DIGITAL BODIES, TERRITORIES IN DISPUTE: EL SALVADOR

El Salvador is a country with deeply rooted structural inequalities that manifest themselves in constant social unrest. It has gone from suffering under military dictatorships and an armed conflict to social violence and territorial control at the hands of organized crime. Starting in 1992, the country began to build a fledgling democratic institutional framework. Nevertheless, following the neoliberal handbook, the political and de facto powers privatized what little the state still administered, except – thanks to the sectors’ trade unions – education and healthcare. The political and economic system built after the armed conflict failed to address people’s most pressing demands, instead favoring local elites and exacerbating inequality and violence.

Nayib Bukele of the Nuevas Ideas Party became president in 2019, launching a rapid process to concentrate power in the Executive Branch with the goal of efficiently implementing global techno-capitalist, ultra-conservative and anti-rights agendas. On 9 February 2020, together with the Minister of Defense and the Director of the National Civil Police, Bukele took over the Legislative Assembly. This de facto coup d’état marked a pivotal moment in the decline of the country’s fragile democratic institutions.

Today, El Salvador has embraced repressive policies that are incompatible with human rights and has welcomed giant technology companies opening physical corporate offices, such as Google, while at the same time displacing communities to make way for extractive megaprojects. Moreover, the government has moved to dismantle the already inadequate social safety nets that existed and has attempted to silence and weaken the social and community fabric.

Innovation and the digital agenda are presented as the hallmarks of a model that – under the guise of “modernization” and “development” – has no other goal than to benefit wealthy foreign companies through, for example, tax exemptions. Furthermore, the government has pushed through a number of legislative changes that pave the way for the privatization of common goods and the dispossession of communities to benefit foreign investments. These have included the General Law on Metal Mining (overturning the 2017 nationwide ban on all metal mining), the law dissolving El Salvador’s Environmental Fund (FONAES) and the General Water Law, which makes it easier for real estate companies to obtain licenses for housing projects in areas with existing reserves. Currently, large-scale real estate, infrastructure and tourism projects approved without consultation processes are driving the displacement of communities throughout the country. Seeking to promote tourism through the Surf City project, the country’s coastline has been gentrified while investors exploit scarce natural resources for their own private gain.

Among the Executive Branch’s key allies are ultra-conservative groups that receive financial and logistical support from far-right transnational lobbies. These sectors’ economic interests are intertwined with anti-feminist and anti-rights narratives echoed by government actors.

The implementation of authoritarian strong-handed mano dura policies – particularly the repeated renewal of the state of exception in place since March 2022 – has enabled the rapid advance of the techno-capitalist model. While hiding official figures on femicides, disappeared persons and mass graves, the security policy is used as a propaganda tool to promote the government’s “successes”.

Far from addressing the structural causes of violence, the state of exception has brought with it militarization and territorial control, and has led to the overcrowding of prisons through the use of opaque and arbitrary legal procedures. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, more than 91,000 people were detained from the start of the state of exception up to March 2026, and at least 500 deaths in state custody were recorded during the same period. Furthermore, data from the report Tres años de régimen de excepción: Tortura sistemática en las cárceles de El Salvador [“Three Years of the State of Exception: Systematic Torture in El Salvador’s Prisons”] reveals that between 27 March 2022 and 28 February 2025, human rights violations were committed against 6,889 people – including arbitrary detentions; violations of due process; raids on homes; cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and torture; forced disappearances; forced displacement; sexual abuse; discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity; detentions of pregnant women; restrictions on access to healthcare; and deaths in custody, among others.

Acting on behalf of transnational and ultra-conservative de facto powers, public institutions seek to silence critical journalism and human rights organizations, especially those that challenge the state of exception and extractive projects.

Thus, journalists and human rights defenders and organizations are publicly accused of supporting gangs, of being terrorists or “enemies of the homeland”. The 2025 approval of the Foreign Agents Law has placed huge burdens on social and non-governmental organizations, with unjustified financial and administrative controls, and limiting their access to financial resources while at the same time expanding the government’s ability to surveil, penalize and restrict people’s right to organize.

