A promise and risks of digital security in the era of dictatorship

Rodriguez and his group received a training in digital security from amateurs, another organization from LGBTIQ+ calling at the national level. Since May, amateurs have trained 60 people on issues including digital rights, risk analysis, extortion, hunting, picnic, monitoring and pornography. It also includes the implementation of tools such as the use of VPN and encrypted messaging platforms, such as signal and Proton.

“There is something that activists tell us (this) is that people take their photos on Facebook and impersonate a personality on social networks, either to attack other group groups or to undermine personal aspects. It is a very interesting experience. People are not aware of our exposure in the digital world,” says Fernando Paz, who is responsible for teaching these platforms.

Natalia Alberto

For Rodriguez, these tools are a way to confront a country, with the support of the government, increasingly violence towards those who represent diversity.

“At the university, we had experiences in the hate speech in the classroom,” said Rodriguez.

One of the ways the government used to hide violence against the LGBTIQ+ community is a lack of accountability of hate crimes committed in El Salvador. In recent years, the country’s public prosecutor’s office, also known as FGR, has used the categories of “murder due to social intolerance” and “murder due to family intolerance” to calculate the murders that cannot be attributed to what “general crime” (mostly, according to the government’s critical narration). There is no clarity about what is included in these groups, which are not official, not only defined, and not only used – not within administrative reports. Between 2023 and 2024, FGR Calculate 182 of these cases.

Natalia Alberto

Script

In the face of statistical ambiguity, practice Documentation and archiving Hate crimes were taken by organizations. The emotional social service, which is the combat group of violence, found that 154 from LGBTIQ+ They were arrested During the Emergency Emergency System, which started in March 2022 and has been extended 39 times so far. Next, Nicolas Chavez and her team saw the need to register violence against LGBTIQ+residents.

“We have always been intended to start an observatory, but with the beginning of the exception system, everyone knows that the police and military harassment have an impatient effect on the gay community,” said Chavez.