Month: February 2015

Categories
Human Rights LGBTQ

Mexico’s Quiet Marriage Equality Revolution

“Outside of Mexico, and even inside of Mexico, these advances are not widely known … but it is irreversible,” the lawyer who started the wave of cases now sweeping the country told BuzzFeed News.

Last updated on March 4, 2015, at 6:51 p.m. ET

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on February 26, 2015, at 10:04 a.m. ET

Courts in more than two-thirds of Mexico’s 31 states have granted same-sex couples the right to marry over the past two years in a series of rulings that will likely make marriage equality a reality nationwide in the near future.

The wave of rulings throughout Mexico hasn’t caused the uproar that has followed rulings in the United States over the past year striking down state laws barring same-sex couples from marrying. Couples have not rushed to marry nor have conservatives organized major protests.

This is in part because the technicalities of Mexican law have meant these decisions have been much more narrow in their immediate impact. Each decision applies only to the individuals who have brought the cases, and other same-sex couples will still have to sue in order to marry. It takes multiple cases meeting certain technical requirements for the courts to nullify a state law in Mexico — a hurdle that has not yet been met.

But with new rulings being announced almost every week — judges in seven new states ruled in favor of marriage equality in the first three months of 2015 alone — it seems almost inevitable that this day is coming, say legal experts who have closely followed the litigation.

“It’s just a matter of time,” said Geraldina Gonzalez de la Vega, a lawyer who worked on the first of these suits filed in 2011 and is now a clerk to a Supreme Court minister. “This has spread all over the country.”

The first place in Mexico to allow same-sex couples to marry was Mexico City — a federal district that functions like a state, sort of like Washington D.C in the U.S. A marriage equality law was adopted by the city’s legislature at the very end of 2009. When opponents took the law to Mexico’s Supreme Court, the judges ruled that it was constitutional for Mexico City to recognize same-sex couples and went one step further: They also held that the city’s marriages were valid in every state of the country.

But the Supreme Court left state marriage codes restricting marriage to heterosexual couples in place. The first case to argue that state marriage laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman were also unconstitutional seemed like a long shot. Unlike in the United States, where legal activists spent years spelling out the grounds for marriage equality and some state challenges attracted A-list attorneys, the idea to challenge a state marriage code came from a law student in the largely rural state of Oaxaca.

Alex Alí Méndez Díaz has now been involved in lawsuits in 19 states even though he is still finishing advanced studies in Mexico City and has an unrelated full-time job. Méndez first thought about challenging state marriage laws when he met a couple named Alejandro and Guillermo while helping to plan a pride parade in his native state of Oaxaca in 2011. The two wanted to marry, but they couldn’t afford to make the trip to register their union in Mexico City.

“These guys said to me, ‘We want to get married but we don’t want to leave. … Can we get married here in Oaxaca?’” Méndez recounted during a 2012 interview with this reporter in Oaxaca City. He downloaded the ruling in the Mexico City case and concluded that it laid the foundation for challenging Oaxaca’s marriage code.

Others in Oaxaca’s local LGBT rights organizations thought going to court was a bad idea, Méndez said, in part because they were worried that the state wasn’t ready for a public discussion about same-sex marriage. But he was sure of his legal arguments, so he decided to bring the case by himself.

“I said, ‘Fine, if the collective won’t do this as a group, well, I’m the only lawyer [in the organization]. I’ll do it,’” he said.

In August 2011, Mendez filed cases on behalf of Alejandro and Guillermo and another couple he recruited through Facebook. In early 2012, he filed one more. These were amparos, a kind of suit in the Mexican system concerning human rights violations. He lost two of them — including Alejandro and Guillermo’s — but the third, on behalf of a couple identified as Lizeth and Montserrat, eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. In December 2012 the Supreme Court sided with the couple.

“Like racial segregation, founded on the unacceptable idea of white supremacy, the exclusion of homosexual couples from marriage also is based on prejudice that historically has existed against homosexuals”

The written decision in the case, published in early 2013, made an impassioned argument for marriage equality. A unanimous opinion authored by Supreme Court Minister Arturo Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea said that the court needed to step in partly because of a provision added to the Mexican constitution in 2011 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “sexual preferences.” Unlike in the U.S., Mexican courts recognize rulings from other countries, so Zaldívar also based the decision in part on landmark U.S. Supreme Court judgements striking down racial segregation.