In this context, the social movements that protest against dispossession projects – whether public or private – face militarization, forced displacement and the criminalization of their leaders through fabricated charges; all this without any guarantees of due process. For example, due to its struggle against metal mining, the Santa Marta community finds itself under siege and five of its leaders – members of the Association for Social Economic Development (ADES Santa Marta) – were arbitrarily detained, subjected to unjust and illegal criminal proceedings, and criminalized for 21 months (IM-Defensoras, 2025a). In another area of the country, between May and December 2025, lawyer and environmental defender Alejandro Henríquez and community leader and president of the cooperative El Bosque José Ángle Pérez were criminalized due to their struggle against the eviction of 300 families from El Triunfo, Santa Tecla (IM-Defensoras, 2025b) and in retaliation for exercising their legitimate right to protest.

Between 2020 and 2025, our registry system documented 3,560 attacks against 284 women defenders and 83 organizations that defend human rights in El Salvador.

During 2025, we saw an increase in attacks as well as the emergence of new and particularly severe forms of violence, including the confiscation of properties and assets, expelling women defenders from their communities or places where they conduct their work, evictions, forced internal and external displacement, arbitrary detentions and the launch of unfounded judicial processes. One example is the criminalization of Ruth López, woman human rights defender and director of the anti-corruption and justice unit at the organization Cristosal (IM-Defensoras, 2025c). The main goal of these attacks is to create a chilling effect, sending a message to spread fear, silence social movements and dismantle the social fabric.

LEGAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE DIGITAL SPHERE

In recent years, El Salvador has created and amended its legal framework in order to promote the use of technology and innovation as part of the process to modernize the state. However, various journalistic investigations and international bodies have alerted to the lack of judicial guarantees as well as the absence of legal frameworks that center the protection of people’s data. Instead, the policies enable cyber-surveillance and access to personal or sensitive information that can be potentially used to threaten and/or silence critical voices. These are some of the laws enacted in recent years:

• Law to digitally modernize the state. Approved in September 2023 and popularly known as the “Google law”, the law formalizes an agreement between the government and the US company for the latter to set up operations in the country. According to official statements, the aim is to drive digital transformation and modernize government services, and in this way expand opportunities to bring technology to the people. However, the signed agreement has not been made public, so its exact terms are unknown, including whether it contains a clause imposing mandatory investment in the company. What we do know is that during the seven-year period of the agreement, the government will be required to contract Google’s services for a minimum of $500 million (Portillo, 2023). The law was passed without consulting experts and absent a public debate regarding its potential impacts on digital rights and people’s data privacy.

• Special Law for the Intervention of Telecommunications. The law was passed in March 2010, with subsequent reforms in 2014 and 2022. The November 2022 reforms were proposed by the Nuevas Ideas Party caucus with the aim of expanding the scope and increasing the expediency of interventions in the private telecommunications sector. Interventions must be requested by the Attorney General of the Republic and the Director of the Interventions Center, and authorized by the supervisory judge within a maximum of four hours, thereby eliminating the role of investigating judges in these cases. Regarding the changes, lawyer and Alac-FUNDE coordinator Wilson Sandoval reflects: “They have set up an entire scheme involving new courts, reforms, and jurisdictions so that any intervention can be expedited and becomes routine.”

• Special Law on Computer Crimes and Related Offenses. Passed in February 2016, the law seeks to prevent and criminally punish offenses targeting computer systems and personal data committed using information technology. The law was amended four times between 2021 and 2025, leading to criticism because it expanded the surveillance powers of the Attorney General’s Office, including the ability to carry out “necessary digital undercover operations” without a court order, and due to the risk that these powers could be used against journalists and human rights defenders.

• Law on Personal Data Protection. After a long debate, the law was passed by the Legislative Assembly in November 2024. As stated in the first article, its objective is “to establish regulations for the protection of personal data, setting forth the essential requirements for the lawful and informed processing of such data, as well as the legal framework for its collection, use, processing and storage, in order to guarantee individuals’ right to privacy and informational self-determination.”

• Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism. The law was passed in 2006 and has been in effect since 2007. From the start of the state of exception, a series of reforms were passed to broaden definitions and penalties, and to limit procedural guarantees (such as investigations without formal charges and unlimited periods of pre-trial detention). The 2024 reform authorizes the Attorney General’s Office – an institution under the control of the Executive Branch – to designate individuals or legal entities as “terrorists” without a final judicial conviction, and to remove them from that category. In March 2026, the Legislative Assembly amended Article 27 of the Constitution to allow for life imprisonment for certain crimes, including terrorism. This type of legislation has been used as the basis for criminalization processes. Specifically, this law is relevant to the analysis of digital violence in El Salvador because smear campaigns often employ narratives that seek to stigmatize human rights defenders, journalists and social organizations by labeling them as terrorists or apologists for terrorism.

