Beatriz v El Salvador: the abortion case that could set a precedent across Latin America

Sarah Johnson. The Guardian. December 2, 2024

Earlier this year, Morena Herrera woke up to find that a video about her had been posted on social media. It claimed that the 64-year-old campaigner for abortion rights in El Salvador had “chased down” a young woman in hospital and “terrorised” her into seeking an abortion.

The young woman was Beatriz, who had been denied an abortion in 2013, even though she was seriously ill and the foetus would not have survived outside the uterus.

Beatriz died after being involved in a traffic accident in 2017, but her case is before judges at the inter-American court of human rights (IACHR), based in Costa Rica, and could open the way for El Salvador to decriminalise abortion. It could also set an important precedent in the region: across the Caribbean, South and Central America, abortion is not permitted for any reason in seven countries.

In El Salvador, abortion can be punished by up to eight years in prison, and women can even be charged with aggravated homicide, which carries a sentence of up to 50 years in prison. Women have been jailed for miscarriages.

This is not the first time Herrera has been subjected to such an attack. “There have been videos of me on several occasions which tell the government to prosecute me,” she says. “There had already been a campaign saying that I traded in foetal organs – an absurd thing.”

In a video posted last year, Herrera was called an “enemy of the state”, a “colleague of terrorists” and a “feminazi”.

The videos are part of a slew of attacks that activists say has picked up pace in the lead-up to the judgment in the Beatriz case, which is expected soon. In 2023, IM-Defensoras, an organisation that supports female, transgender and non-binary human rights defender human rights defenders in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, documented 188 attacks on activists in El Salvador, 78% of which were digital.

Almost two-thirds (62%) targeted women campaigning for sexual and reproductive rights. The majority occurred around the time Beatriz’s case was being heard at the IACHR.

“A lot of the attacks are aimed at stigmatisation,” says Lydia Alpizar, co- director of IM-Defensoras. “[They are] slandering campaigns, fake news, manipulation and question or doubt [activists’] ethical or moral qualities.

“It’s very clear that anti-rights and anti-gender groups that have affinity with the government are attacking and questioning the point of view of feminists and defenders, and also trying to put pressure on the inter-American court to avoid any kind of advancement.”

On one website set up to discredit the case of Beatriz, there are photos of the judges of the IACHR at the top alongside a heading in white and red capital letters that reads: “They want to legalise abortion with a fake case.” Below is a link to a petition asking the judges not to “sell out”.

The website was created by the Global Center for Human Rights, a US-based anti-abortion organisation linked to conservative evangelical groups that opposes what it calls “ideological colonisation [of] countries rooted in Christian values”.

According to the organisation’s social media, it hosted an event in July 2023 with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington thinktank, “highlighting the use of US taxpayer funds to finance the undermining of fundamental freedoms in Latin America and the Caribbean”. The Heritage Foundation is the creator of Project 2025, a roadmap for the second Trump presidency that aims to further curb abortion rights, among other things.

A video claiming the Beatriz case is “fake”, co-produced by the Global Center for Human Rights, was posted in August on the YouTube channel of Ciudadanos Argentina. This political group is linked to La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances), the far-right coalition led by Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, who wants to reverse the country’s landmark legalisation of abortion in 2020.

Judges of the IACHR portrayed on a website trying to discredit the case of Beatriz, set up by a US-based anti-abortion organisation. The site implies that the judges received foreign money illicitly. Photograph: casobeatriz.org/

“Abortion is about to be legalised across all of the American continent if we don’t act urgently,” it states, and lists various human rights organisations and philanthropic foundations as donors of the IACHR, questioning its independence. There is a clip in the video of the president of the court, Nancy Hernández, rejecting such claims as “absolutely false”.

Back in El Salvador, Mariana Moisa, a women’s rights activist and founder of the Citizens’ Coalition for the Decriminalisation of Abortion, which campaigns for women convicted over premature births and obstetric emergencies, says she is subjected to an increasing torrent of abuse every time she posts on X.

“I have received a lot of threats and hate speech on social networks, especially on X,” she says. “A post can lead to a wave of comments where I’m called a murderer; people accuse me of promoting a crime and there are requests that the attorney general investigate me.”

Anti-abortion groups often gather outside her office to pray, which she sees as an act of intimidation. Her organisation’s website was the target of 13,000 cyber-attacks during the hearing of the landmark case of Manuela v El Salvador at the IACHR in 2021.

The court ruled that El Salvador violated the human rights of Manuela, a woman who was accused of having an abortion after suffering a miscarriage and sentenced to 30 years in prison. She died two years later, still in detention.

“We can clearly see there is a political interest of the extreme right to oppose women’s rights,” says Moisa. “No politician wants their citizens to be truly free, especially not those of the extreme right, so a way to maintain the social order is by oppressing women and girls.”

Both Moisa and Herrera worry about the impact of such attacks in the future. They are taking place against a backdrop in El Salvador where a state of emergency to tackle gangs declared by the authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, in March 2022 has led to the arbitrary detention of more than 80,000 people, ill treatment, torture and deaths in custody.

Herrera says: “I am not going to say that [these attacks do] not affect me … I worry that at a given moment [authorities] will translate these invented accusations into legal proceedings.”

Moisa is also concerned. “I do not want to be in jail,” she says. “But I know that it is a risk that we run as human rights activists in this context.

“We believe this fight is urgent and necessary. If we do not fight, there will be more girls who will continue to be forced to give birth.”