The promise and risk of digital security in the age of dictatorship

Rodríguez and his collective received the nationally from Amate, another LGBTIQ+ organization. Since May, Amate has trained 60 people on topics, including digital rights, risk analysis, extortion, phishing, excursion, surveillance and revenge porn. It also includes implementing tools such as the use of VPN and encrypted messaging platforms, such as: signal And proton.

“Something that tells us activists is very common that people take their Facebook photos and spend them on social networks either to attack other collectives or undermine personal aspects. Therefore, it is a very interesting experience. People are not aware of the exposure that we have in the digital world,” says Fernando Paz, who teaches these courses.

Natalia Alberto

For Rodríguez, these tools are an opportunity to face a country that is becoming increasingly violent with the support of the government to those who represent diversity.

“At the university we have had experiences with hate speeches in class. Professors said that they share bukele’s thinking about gender -specific ideology and that this has to disappear because it poisons the youth,” says Rodríguez.

One possibility of how the government has hidden violence against the LGBTIQ+ Community is the lack of accounting for hate crimes committed in El Salvador. In recent years, the country’s Attorney General, also known as FGR, has used the categories “Murder due to social intolerance” and “Murder due to family intolerance” to count murders that it is not what it is called “general crime” (mainly according to the government of the government). There is no clarity about what flows into these categories that are not official, are not defined and only used publicly – not in administrative reports. Between 2023 and 2024 the FGR counted 182 of these cases.

Natalia Alberto

Hit Record

In view of the statistical darkness, the exercise of Document and archive Hass crimes were recorded by organizations. The suffering social service, an anti-violence group, found that 154 LGBTIQ+ Menschen Were detained While El Salvador’s emergency regime, which began in March 2022 and has so far been extended by 39 times. Afterwards Nicola Chávez and her team saw the need to record cases of violence against members of the LGBTIQ+ BEOPulation.

“We always intended to found an observatory, but with the beginning of the exceptional regime, everyone knows that police violence and military harassment have a disproportionate influence on the LGBT community. Obviously it hurts and I don’t know who you can otherwise rely on to be able to follow,” says Chávez.