CONNECTIVITY

According to data on internet connectivity in El Salvador published by the analytics platform DataReportal (2025), as of early 2025, there were 4.88 million internet users in the country, placing the internet penetration rate at 76.9% of the total population; this represented a 7.7% increase from the previous year. The report also counted 3.9 million active social media user profiles in early 2025, representing 61.4% of the country’s population.

Approximately 85.2% of all internet users, regardless of age, used at least one social media platform in January 2024 (53.8% were women and 46.2% were men). Furthermore, a July 2023 report by Prensa Gráfica (Cea and lpg Datos, 2023), using data from the Multipurpose Household Survey, revealed that computer use in households had doubled over a two-year period, reaching 74% among families with at least one student, in contrast to the 32.1% of households that reported having internet access in 2021.

DIGITAL PUBLIC POLICIES: MODERNIZATION AND BITCOIN

Over the past twenty-five years, governments have promoted initiatives aimed at modernizing public administration, with a focus on the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Example from the 2009-2019 include the digitalization of health services and the implementation – with support from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) – of the Infosegura program implemented, which is an information system for data and statistics from the Ministry of Justice and the National Civil Police (PNC).

The Executive Branch has promoted the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, a term coined during the election campaign that refers to an economy integrated and coordinated in real time, in all its aspects (production, logistics, markets, etc.), through telecommunications, information technology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Some of the technological innovation initiatives include the introduction of Bitcoin as legal tender (although this status was revoked in January 2025 and its use became voluntary and limited to transactions between individuals and private companies), the digitalization of autonomous state-owned portfolios, the promotion of technology as a youth employment opportunity and electronic voting.

Meanwhile, the President’s Technical and Planning Secretariat was eliminated and replaced by the President’s Innovation Secretariat, with the goal of establishing government e-services and digitalizing the public administration, thereby promoting a new digital governance strategy. This new entity leads the “National Digital Agenda 2020–2030” project, which has four central pillars: the creation of a unique digital identity; education and innovation to bridge the digital divide and foster competitiveness; the modernization of the government and public services; and digital governance. This agenda includes topics related to data security and includes the development of a national cybersecurity strategy and policy for the state.

Digitalization and the promotion of technology are not problematic in and of themselves; the risks arise with the lack of adequate regulations regarding the use of data and the protection of people’s digital rights. Here, it is worth noting the 2023 sale of a database with the personal data of more than five million people, which came to light in April 2024 (Bernal, 2024).

The Bitcoin push is an example of how the current government uses technology to justify actions that benefit large foreign capital. The Bitcoin law was approved on 9 June 2021 as a presidential initiative with a waiver of procedural requirements, making El Salvador the first country in the world to have a cryptocurrency as legal tender. Before it came into force, the president announced the purchase of 400 cryptocurrencies (DW, 2021a). From that fund, Nuevas Ideas legislators allocated $30 million to provide $30 in Bitcoin to each person who downloaded the Chivo Wallet app. According to a post by the president on his Twitter account, three million Salvadoreans registered, and thus the government distributed $90 million in public funds. It bears noting that in December 2021, the organization Cristosal filed a complaint regarding the identity theft of 131 people who, when attempting to register on Chivo Wallet, were informed that their National ID numbers had already been used (Rauda Zablah, 2023). The government provided no information regarding the design of this legislation or the Chivo Wallet. Furthermore, it invested in setting up Chivo ATMs for use throughout the country and in creating an electronic wallet that had many irregularities and defects. Social media was flooded with reports of online identity theft, there were constant problems when creating profiles, financial losses for users and small businesses, as well as transaction errors.

According to the Central American University’s Institute for Public Opinion (IUDOP, 2021), 66.7% of the population believes that the Bitcoin law should be repealed. Furthermore, 78.3% has little or no interest in downloading the digital wallet app, and 71.2% prefers to use the US Dollar. Likewise, a survey conducted by the publication Disruptiva found that 53.9% of respondents disagreed with the adoption of Bitcoin, and 64.8% said they were not in favor of receiving their salaries in Bitcoin (Disruptiva, 2021).

