Under President Bukele’s perpetual 'State of Exception', El Salvador has made international news for its historic decline in homicides. Despite this, women report that problems of violence are far from over in the country, write Julia Zulver and Anne Ruelle
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has repeatedly claimed that El Salvador is now the safest country in the Western hemisphere. Indeed, homicide rates are lower than they have ever been since he declared a State of Exception in 2022, and consequently arrested over 90,000 people. The policy has now been renewed monthly for over three years.
However, the cost of this alleged safety has been high. In El Salvador, there are now effectively no rights guarantees, no due process, and no term limits on the president.
But when we look at this story through a gendered lens, it becomes clear that the voices of women are missing. The State of Exception has triggered new insecurities, and worsened old ones. Through women’s experiences as activists, mothers, and incarcerated people, our research reveals a counter-narrative to the purported successes of the ‘Bukele model’.
Accounts from the first year of the State of Exception revealed that women were becoming collateral damage. While the presence of gangs has diminished significantly, violence is ongoing. Women fear the police and army who patrol their neighbourhoods with impunity. And it isn't just the police and military perpetrating the violence. Data collected by local women’s rights organisations like ORMUSA show that rates of sexual violence have gone up since the State of Exception was declared.
The damage, then, is no longer collateral. Rather, it has become central to understanding the story behind the propaganda that sells mass incarceration as a straightforward and effective solution to violence.
For years, Salvadoran women’s rights activists focused on gangs as the major threat to their work and safety. Now, that threat is the government.
Women activists call out the government’s human rights abuses under Bukele, including those relating to women’s rights violations. The problem with this, however, is that their criticism of the government enables Bukele to paint those activists as sympathetic to, or even supportive of, gang members.
And when activists point out that gender-based violence continues to proliferate under the State of Exception – even though the President would have you believe that there are no gang members left, and therefore no violence – such activists threaten the government’s narrative of universal security.
When activists call out Bukele's human rights abuses, he flips the narrative, claiming that they are 'gang sympathisers'
Activists face government-perpetrated intimidation, stalking, and surveillance. They report being followed by police or military, and facing widespread online harassment from state-sponsored troll farms.
The government also uses legal and fiscal systems to target activist organisations. It has imposed strict financial audits, and has even raided NGOs' offices, including those belonging to women’s rights organisation Las Mélidas.
The new Foreign Agents Law, similar to those in Russia and Nicaragua, allows the government to surveil and shut down groups, effectively silencing those who challenge the official narrative on human rights. As one activist told us: 'If we defend women, it’s a problem for the president'.
For three years, women have kept El Salvador’s prisons running. They do not do so by choice, but because politicians have repeatedly asserted that without family support, inmates will go hungry and suffer neglect. Each month, women assemble packages of food, clothing, and hygiene products, then spend entire days in line to drop them at the prison gate — without ever seeing their loved one.
They approach the situation with a fierce practicality: 'If I don’t do it, who will?'
For these women, the State of Exception has also meant the loss of family members who contributed to their household finances. Older women are forced to take on additional costs associated with the care of children or grandchildren whose parents are incarcerated.
Such families face increased challenges to their ability to make ends meet, or even simply survive. So while gang violence has indeed decreased, the structural violence of poverty continues to worsen as the State of Exception stretches on.
Women also find themselves behind bars. Not all women who are incarcerated, however, have proven linkages with gang activity. Rather, they are arrested because of direct or indirect ties to men with alleged gang ties.
Reports have found that mothers, wives, ex-partners, daughters, sisters, and even workmates of supposed gang members have been locked up.
Not all jailed women have proven gang linkages, but they may be targeted because of their relationships — however tenuous — to men with alleged gang ties
Like the men, in prison these women face torture and inhumane conditions. There are reports of forced nudity, beatings, burnings, mock executions, and suffocation.
Salvadoran prisons do not provide pre- or postnatal care. At least three babies have died behind bars.
One of the most publicised such cases is that of Dina Hernández, who was locked up during her third trimester and did not receive prenatal care. When the court ordered her release, the prison refused to free her, claiming she had been charged with a new crime.
Dina gave birth to her daughter, Keren, while still behind bars. Keren died at just a few weeks old.
Women in El Salvador are much more than collateral damage. They bear the direct injuries of the State of Exception. Our interlocutors in El Salvador were clear that rather than disappearing, the country's violence has merely mutated.
Women’s rights defenders explained that they are under attack by Bukele and his government. They actively and publicly contradict Bukele’s security narratives with data that reveals a different picture.
Since Bukele's State of Exception crackdown, gang violence may have dissipated, but gender-based violence continues among families, and at the hands of the police and army
Women who formerly lived under gang control shared with us that while gang violence has dissipated, gender-based violence, including feminicide, continues in families and at the hands of the police and army.
Having a loved one in jail drains household resources. It leaves less money for food, clothing, and shelter. Prisons put women’s labour and lives at risk — behind bars, and on the outside. Violence persists when policies like the State of Exception make no structural changes to provide better options and to transform inequalities. Rather than tackling poverty and gendered inequality, such policies simply reinforce them.
For the women of El Salvador, Bukele's State of Exception has not made their lives more secure. Rather, it is simply retracing familiar patterns of gendered violence.
This blog is based on findings from the authors’ ongoing research project, Gendered Insecurity Under El Salvador’s State of Exception.
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