The Promise and Peril of Digital Security in the Age 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 cryptocurrency platforms, such as signal and proton.

Something that activists tell us [that] It is very common for people to take their photos on Facebook and impersonate social networks, either to attack other groups or to undermine personal aspects. So it is a very interesting experience. Fernando Baz, who is responsible for teaching these courses, says people are not aware of our exposure in the digital world.

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 182 returned from these cases.

Natalia Alberto

Script

In the face of statistical ambiguity, organizations have taken the exercise and documentation of hate crimes and archives by organizations. Emotional social service, which is the group of violence control, found that 154 people of LGBTIQ+ were arrested during the Emergency Emergency System, which began 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.