On 7 December 2023, the government – along with cryptocurrency company Tether – announced the “Adopting Freedom” visa program, which aims to attract Bitcoin investors in exchange for Salvadorean citizenship and a passport. The process requires a non-refundable deposit of one million Bitcoin or USDT (a type of cryptocurrency) and completion of the Know Your Customer (KYC) process – a technology-based procedure that verifies users’ identities through facial recognition and document verification.

The Salvadorean women human rights defenders who participated in the survey recognize that technology and social media are territories used to surveil and discredit them. Platforms like X are used not only for broadcasting official decisions and narratives but also for coordinated mass dissemination of hate messages and disinformation.

In response, women defenders have strengthened their social media use, ownership and activism to dispute the digital territory. There have been numerous efforts since 2019 to build a coordinated movement – both online and in the streets – capable of mobilizing the political agenda and influencing narratives and the collective imagination.

The rise in the use of technology and social media has enabled the youth feminist movement to gain momentum, becoming increasingly visible – for example, during the COVID-19 syndemic. This organic, independent feminist movement called for people to speak out online against the policies and mechanisms put in place in response to the emergencies caused by the syndemic, bringing visibility to how decisions lacking a gender perspective led to critical situations for the most vulnerable communities. During the lockdown, and in response to the government’s statement that “women are 61% safer under this government than they were under the previous one” (Moreno, 2020), cyber-activists mobilized to refute the claim. To this day, public institutions and officials refuse to name the violent deaths of women as femicides.

The presence of Salvadorean feminists on X has visibly increased, and it has gone beyond the online space, reaching the public space with protests against femicides and the uncovering of mass graves, such as the one in Chalchuapa (Nochéz y Peña, 2021). Their actions show their strength, and they incorporate elements such as artistic expression into their public demonstrations. For example, the Amorales collective’s “Maldición” performance, which took place at the Allegory to the Constitution monument and whose words shook social media (Cortez, 2021), demonstrates how the women defenders’ activism connects the physical territory with the digital territory.

However, the testimonies collected reveal the huge gap that exists between Salvadorean women defenders and the governmental powers regarding the use of social media platforms. Some of them see this as a challenge; others, aware of this, refuse to identify as cyber-activists.

"As one testimony states, “We have to move away from apathy towards the use of technology platforms."

On this point, another woman defender affirms,

"The entire state apparatus has access to these technology resources. It makes us too vulnerable; they can know all about us, and we can know nothing about them."

Running through the collection of testimonies is a strategic perspective on the use of digital technologies. All those interviewed recognize the importance of using the platforms, but there is also an awareness – based on their experience – that this use can expose them and make them vulnerable to attacks. The women defenders interviewed mention having thought about what they decide to publish (or not) on their networks and platforms, and being aware of the difference between the private – contents, contacts and platforms – and the public, carefully defining both spheres and always aware of the complications that come with their decisions. They also recognize the risks associated with their privacy and personal information not being solely under their control, since third parties may gain access to this information and publish personal data without their consent.

According to our Registry of Attacks, we registered 2,241 digital attacks against women human rights defenders in El Salvador between 2020 and 2025, accounting for 63% of all attacks registered in the country during that period.

The majority of the women defenders who participated in the study affirm that they have suffered systematic digital violence as part of their activism. They also believe that digital attacks have increased in recent years. This perception coincides with our registry: the total number of digital attacks documented in 2025 is 135% higher than in 2024.

The women defenders surveyed admit that they feel vulnerable to attacks when using ICT to conduct their rights-defense work. They highlight the following factors as the main reasons for this vulnerability: the insecurity caused by varying levels of knowledge about technology, the digital risks they are exposed to due to their activism, their view that digital security is complicated, and their perception that digital attacks are on the rise. These feelings of vulnerability reveal a personal dimension – doubts regarding their own knowledge about technology and security – as well as the recognition of a context in which their activism exposes them to attacks.

THE GENDER DIMENSIONS OF DIGITAL VIOLENCE

Across the board, the testimonies reveal that violence facilitated by digital technology has an essential gender component linked to a powerful anti-feminist agenda that is politically very active at the national, regional and international level.

This coincides with the data from our registry of attacks, where we documented that 86% of digital attacks in El Salvador between 2020 and 2025 include violent messages that seek to reinforce the gender-based patriarchal order.