“Like racial segregation, founded on the unacceptable idea of white supremacy, the exclusion of homosexual couples from marriage also is based on prejudice that historically has existed against homosexuals,” Zaldívar wrote, referring both to the 1954 school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education and the 1967 case striking down laws banning interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia.

The judgement allowed just the petitioners to marry — Mexican law requires essentially five identical rulings on a subject from a high-level court in order to establish precedent binding all government officials. But it provided a very clear blueprint for bringing more challenges. Méndez announced on Twitter less than a week after the decision was handed down in December in 2012 that he was preparing to file amparos on behalf of more couples in Oaxaca, and lawyers in several other states immediately began talking about copying the strategy.

“In the two years [since], we have succeeded in covering almost the entire country.”

Méndez also began working on an amparo colectivo, a petition of 39 individuals from Oaxaca challenging the marriage restriction. These actions didn’t revolve around specific couples alleging their rights had been violated because they’d been denied the right to marry. Instead, it was a group of gays and lesbians who said it was inherently discriminatory for the state to bar them from matrimony. This would streamline the process, allowing large numbers of couples to win marriage rights through a single suit, and also allow single people to win the right to marry even if they didn’t yet have a partner.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of this amparo colectivo in April last year. Since then, groups numbering in the hundreds have successfully brought these suits in multiple states.

As of late February, there have been rulings in favor of marriage equality in 22 states, according to local news reports, and cases have been filed in at least four others. This legal wave nudged the legislature of one state on the U.S. border, Coahuila, to pass a marriage equality law in September. And the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo — where same-sex marriages actually began taking advantage in 2011 of the little-noticed fact that the wording of its marriage statute was actually gender-neutral — held two mass weddings of same-sex couples this year.

Méndez himself seems astonished at the pace of change.

“Imagine, in 2012, we won the first judgement in Oaxaca,” Méndez marveled during a phone interview last week. “In the two years [since], we have succeeded in covering almost the entire country.”

Even some LGBT rights supporters are a little mystified that marriage equality rulings haven’t sparked a national backlash. The fight over Mexico City’s 2009 marriage equality law brought strong opposition from the country’s Catholic hierarchy. Yet while some state bishops have condemned marriages between same-sex couples in the past few years, there has been no substantial opposition.

“The church was really concerned with the amendment here in Mexico City,” Geraldina Gonzalez de la Vega, the Supreme Court clerk who helped Méndez bring the Oaxaca case, said. But now, with scores of amparos pending, “they are not saying anything.”

Gonzalez attributes this in part to the fact that there isn’t much history of using the courts to force widespread change in Mexico, and so neither activists nor the media fully understand the scale of the change that’s underway. Méndez thinks this will change as the litigation moves from cases involving individual couples and produces the kind of rulings that will allow same-sex couples to marry in their states without having to file suit.

“The moment that there is an order from the Supreme Court forcing reform we’ll begin to see all kinds of resistance,” Méndez said. “We’re going to have serious problems with protests in opposition.”

Méndez expects the Supreme Court to start issuing the kinds of decisions that would make marriage widely available to same-sex couples throughout the country sometime in the next “two or three years,” based on the timeline for the cases already in the works. That may come sooner in some states — on Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling ordering the state of México (which borders Mexico City) to change its marriage codes, but it will take an additional case to make that binding precedent in the state. Three more states — Oaxaca, Jalisco, and Colima — are also on the verge of crossing that threshold.

As the wins become more substantial, advocates may no longer be able to carry on their work under the radar, and there are already signs that a backlash is coming. January brought the first high-profile resistance by local officials to a Supreme Court ruling allowing a couple to marry, a marriage equality standoff that made some national news. This came when the state of Baja California tried to duck a Supreme Court court order allowing a couple to wed in the city of Mexicali. The couple was turned away from city hall three times, the last of which after a volunteer who performs a mandatory pre-marital counseling session at city hall submitted a complaint saying the men “suffer from madness.” LGBT rights activists organized a protest in front of city hall under the hashtag #MisDerechosNoSonLocura (#MyRightsAreNotMadness), and city officials finally capitulated and allowed Víctor Fernando Urías Amparo and Víctor Manuel Aguirre Espinoza to marry on Jan. 17.

