On March 10, 2024, Nayib Bukele mocked on The phrase comes from an interview that Morena Herrera, a historical Salvadoran feminist, gave to EL PAÍS after the elections. Despite the president's mockery, Morena did nothing but tell the truth. For the unbelievers, just look at the role of the first lady, Gabriela de Bukele, who has served, above all, as a mother and companion, but never in a leadership role. Although her work has been important to guarantee some rights to pregnant women and early childhood (pregnant women have been imprisoned without access to health and three babies have died during the emergency regime), is not that of an empowered woman, but that of one whose role is exclusive of caring for care tasks, that of the good mother. And there is nothing wrong with that, except that public policy is tailored to people with privileges in a country where motherhood is not always chosen, where contraception is not guaranteed by the State and where sexual education is banned.
To the idea that Bukele wants women locked up at home, we must add that he wants to educate children and adolescents as asexual beings, to whom it is preferable to talk about God than about how to prevent sexual violence. It seems like a joke, but it's an anecdote; and in El Salvador there are many people who are comfortable with it being that way. This idea, like most of those promoted by Bukele, is neither new nor original. Comprehensive sexual education (CSE) has been, for years, the ghost that conservatives and churches have pursued in El Salvador under the false premise that teaching children and adolescents about their rights is equivalent to “converting” them into homosexuals.
In the country where a pregnant teenager is not a scandal but an epidemic, there has not been an electoral cycle since the 90s where support or rejection of CSE and abortion did not serve as a seal of approval or disdain towards anyone who aspires to a popularly elected position. Although it was at the end of February 2024 that the withdrawal of sexual education materials from the educational curriculum was announced, the erasure of comprehensive sexual education has occurred gradually since 2022. That does not mean that it is no longer strategic.
Bukele is a man of signs and an expert in smoke screens. That is why it is not surprising that one of the first controversies after the unconstitutional re-election was one that earned him the sympathy of the vast majority of people in El Salvador, whether or not they voted for him: the elimination of everything that has to do with education integral sexual or “gender ideology”, that imaginary current that is protested every time a common enemy is needed.
The cuts began in September 2022, after a scandal broke out over an educational short broadcast on Channel 10 (state channel) in which three types of possible sexual orientations were discussed: heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual. Content like this, in line with reality, earned the director of the channel his position and had as its first result the cutting of everything that resembles it, not only in the educational curriculum but in the talks given by health promoters in the schools. A consultant on gender issues in the public and private sphere who works with the Ministry of Education who spoke anonymously so as not to lose her job assured that in that same context, while working on a project with international organizations and the then ISNA (Salvadoran Institute for Children and Adolescents), they were ordered to eliminate the topics of comprehensive sexuality education and change the name of the program. “We had to call him. Education for the well-being of children. Imagine a sex education program without being able to mention the word sexuality. We had to remodel everything to put makeup on it and in the end it was no longer promoted,” she says. All this despite the Grow Together Law, one of the star projects of the first lady explicitly dictates in its article 33 that “all girls, boys and adolescents, without exception, in accordance with their development and the progressive exercise of their faculties They have the right to receive comprehensive sexuality education and sexual and reproductive health care.”
That this administration disrespects the laws, even if they themselves have created and approved them, is not surprising taking into account that they have violated the Constitution on various occasions: from the dismissal of the Constitutional Chamber to the illegal re-election. For this reason, organizations and even teaching staff have since been making important efforts from the community level to maintain spaces that had been conquered during the left-wing governments – the “golden” era – to launch these issues, even if it is from a narrative. aseptic, where not only is pleasure not talked about, but gender, diversity and empowerment are erased concepts. In the interior of the country, in the western zone, fathers and mothers were the most interested in maintaining access to sexual education for their sons and daughters and thus the well-being days for children and adolescents were born, where although There is a prohibition to talk explicitly about sexual education and diversity, there is still room to talk about topics that were silenced in schools.
The erasure of “gender ideology”, in the end, beyond gaining popularity among local conservatives is for Bukele a wink, an offering, towards those he considers his allies abroad. The final guillotine blow to the ESI is aligned with the Mandate for Leadershipa document prepared by the Heritage Foundationthe organization that leads the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which is behind the efforts to bring Trump, the friend, back to the White Housevery nice and cool” from Bukele, as he himself defined it in a bilateral meeting in 2019. It was precisely at this year's CPAC, held in February in Washington, that Bukele gave the final order to the Minister of Education. This conference, a gateway for conservative leaders, was attended by Javier Milei for the first time in 2022, the current president of Argentina, who since coming to power wants to make abortion a crime and who is also leading his own crusade against CSE.
Hopefully the attendance of two characters like Bukele and Milei to the CPAC was a coincidence of megalomaniacs absorbed by power, but the countries they represent are strategic points on the conservative agenda: Argentina being the country where the feminist movement led the absolute decriminalization of abortion and El Salvador the first accused before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for denying a woman access to abortion. The Court's ruling, still pending, could set an important precedent throughout the region to guarantee the right of women to decide about their bodies, especially those in vulnerable conditions.
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