These gender components are expressed, for example, through ridiculing women defenders’ sexual orientation, gender identity or physical appearance; demanding that they return home to cook for their husbands; and questioning women’s right to political participation (“giving women a vote is a mistake”). The attacks also appear in the denial of rights for sex and gender diverse people. For example, a woman defender interviewed states that when she published her name and gender change, she began to suffer digital attacks that included threats against her daughters and her family.

Along these lines, the report by the Roundtable for the Right to Defend Rights (MDDD, 2024) on attacks against journalists between October 2023 and 10 January 2024 revealed that women journalists suffered 655 digital attacks with a significant and notable component of sexual violence, misogyny and lesbophobia; 17.5% of all comments against women journalists can be typified as sexual violence. A relevant finding is that 7% of the insults directed at men journalists contain transphobic, homophobic and misogynistic language, referring to them using the pronoun “she” or using insults specific to women, such as “bitch”. In this sense, we observe a strong component of gender-based violence, even when the insults are directed at men.

The women defenders who participated in the study are not always familiar with the technical classifications of digital attacks, as these are complex and constantly evolving. In the survey, we identified four types of digital attacks as the most common:

1. Digital tracking and surveillance of their cell phones, computers or social media accounts.

2. Impersonation, misappropriation and electronic identity theft – that is, when someone pretends to be them in emails, on social media, via cell phone, accessing a bank account, etc.

3. Unauthorized access to their personal or work accounts (hacking).

4. Cyberbullying or digital harassment, which can appear as online defamation, dissemination of false or private information against them or people close to them, harassing messages, ridiculing, threats, etc.

Further, when analyzing the information gathered through testimonies, we identified the following expressions of digital violence:

Disinformation. This is the type of attack most often named by those interviewed, which is not surprising, as national and international investigations and reports have for years shown how the government uses this tactic. A Reuters investigation (Kinosian, 2022) warned about the emergence of a communications giant using paid trolls to endanger journalists and members of the opposition. The main feature of this type of attack is the manipulation of information to vilify and discredit the woman defender and the organizations to which she belongs. It takes the form of publishing false information – such as doctored pictures – or information taken out of context – such as videos containing incomplete information – to support false accusations. This strategy seeks to polarize public opinion by reviving the country’s historical social divisions: the “good guys” (supporters of the government and its allies) and the “bad guys” (people and organizations that oppose the “good guys”).

Women journalists were the first to face attacks on social media. We documented constant attacks filled with insults, hate speech and threats of sexual violence posted from accounts aligned with the Executive Branch in retaliation for publications that were critical of the government’s administration.

Harassment. This type of violence is exercised through repeated unwanted behaviors targeting women defenders in order to create fear, angst, intimidation or emotional distress. The most common tactic is the filing of mass complaints against women defenders’ social media accounts to have their posts removed, block their profiles and even force them to lose their accounts. Then there is inbox bombing, which floods their emails and causes confusion, fear and frustration; as well as the creation of hashtags to instigate mass harassment.

A woman academic was accused by a government security advisor of running a troll center from which attacks against the president and his officials were organized (Última hora, 2020). Additionally, some women lawyers known for their critical views on social media were targeted by bots from pro-government accounts and certain public officials.

Threats to the integrity of women defenders and their close circles. These attacks usually come from anonymous accounts that warn them that they are in danger if they continue conducting their work. In recent years, we have documented direct and indirect threats of death and rape targeting both women defenders and their families. These threats exemplify the blurred line between “the physical” and “the digital” because, given the prevailing context of impunity in the country, they are perceived as real threats that could be carried out at any moment, and are sometimes accompanied by indications of physical surveillance through statements like “I know where you live”, the sending of names or pictures of their loved ones, or the occurrence of strange situations such as “thefts” or the unusual presence of National Police patrols near their homes.

In March 2022, feminist activist WhatsApp groups were hacked and infiltrated, and they received violent messages containing death threats, threats of sexual violence and threats of raids on their homes and meeting places. Complaints filed resulted in nothing more than silence (Jordán, 2022).

Illegal electronic surveillance. This is one of the main concerns for women defenders, since it has been proven that journalists and people in the opposition (or perceived as such) have been victims of cyber-espionage conducted by the government using the Pegasus software. After confirming the use of Pegasus on her cell phone, one testimony describes, “They turned on my camera and microphones, they accessed my pictures, contacts, etc. I felt so violated!” An interviewee who was hacked – seemingly through phishing – denounced the vulnerability of her information and that of her organization. The situation led to the dissemination of messages against her collective; she states in her testimony, “The people who conducted these attacks knew who we were. I have felt a lot of fear that at any time they can use all the information they saw there, and that they are basically saving it for another time.”