There are also signs that it could emerge as a theme in the campaign for national congressional elections that will be held in June, at least in some states. The clearest hints of this have come from Chihuahua, where Méndez said there have been 25 successful amparos. On Feb. 10, the leader of the opposition PAN party in the state legislature declared, “We are going to oppose approval of gay unions, we are going to vote against them, and that is what we were discussing with the bishop.”

But even if a backlash erupts now, Méndez said, the cases they’ve already won make marriage equality all but inevitable.

“Outside of Mexico, and even inside of Mexico, these advances are not widely known,” Méndez said. “It is very slow, it is very invisible — but it is irreversible.

Rex Wockner provided research assistance for this story.

This post has been updated to reflect a March 4 ruling against a law in the state of Chiapas banning same-sex couples from marrying

Categories
Human Rights LGBTQ

Egyptian Doctors Think This Torturous Exam Can Detect “Chronic Homosexuals”

Anal exams are performed by police in many countries that criminalize homosexuality — and they base their work on 150-year-old European science. BuzzFeed News’ J. Lester Feder and Maged Atef report from Cairo.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on February 16, 2015, at 10:38 a.m. ET

CAIRO — When asked to explain what Cairo’s medical inspectors look for when they examine someone who’s been arrested for homosexuality, Dr. Maged Louis picked up a pen and started sketching an oval with sharp points on both ends.

“The shape of the hole will change,” he said. The anus “won’t be normal any more and will look like the female vagina.”

More than 150 people have been arrested on charges of homosexuality since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power just under two years ago, the largest roundup of alleged LGBT people in more than a decade in Egypt. Anal exams are a routine part of the investigation in such cases, and Louis has a role in overseeing all of them. He is the deputy director of the Justice Ministry’s Forensic Medical Authority, as well as the chief of forensic medicine for the Cairo police district.

“First we make them take the prostrate position — the position that Muslims take when they pray,” he said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. The tests are intended not just to determine whether someone has ever had anal sex, but also to detect “chronic homosexuals,” because the letter of Egyptian law only criminalizes men who engage in “habitual debauchery.” Louis said that he believed that in addition to their elongation, the anuses of “chronic homosexuals” also don’t clench when touched or don’t contract as tightly. They are smooth and lack the “corrugations” — wrinkles — found on “normal” anuses, he said. And though he denied that examiners penetrate subjects under examination, he also said they can detect a “chronic homosexual” if his anus can accept larger objects.

“A normal man’s anus can’t take more than one joint of the small finger,” he said.

International human rights and medical experts dismissed Louis’s checklist as having “no medical basis” and being “categorically not true.” Most of those interviewed by BuzzFeed News couldn’t contain their shock before all of the criteria were listed.

“I think you heard my laugh — I think that says it all,” said Dr. Joel Palefsky, a professor at the University of California San Francisco specializing in anal cancer who is president of the International Anal Neoplasia Society. “We run a clinic where we do anal examinations of thousands of patients … Never in my 20 years of doing this have I seen an anus that looks like a vagina.”

Human Rights Watch and other advocacy organizations have long denounced such anal exams — which are routine in several of the world’s roughly 80 countries that criminalize sodomy — as a form of torture that violates international law. Medical leaders in some of the countries where these exams are used have called for their abolition, such as in Lebanon.

But Louis was incredulous that anyone could doubt his inspectors’ work.

“All of what I said is science and written in books,” he said. “Doctors all over the world know that.”

The idea that inspectors are intentionally fabricating evidence because of their own homophobia isn’t what makes these exams so disturbing — though that does sometimes happen, according to defendants’ accounts. It’s that beliefs about homosexuality are leading doctors — some of whom have done extensive (and horrific) research into perfecting diagnostic techniques — to believe that what they are doing is science.

One of the modern pioneers in anal examinations in Egypt was Dr. Aymen Fouda, Louis’ predecessor as deputy director of the Forensic Medical Authority, who went on to become chief medical inspector from 2005 through 2007.

