador is a big theme of the HUMO podcast. Criticizing El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele will make you a target of the government. I feel the closest parallel in the U.S. today is how journalists will get censored by big networks or harassed by genocide-deniers for reporting on Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Ironically, President Bukele is of Palestinian descent but uses Israeli spyware to spy on journalists in El Salvador.

I think we all need to actively seek out and support our local independent journalists and platforms, ones free from corporate and militaristic interests.

While I know every story we listen to doesn’t have to have a resolution that is positive, I would like to know if there has been any progress or positive outcome since the podcast ended?

We’re still going through it. Nayib Bukele is set to take a second consecutive five-year term as president, which is unconstitutional in El Salvador. But, the positive side is that more people are waking up to the reality of what is happening in El Salvador under President Bukele. People have come up to me saying that they knew El Salvador wasn’t all pupusas and rainbows but that listening to HUMO let them see the bigger picture. So that’s a win. That’s exactly why we tell these stories. 

If you are comfortable sharing, what are your hopes for your parents’ mother country as it navigates these times?

I hope more and more people wake up to the fact that Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador is setting the country back several decades when it comes to government repression and human rights. I hope people come together and organize. I hope people find strength and learn lessons from our very recent history of resistance in the 1970s and 80s. El Salvador has lived darker days and strewn way too much blood – that wasn’t in vain.

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

I don’t have anything to announce at the moment. I’m incubating a few ideas but nothing ready to share. I’m still under-employed in the journalism industry and open to work!

---

If Latin American affairs interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Alexandra Rivera of United Stateless podcast.