Virginia Flores has been on edge since February 2019, when she learned her best friend, Camila Díaz Córdova, a transgender woman, was dead in an apparent homicide. She has reason to be worried. Flores, a 37-year-old trans woman from El Salvador, knows she has beaten the odds just by being alive today. In El Salvador, trans women have a life expectancy of only 35 years due to extreme violence. Across the entire Latin America and Caribbean region, the figure ranges from 30 to 35 years, compared to average life expectancies ranging from 65 to 81.
The killing was a turning point for Flores: She said she realized she would never live in peace in her home country. In the week Díaz Córdova died, another trans woman was killed in El Salvador, and at least five more have been killed since then. In 2011, one of Flores and Díaz Córdova’s best friends, a trans woman named Monica, was killed. There was no arrest or conviction. “It’s alarming,” Flores said. “That’s why so many people say, ‘I don’t want to be here.’ Because I could be next.”
Three police officers currently stand trial for Díaz Córdova’s killing, which is being prosecuted as a hate crime in a historic case for the country. If the trial ends in conviction, it would be the first homicide conviction classified as a hate crime in El Salvador. It wasn’t until the country modified its penal code in 2015 that prosecutors could even categorize a homicide as a hate crime and seek a harsher penalty. Of 27 killings that El Salvador’s ombudsman has identified as LGBTQ hate crimes since then, prosecutors have tried to classify just two as hate crimes, not including the case of Díaz Córdova. In both cases, judges decided not to accept the charges, which would carry a higher sentence.
Trans rights organizations hope that the case will send a signal to Salvadoran society that hate crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer citizens are unacceptable and will be punished accordingly. But they say this would mark only a small step forward for trans rights in a country where LGBTQ citizens face systematic abuse and discrimination in nearly every aspect of life. Read more via Foreign Policy’s in-depth report