During a 2003 interview with Scott Long, then-director of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT program, Fouda said the exams were based on techniques developed in Europe.

“In this kind of investigation there are six criteria which were established by the celebrated Frenchman [Auguste Ambroise] Tardieu,” Fouda said, referring to the 19th-century forensic doctor who published a book in 1857 called The Forensic Study of Assaults against Decency. In the book, Tardieu spelled out six “characteristic signs” of “habitual pederasty,” which included those described by Dr. Louis as well as sores and fissures. But, he wrote, “[t]he unique sign and the only unequivocal mark of pederasty” is an “infundibuliform” — or funnel-shaped — anus.

Fouda told Long that forensic experts were working on developing “new, advanced methods” to detect homosexuality “involving the use of electricity.” Fouda had co-authored a 1998 study published in a journal published by the Egyptian Society of Forensic Medical Sciences that experimented with inserting hypodermic needles into the muscle of the anus in “unanesthetized humans” which claimed to demonstrate that gay men’s anuses conduct electricity at a different rate. Other researchers continued experimenting with related methods, including a doctoral student who defended a dissertation at Ain Shams University — one of Egypt’s most prestigious — in 2003 entitled “Medico-legal Assessment of the Anal Sphincter Functions in Sodomists.”

Tardieu’s theories were suspect in Europe even when they were first published, said Khaled Fahmy, a historian of Egyptian forensic medicine at the American University of Cairo who has studied its translation into Arabic.

“Even back then this is a highly ideological book,” he told BuzzFeed News, part of a “morals campaign” that was a response to events in Paris at the time. And he thought it “would be shocking” to the Egyptian public if it were widely known that courts were continuing to treat examinations as serious evidence that were based on science that was 150 years old.

But, he speculated, they endure in part because they reinforce certain basic notions about homosexuality that circulate in Egypt: that it is like a disease, usually passed on to children through sexual abuse.

“There is a belief that this abuse during childhood will leave a physical mark, and it leaves a mark on the anus,” he said. “We now have a homosexual body — not only a homosexual character which is a defective character, but it has physical traces that a forensic doctor can discern.”

And though these anal exams now seem laughable in Europe and the United States, the belief that a detectable physical basis for sexual orientation persists into the 21st century. In 2010, the Czech Republic announced that it would stop subjecting gay refugees to a practice called “phallometry” or “penile plethysmography” — which involves attaching a pressure-sensing device to the refugee’s penis while he is shown heterosexual pornography — after it was denounced as “degrading treatment” by the United Nations Refugee Agency.

The same belief for a measurable sign of homosexuality also lingers in the hunt for a “gay gene,” suggests Graeme Reid, the current head of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT program. Though the argument that homosexuality is determined by biology has been very effective for the LGBT rights movement in the U.S. and Europe, Reid said, efforts to isolate a “gay gene” are also based on a simplistic, “flawed cultural assumption” about the biological basis of sexuality.

“The idea that there is kind of one causation for sexuality seems absurd given what we know about the complexity of human sexuality,” Reid said.

Some defendants who have undergone anal exams in Egypt describe open cruelty on the part of the doctors. One of the defendants in Egypt’s largest homosexuality trials in recent history — the 2001 trial of 52 men that became known as the “Queen Boat” case — told Long of Human Rights Watch that the anal exam was one of the “two worst times in my life”; the other was when the judge sentenced him to two years in jail. “The doctors treated us like pigs,” said another quoted in Long’s report on the trial, and several noted that their degradation was compounded by the fact that they were forced to assume a sexually subservient position in front of women. Anal exams are far from the only intrusive practice that appears to be becoming more common in Sisi’s Egypt — “virginity tests” for women who are arrested are also making a comeback since the military reasserted control, and Sisi has personally defended the practice.

Fahmy said that some of the doctors “may” see themselves as administering a form of punishment through these exams. But he thinks in most cases, the doctors “would be thinking this is not torture; they’re not really humiliating them.” A man who has allowed another to penetrate him — which carries much greater stigma than doing the penetrating — has already lost his honor in the eyes of many Egyptians, and so these exams seem like nothing by comparison.