In November 2021, it was publicly reported that journalists and members of organizations received an alert from Apple warning them that they were being subjected to targeted surveillance  by “state-sponsored attackers”. Analysis by Amnesty International and Citizen Lab confirmed that each device was indeed infected with the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware (Amnesty International, 2022).

According to our registry system, between 2020 and 2025, 61% of perpetrators of digital attacks in El Salvador are unknown. This shows that perpetrators take advantage of the anonymity and impunity that digital platforms afford.

Some women defenders surveyed note that they know, or they suspect, who the perpetrators of these systematic attacks are, while others do not. The actors they identify as suspects behind the digital violence they experience are, in first place, national or local public authorities, and in second place, political parties, their supporters or members of those parties. Other relevant actors are police agents, armed forces, common criminals and media outlets.

Based on our analysis of the context and our registry of attacks, we have been able to identify the possible use of bots and/or trolls funded by the state and anti-rights groups to carry out these attacks. Additionally, high-ranking public officials and communications media aligned with the state use public speeches and social media to smear, defame and criminalize those who defend human rights, reinforcing a hostile climate of retaliation against women defenders.

Since before her May 2025 detention and up to the present, woman defender and lawyer from Cristosal, Ruth López, has been the victim of a systematic disinformation and smear campaign driven by the state apparatus. According to a Coyuntura investigation (Videa, 2025) published less than a month after her detention, there were already more than 70,000 posts on X about the case, most of them from accounts with suspicious activity patterns or clearly automated, containing very similar insults: “thief”, “rat”, “bitch”, “show”, “corrupt”.

The same investigation found that during the first nine days of June 2025, only three out of every ten X accounts that commented on Ruth López showed even minimal signs of belonging to a real person (a credible profile picture, full name or some identifying information), while the remaining seven were anonymous accounts with generic images and no consistent activity history, and were dedicated almost exclusively to spreading propaganda favorable of the administration and coordinating attacks against critical voices.

The testimonies point to a consortium of perpetrators in El Salvador that act as a bloc: on the one hand, the government and its officials; on the other, the ultraconservative agenda. The existence of troll centers operating in El Salvador has been publicly confirmed since 2019 (Kinosian, 2022). According to a woman defender, the ultra-conservative agenda wields great influence over public policy because conservatism still commands a large share of the vote in the country and the region.

Today, the international far-right agenda has enough financial resources to coordinate digital strategies, such as the one deployed on social media during the visit to El Salvador by Argentine far-right figure Agustín Laje, who advocates for what extreme conservatism calls “the culture war” against progressive agendas like feminism and gender and sexual diversity.

The aim of this consortium is to discredit human rights defenders and the independent press – actors who challenge the government’s ultra-conservative positions and policies – in order to crush dissent, criticism and freedom of expression, and, in the process, to undermine the integrity of any person, collective or organization that might be considered a critical and/or oppositional voice.

Based on women defenders’ testimonies, we identified some mechanisms, or modus operandi, used by the perpetrators:

• Strategies for going viral. Without doubt, social media are the preferred tool for perpetrating attacks, since it enables messages to rapidly go viral. In El Salvador, tactics such as creating hashtags to make attacks go viral, paying troll farms or bots, and hiring influencers are used to increase the reach of messages that seek to discredit women defenders’ work. Although social media platforms X and Facebook are the classic channels for disinformation and the viral spread of content, YouTube also features prominently, as paid influencers – with government-issued press credentials – act as agents who help spread the official narrative.

• Constant monitoring of personal information. Many attacks use women defenders’ personal information, clearly pointing to perpetrators conducting a sophisticated monitoring of their accounts. As one testimony affirms, “These are attacks based on personal data; it’s people who are permanently investigating.” When the state is one of the main actors suspected of being behind the attacks, there is concern about the possible gathering of sensitive personal data from public service and institutional digital platforms.

• Complicity of hegemonic communications media. Attacks carried out through digital technologies – particularly involving disinformation – are conducted in strategic partnership with traditional hegemonic communications media. Often, the media are the first to act as a megaphone for this kind of smear campaigns; this information is then shared and goes viral on social media.

