The Promise and Peril of Digital Security in the Age of Dictatorship

Rodríguez and his corporate received integer information grooming from Amate, different LGBTIQ+ enactment that advocates nationally. Since May, Amate has trained 60 radical connected issues including integer rights, hazard analysis, extortion, phishing, outing, surveillance, and revenge porn. It besides includes the implementation of tools specified arsenic the usage of VPN and encrypted messaging platforms, specified arsenic Signal and Proton.

“Something that activists were telling america [that] is precise communal is that radical instrumentality their Facebook photos and impersonate them connected societal networks, either to onslaught different collectives oregon to undermine idiosyncratic aspects. So it's a precise absorbing experience. People are not alert of the vulnerability we person successful the integer world,” says Fernando Paz, who is successful complaint of teaching these courses.

For Rodríguez, these tools are a mode of confronting a state that, with authorities support, is becoming progressively convulsive towards those who correspond diversity.

“At the university, we person had experiences of hatred code successful classes. Professors person said that they stock Bukele's reasoning connected sex ideology and that this has to vanish due to the fact that it poisons the youth,” Rodríguez says.

One mode the authorities has utilized to fell unit against the LGBTIQ+ assemblage is the deficiency of accounting of hatred crimes committed successful El Salvador. In caller years, the country’s Attorney General's Office, besides known arsenic FGR, has utilized the categories “murder owed to societal intolerance” and “murder owed to household intolerance” to number homicides that it cannot property to what it calls “general crime” (mostly, according to the government's narrative, perpetrated by gangs). There is nary clarity astir what falls into these categories, which are not official, are not defined, and are lone utilized publicly—not wrong administrative reports. Between 2023 and 2024, the FGR counted 182 of these cases.

Hit Record

In the look of statistical obscurity, the workout of documenting and archiving hatred crimes has been taken up by organizations. The Passionist Social Service, an anti-violence group, recovered that 154 LGBTIQ+ radical have been detained during El Salvador's exigency regime, which began successful March 2022 and has been extended 39 times to date. Following this, Nicola Chávez and her squad saw the request to grounds cases of unit against members of the LGBTIQ+ population.

“We had ever intended to commencement an observatory, but with the commencement of the objection authorities everyone knows that constabulary unit and subject harassment person a disproportionate interaction connected the LGBT community. Obviously that hurts us, and I don't cognize who other they number connected to beryllium capable to denounce,” Chávez says.