Doctors likely believe that “these are people who have forfeited their honor to begin with,” Fahmy said. “By being who they are, by being homosexual, they effectively have forfeited the constitutional protection that they are entitled to.”

Because these “examinations have no forensic or evidentiary value for consensual homosexual acts,” Human Rights Watch maintains that doctors who perform them violate the United Nations Principles of Medical Ethics, which says physicians should not “apply their knowledge and skills in order to assist in the interrogation of prisoners and detainees in a manner that may adversely affect [their] physical or mental health or condition.”

And there is no doubt that these exams are absurd, say doctors practicing in the United States. Dr. Ross Cranston, director of the Anal Dysplasia Clinic and Research Program in the University of Pittsburgh Division of Infectious Diseases, said not all gay men have anal sex regularly or at all, and that no credible study has ever shown any clear difference in things like muscle strength.

“I could not tell a gay anal canal from a straight anal canal,” Cranston said. “There’s no typical sign of the gay anal canal.”

Human Rights Watch’s Reid said the organization will begin a project this spring to document how common anal exams are and the role of medical practitioners in them. The organization has documented them in at least six countries in the course of investigating specific cases of abuse, but no comprehensive review has ever been done to establish how widespread they are. And it’s not clear, Reid said, whether “there’s a collaboration between medical examiners and police to deliberately subject people to humiliation and torture, or medical examiners genuinely believe that this has some kind of a medical basis.”

Anecdotal reports suggest there is a good deal of skepticism about anal exams even in countries with notoriously homophobic regimes. In Uganda, for example, anal exams are “the first line of investigation” when someone is arrested for homosexuality, said Adrian Jjuuko, director of the Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum, which often provides legal support in cases involving LGBT rights. A Ugandan man who was arrested for homosexuality along with two others in November told BuzzFeed News that police stuck their hands down their pants when they were first detained to “see if we had Pampers,” believing “gays put diapers on themselves” because anal sex causes incontinence.

But despite the police’s fixation on the anus, Jjuuko said, “the state does not use [anal exams] as evidence.”

The amount of research Egypt’s forensic experts appear to have invested in anal exams would seem to set them apart. It’s not clear whether the doctors who perform the exams have the same rigor — Long collected reports from defendants in the 2001 case who said investigators reached their conclusions based on the fact that they appeared feminine or had no hair on their chests.

Belief in the scientific rigor of anal exams is widely shared in Egypt. Medical examiners aren’t just a tool the police use to simply rubber-stamp charges — in fact, they’ve contradicted the charges in Egypt’s two most high-profile homosexuality trials under Sisi’s regime.

During the trial last month of 26 men accused of participating in a “gay sex party” at a working-class bathhouse, it wasn’t prosecutors who introduced the results of the anal exams, but the defense. Prosecutors didn’t introduce them because only three of the men were found to have been sexually “used,” contradicting the testimony of the arresting officer, who claimed to have personally witnessed multiple couples engaged in anal sex.

All 26 men were acquitted in January, the first time defendants had been acquitted on charges of homosexuality in a high-profile case since Sisi began controlling Egypt. But an exam pronouncing a defendant’s anus “un-used” is not a guarantee of acquittal. Examiners routinely add a disclaimer to reports when they find no evidence of penetration that says anal sex can be undetectable if it happens with “full consent, taking the right position, and the use of lubricants.” And in another recent case — in which eight men were prosecuted based on a YouTube video prosecutors alleged was of a same-sex wedding — all were sentenced to a year in jail despite the fact that medical examiners said there was no evidence of penetration.

Even some Egyptian lawyers who support LGBT rights don’t question the legitimacy of the exams.

In some cases, attorneys even demand police send their clients for forensic exams in the hopes that it will refute the charges. Mohamed Abo Zakry, a defense attorney with an organization representing seven of the defendants in the bathhouse case, reacted as if it were a stupid question when asked about challenging the legitimacy of the tests during an interview with BuzzFeed News just before the acquittal in January.

“We cannot say the exams are not accurate,” Zakry said. “They are accurate. Any [doctor] who has experience can see clearly if this guy is gay or not.”