• Harassment of the critical press. In a context where the hegemonic communications media are subservient to those in power, the independent and critical press is a clear enemy to the perpetrators. As defenders of freedom of the press, they are subjected to a regime of smear campaigns, harassment and digital surveillance. On this subject, one testimony recalls how, after denouncing the Executive Branch’s surveillance strategies, “the machinery of harassment began”.

• Narratives that divide society and social movements. We identified the spread of narratives that portray social movements and human rights organizations as internal enemies, appealing to the social divisions that have existed in El Salvador since the civil war. Human rights defenders are often associated with terrorists, gang members, or the partners of gang members; or they are labelled as people “who defend murderers”. These labels place the blame on human rights defenders for social ills affecting the population, such as violence, corruption and bipartisanship.

Fueled by the anonymity of the perpetrators, cyberattacks occur in a legal vacuum and distrust of the public institutions and digital platforms that ensure their impunity. Most of the women defenders surveyed say they did not file a complaint with the state because they believe the country’s political and legal framework does not guarantee their digital protection. The testimonies point to a number of specific reasons for not reporting these incidents, including uncertainty about how to prove who is behind the attacks and the emotional and financial toll caused by such harassment. Sometimes, choosing not to report an incident is a protection strategy to avoid further retaliatory physical or digital attacks, and to prevent harm to their family or organization.

Nevertheless, some of the women defenders surveyed state that they filed complaints with the digital platforms on which the attacks occurred. However, as one of them comments, the platforms do not protect against hate speech directed at the LGBTIQ+ community:

“Now, I don't even bother reporting it on X anymore; they are slow, they don't understand. In general, the platforms have much work to do.”

Understanding the digital sphere requires a broad view of what cyber-activism entails in contexts of growing authoritarianism. In the current Salvadorean political context, as one testimony expresses,

“we are in danger for who we are and for what we do.”

Thus, it is important to strengthen the political perspective on digital attacks and put an end to what is referred to in an interview as “the invisibilization of digital violence”. One of our most pressing needs is therefore to raise awareness about digital violence and promote digital rights.

In the in-depth interviews and surveys conducted, Salvadorean women defenders acknowledge the difficulty they have in detecting when they are facing an incident of digital violence. The normalization of this violence is so deeply entrenched that it highlights the need for access to technology training. Women defenders express a need for technical knowledge that will enable them to achieve technology autonomy from a feminist perspective. Capacity-building spaces that focus on technical aspects are therefore essential so that they can recognize digital violence and have the tools to prevent and respond to it. Designing and maintaining these spaces must take into account women defenders’ specific circumstances, considering, for example, their access to the internet, devices and basic skills such as literacy.

Combating violence in the digital sphere requires an awareness of the full spectrum of situations in which it occurs and the room we have to navigate them. Salvadorean women defenders note that, at times, a lack of knowledge about protocols for responding to digital attacks can be paralyzing. This underscores the vital need to increase their ownership of digital protection and security – in political, technical and personal terms – within their communities. Even though there is a growing body of knowledge regarding digital security, specific urgent challenges exist: from systematically tracking perpetrators to identify who they are, to designing security protocols as a collective exercise conducted by the communities themselves.

The survey results point to three top areas of digital security where women defenders feel most vulnerable: virus and malware detection; creating, handling and managing passwords; and the safe use of social media (managing privacy and anonymity settings, what kind of information is posted, etc.)

One of the women defenders interviewed reflects:

“It has become state policy to smear people online, government officials seek out disinformation in order to undermine the accuracy and credibility of journalists. There’s no way for an individual to cope with that power imbalance.”

This is why one of the priority needs for support is to organize collectively on at least two fronts:

• Improve the links between support channels. The testimonies collected reveal a consistent theme regarding the need to improve access to information about existing types of support: digital security, psychosocial support, access to secure platforms, emergency funds for travel, etc. Urgent and timely responses are also required, because, as one of the women defenders interviewed notes: “When we face digital violence, there is either inaction or a delayed activation of protocols.”

• Better coordinate collective public responses to attacks. The testimonies stress that we must not remain silent in the face of violence, but they also acknowledge that every possible precaution must be taken in accordance with the protection needs of the women defenders who have come forward. As one testimony notes:

  “We must draw on our collective strength and avoid falling into individualism”

  Furthermore, as another interviewee affirms, we need:

  “the international strengthening of feminist solidarity”