Three police officers have been found guilty in a Salvadorian court for the February 2019 murder of Camila Díaz Córdova, a transgender woman and sex worker who had been deported from the United States the year before. The July 28 ruling marks the first homicide conviction for the killing of a trans person in El Salvador, according to the international advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
In a statement, the organization calls the decision “pivotal to the rights of transgender Salvadorans.”
“This landmark ruling is much needed in a country where [LGBTQ+] Salvadorans and their families rarely see justice for violent crimes,” José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at HRW, wrote in a statement. “The outcome of Camila’s case sends a powerful message to Salvadoran society that anti-LGBT violence will not be tolerated.”
The three officers convicted of aggravated homicide were Jaime Geovany Mendoza Rivas, Luis Alfredo Avelar Sandoval, and Carlos Valentín Rosales Carpio, according to the Salvadorian newspaper El Diario De Hoy. They were each sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Díaz left El Salvador in August 2017 and traveled to the United States, where she applied for asylum after experiencing years of anti-trans violence in her home country, as the Washington Blade reported earlier this year. Upon arrival, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained her in a California facility.
A judge subsequently rejected her asylum claim and she was deported back to El Salvador in November of the same year. Díaz’s friends told HRW that ICE officials “tricked her into signing a removal order.”
Just over a year after her return, Díaz was brutally killed. After midnight on January 31, 2019, she was arrested for public nuisance and intoxication, according to El Diario. Díaz was then beaten by the arresting officers and was left on the side of a highway with critical wounds. She was later taken to a hospital in the capital city of San Salvador, where she died three days later.
Díaz was remembered as “a happy and sincere” person, in comments made by her best friend Virginia Gómez to Washington Blade.
El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world and has seen a surge of violence against transgender women in recent years. At least 600 transgender people have been murdered in the country since 1993, according to the local advocacy group COMCAVIS Trans. Between October 2019 and April 2020 alone, at least seven trans women and two gay men were murdered in El Salvador, according to HRW.
Though prosecutors pushed to classify the murder of Díaz as a hate crime, judges dismissed the hate crime charges on the ground that there was insufficient evidence.
Díaz’s case is also indicative of the often deadly consequences of the United States’ arduous and limiting asylum seeking process. HRW found that there have been at least 138 cases of Salvadorans killed in their home country since 2013 after being deported from the U.S.
Local activists claim “there is a systematic disrespect for migrants” in the U.S. Bianka Rodríguez, executive director of the Salvadoran advocacy organization Comcavis Trans, told NBC Out in a statement that the conviction of the police officers who murdered Díaz is a “call to the U.S. and immigration judges to reconsider an analyze each asylum application based on generalized violence.”
“According to our records and reports of forced internal displacement, the perpetrators of violence are not only restricted to gang or family groups, but also extend to state security forces,” she added.
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