Categories
Human Rights LGBTQ Transgender Rights

Meet The Trans Sex Worker Who Transformed A Gang-Controlled Prison

Karla Avelar survived a serial killer, gang attacks, and four years in a Salvadoran prison to become a trans activist on the global stage. J. Lester Feder and Nicola Chávez Courtright report from El Salvador.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on February 8, 2015, at 10:52 a.m. ET

SENSUNTEPEQUE, El Salvador — Karla Avelar had a backache when she reached the Sensuntepeque Penal Center, a cluster of cinderblock buildings perched on the side of a lush green valley near El Salvador’s border with Honduras. So, after lunch, she took off her shirt and lay facedown on the cement floor of a room that doubles as activity space and cafeteria. Five women in bright makeup gave her a head-to-toe massage. They used hand cream as massage oil and placed a small candle over the knot in her back to draw out the pain.

Avelar was so at ease inside the prison that it is hard to imagine that she was regularly raped and tortured while she was incarcerated there between 1996 and 2000. Avelar, now 37 years old, was one of the many trans sex workers from San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, who has done time there over the past several decades. The ones who passed through there around the same time as Avelar report being abused by guards and pressed into a kind of slavery by the gangs who controlled the prison.

Those days are over, thanks in part to a legal complaint Avelar herself filed after her release. The women who rubbed her back on her recent visit, just before Christmas, are among the roughly 50 inmates who live in Sector 2, a special unit that houses trans women along with a handful of gay men. They still interact with the other prisoners in some common areas — several of them have boyfriends in the men’s unit, and the prison supplies them with condoms — but they live and sleep in a part of the prison that is walled off from the men’s unit for their safety.

“Today there is no rape,” said one 25-year-old inmate who gave her name as Kendra. Kendra said she was subject to some verbal abuse when she first arrived in 2010 — a guard forced her to kneel for two hours while hurling homophobic insults at her — but Avelar came to see her and helped put a stop to it. The sealing of Sector 2 in that same year coincided with a decision by the prison administration to move the gang members out of the prison, which also went a long way to improving the trans and gay inmates’ situation.

Many of them have stories much like Avelar’s: Thrown out of home at an early age, they got by as sex workers, and survived rape or run-ins with gangs before landing in Sensuntepeque. They look to Avelar as a cross between a godmother and an advocate, able to win concessions from the prison administration that they could never get on their own. During the December visit, Avelar delivered a petition from the residents of Sector 2 to the warden asking that they be allowed to join the women’s unit for a Christmas pageant. He agreed to it in writing on the spot.

“They’re a little afraid of me because I’ve gotten them to remove certain guards,” she told BuzzFeed News during the three-hour drive to the prison from San Salvador. “So with me, [the guards] are all like, ‘Hello, Niña Karlita,'” greeting her with an affectionate nickname.

In a country where HIV and violence claims so many trans women’s lives that there are few trans women in San Salvador over the age of 35, it’s remarkable that Avelar is even still alive. She was raped and threatened with murder for the first time when she was 10, has survived at least three murder attempts as an adult, and has lived with HIV that went untreated for more than 13 years. Since 2008, she has run the trans rights organization she founded in San Salvador, known by the acronym COMCAVIS Trans. She regularly travels around the world to make the case for trans rights before international human rights bodies.

Avelar is part of a generation of trans activists in El Salvador, most of whom never finished primary school. They have won some substantial victories — including a directive issued by the government in 2010 prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity in government jobs — even though human rights advocates consider El Salvador one of the most dangerous countries in the Americas for LGBT people. Based on media reports, COMCAVIS has documented at least twelve women and two gay men were killed in 2014, a figure they believe understates the actual number of murders.

“In terms of Karla’s transformation, I can say, ‘Wow, when I’m all grown up I want to be just like her’ — only that she’s younger than me,” said William Hernández, who founded El Salvador’s first LGBT rights organization in 1994, Entre Amigos (which translates to “Among Friends”).

“We met her on the streets,” Hernandez said. “We knew the comings and goings of all of the things she lived through.” Now, he marvels at seeing her in meetings seated next to ambassadors and cabinet ministers. “And she’s not just sitting there — she’s actually expressing herself, making decisions and laying the cards on the table.”

