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

Steven Rodríguez traveled more than 40 miles from his home in Santa Ana, in western El Salvador, to attend the Pride march in the capital on June 28. It is the second time he has attended. There, some 20,000 people gathered in a mix of celebration and protest for the rights of sexual diversity. But this year, joy was replaced by fear.

“Maybe it won’t escalate, but there is a fear that what happened to the El Bosque cooperative will happen. But, from deep down I believe that, as people, we have the right to a dignified life. If it’s not me, who else is going to defend my experiences,” says Rodríguez about his decision to attend in the midst of the authoritarian escalation that the country is experiencing.

When Nayib Bukele assumed power in 2019, one of his first actions was to eliminate the Directorate of Sexual Diversity. In February 2024, during his participation in the Conservative Political Action Conference in the US, he made his position clear: “We do not allow those ideologies in schools and colleges. I think it is also important that the curriculum does not include gender ideology and such things.”

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Rodríguez’s main fear is that the march will serve as an excuse to criminalize its attendees. Earlier this year, on May 12, a hundred members of the El Bosque cooperative held a peaceful protest to avoid being evicted. This was repressed by the military police and ended with the arrest of community leader José Ángel Pérez and lawyer Alejandro Henríquez for public disorder. Both are serving provisional detention in a penal center. In the past four months, at least six human rights defenders have been arrested in the country for political reasons.

On the afternoon of June 28, the march ended peacefully and, at least on the ground, no arrests were recorded.

Training Day

Rodríguez is part of a collective called Pedrina, which focuses on community articulation for LGBTIQ+ rights in the West. His approach to digital security began when members of the organization started receiving insults, threats, and hate messages on social networks.

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Rodríguez and his collective received digital security training from Amate, another LGBTIQ+ organization that advocates nationally. Since May, Amate has trained 60 people on issues including digital rights, risk analysis, extortion, phishing, outing, surveillance, and revenge porn. It also includes the implementation of tools such as the use of VPN and encrypted messaging platforms, such as Signal and Proton.

“Something that activists were telling us [that] is very common is that people take their Facebook photos and impersonate them on social networks, either to attack other collectives or to undermine personal aspects. So it’s a very interesting experience. People are not aware of the exposure we have in the digital world,” says Fernando Paz, who is in charge of teaching these courses.

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For Rodríguez, these tools are a way of confronting a country that, with government support, is becoming increasingly violent towards those who represent diversity.

“At the university, we have had experiences of hate speech in classes. Professors have said that they share Bukele’s thinking on gender ideology and that this has to disappear because it poisons the youth,” Rodríguez says.

One way the government has used to hide violence against the LGBTIQ+ community is the lack of accounting of hate crimes committed in El Salvador. In recent years, the country’s Attorney General’s Office, also known as FGR, has used the categories “murder due to social intolerance” and “murder due to family intolerance” to count homicides that it cannot attribute to what it calls “general crime” (mostly, according to the government’s narrative, perpetrated by gangs). There is no clarity about what falls into these categories, which are not official, are not defined, and are only used publicly—not within administrative reports. Between 2023 and 2024, the FGR counted 182 of these cases.

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Hit Record

In the face of statistical obscurity, the exercise of documenting and archiving hate crimes has been taken up by organizations. The Passionist Social Service, an anti-violence group, found that 154 LGBTIQ+ people have been detained during El Salvador’s emergency regime, which began in March 2022 and has been extended 39 times to date. Following this, Nicola Chávez and her team saw the need to record cases of violence against members of the LGBTIQ+ population.

“We had always intended to start an observatory, but with the start of the exception regime everyone knows that police violence and military harassment have a disproportionate impact on the LGBT community. Obviously that hurts us, and I don’t know who else they count on to be able to denounce,” Chávez says.

To date, Chávez’s team has registered 68 incidents of violence against LGBTIQ+ people, although they believe there could be more. One of the main challenges has been to create a centralized database of the information that each member had kept on their own.

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“One of the big frustrations has always been that we don’t have consistency when it comes to storing information,” Chávez says. “To make this database, I had to go from computer to computer, collecting information in emails and loose files.”

Chávez, a doctoral student in American Studies and archivist, applied her knowledge to compile and organize the information. For her, it’s crucial to secure the databases that contain sensitive information related to the victims’ allegations under the emergency regime. One of the keys is to protect the data with multiple layers of security and to use encrypted platforms with automatic self-destruct functions, such as CryptPad.

The authoritarian escalation in El Salvador has forced organizations to be more cautious with their public work. For this reason, Chávez requested that her organization not be mentioned for fear of reprisals following the recent approval of the Foreign Agents Law, which requires those receiving international funds to register as “foreign agents.” If authorized, they would be subject to a 30 percent tax on all foreign funding, a measure that opponents of the legislation say seeks to economically stifle dissenting voices.

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El Salvador’s political situation has forced them to contemplate several scenarios on how to safeguard information. The most critical implies that the government may consider the activities of their organization as a direct contravention of the law and raid their offices. Another concern is that, at the time of registration, they will be required to hand over the contents of the devices.

“The registry is designed as an all-powerful entity. There are minimum requirements to be able to register, but they have the power to demand whatever they want,” says Chávez. “There are no limits in the regulations on what they can request. What worries us is that, as part of a routine process, they want to seize computers, hard disks, etc.”

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The passage of this law to control speech and information is not an isolated case. In November 2024, El Salvador’s Congress passed laws establishing the creation of the State Cybersecurity Agency, whose powers include managing cyber threats and overseeing data protection compliance.

“The government of El Salvador has created an entire infrastructure to have not only social, but also digital control of the citizenry. With the creation of this agency, an oversight tool is enabled for issues related to information, the use of technology and our digital identity,” explains Joshi Leban, a specialist in advocacy and digital literacy.

The records that Chávez is so keenly guarding also have a vision in which this hope for justice persists.

“At some point, perhaps this will become an international litigation, or it may be that this government ends and a process of oversight of what has happened begins. In that scenario, it will serve that the organizations have put these facts on record as documentation.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.