Confronting Gender-Based Violence: Attacks on Women’s Organizations in Central America

Abstract Women’s rights organizations in Central America have been key actors in promoting women’s right to a life free of violence and advocating for reproductive rights and other social and economic protections for women and girls. Yet throughout Central America, these organizations have experienced myriad attacks in recent years. In this article, we examine attacks on women’s rights organizations in four Central American countries: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Although there are important distinctions among the regimes of these four countries, across all of them, setbacks for women have occurred in contexts characterized by increased militarization, autocratic governance, the incursion of conservative religious ideologies in government policies, and the spread of dangerous misinformation that discredits women’s organizations’ efforts. Within these regimes, women’s organizations have been subjected to intimidation, physical violence, legal threats, and digital harassment. Our analysis identifies patterns in these attacks, showing similarities and differences across the four countries during various temporal moments. To do so, we draw on twenty-nine interviews with twenty-eight women activists, academics, and human rights defenders in the region as well as a compilation of newspaper articles, social media, and independent reports documenting attacks on women’s rights leaders and organizations in the four countries. Efforts to dismantle the work of women’s organizations and committed feminists in Central America provide a window into the gendered dimensions of authoritarian practices in the region.