Avelar was born in Chalatenango, a rural district just to the northwest of the one that houses the Sensuntepeque prison. She left home when she was 10 years old, after the second time her cousin raped her in their family house. Another cousin used to shoot at her from time to time — and finally told her to get out.

“My cousin warned me that if I didn’t leave home he’d kill me, because in his family there were only machos,” Avelar said. She was dressing as a boy at the time, she said, but “I wasn’t fooling anybody. … In my town, in my neighborhood, everybody stopped calling me ‘Carlos’; they called me ‘Karla’ instead. Or ‘the faggot.'”

She left without enough money for bus fare, so she started walking toward San Salvador. She walked for a day and a half before reaching Apopa, a town just outside the capital, arriving at around 11 p.m. A man took pity on her and paid for her to take a bus the rest of the way. She spent the next six months sleeping in the San Salvador bus station or on the street, feeding herself from the trash.

She eventually saved up a little money from begging and bought a case of Coca-Cola, and began a business selling soda in one of the city’s largest markets. There she met a woman named María who took her in but made her work a grueling schedule of domestic chores.

The woman’s son also raped her, Avelar said, “but I stayed there because I didn’t know what else to do.”

One of her most dangerous chores was buying tortillas. María’s house was in a neighborhood controlled by the 18th Street gang, but the tortillería was in territory of the rival Mara Salvatrucha (MS). On one of these tortilla runs, a group of MS members grabbed her and took her to a place where she said about 15 men raped her. There were more waiting their turn, but she found the courage to make a break for it.

She returned to homelessness shortly after. That’s where she first met another trans woman, named Diana, who invited Avelar to come along with her when she worked the streets. Avelar discovered that sex work finally gave her a way to earn money on her own and a little bit of control over her life.

“I was young [and] I made money,” she said.

Avelar stayed friends with Diana until about eight years ago, when Diana was killed by her partner, a police officer. They had no real name for what they were at the time they first met. Most of the trans women in San Salvador were lumped into the category of “homosexuals” or they called themselves “locas,” which literally means “crazy women” but often is used to mean something similar to “fag.”

“At that time, we didn’t even know that we were ‘trans’ or that we were the subjects of rights or anything,” Avelar said.

Many of the trans sex workers who were already working in San Salvador when Avelar entered the business in 1990 remember those years as the tail end of a golden age. A civil war raged in El Salvador from the early 1980s until 1992, but the capital itself was comparatively peaceful and home to a thriving red-light district where gay men were relatively open and trans sex workers enjoyed steady business from the soldiers and police. There were a few strips where they worked, but the center of activity was a four-block area known as the Praviana. The women who spent time there in the ’80s and early ’90s estimate that in an area of about four blocks, anywhere from 70 to 90 trans women lived, most of them sex workers in the neighborhood’s hotels.

Avelar was too intimidated by the other trans women to work in the heart of the Praviana. The veterans didn’t exactly welcome her with open arms — they bullied her ruthlessly, calling her “la machorra” (“the dyke”) because she wore short hair.

The “trans women who had been there a long time … would walk up and steal my money — sometimes they would even leave me naked,” Avelar said. Once, a woman waved a machete in her face and told her she “had a pretty face for slicing up into little pieces.”

Avelar eventually learned to fight back, and she began dishing out the same kind of abuse to the women who had treated her so badly. But this was as the Praviana began to decline in the 1990s. Many of the women left for the United States, following a well-worn path that many Salvadorans took in the dangerous and unstable period as organized gangs tightened control of the country following the civil war.

And then there was the “Matalocas” — the “Trannykiller.” A serial killer started attacking trans women on the street in a series of drive-by shootings. He was said to have a wooden leg.

A man matching his description nearly killed Avelar in 1992. One night, Avelar said, she got into the car of a john who drove her to a secluded part of town after agreeing on a price. Her heart stopped when she went to go down on him and discovered he had an artificial leg.

“I touched his peg leg and I got scared,” Avelar remembered. “I said to myself, ‘He’s already killed me.'”

She tried to act calm and finished the blow job, but he had noticed her panic. He pulled her off his penis, smacked her across the head with the butt of a pistol, and then made her get out of the car. That’s when “penetration occurred” she said, and then he forced her back into the car and promised to kill her if she tried to escape.