It is a rainy afternoon in October 2020 and, while in the Salvadoran capital the legislature has been confronted for more than a decade by a draft amendment to the Constitution to establish that only “man and woman born this way” have the right to marry, in a Quiet and remote village in the rural area of eastern El Salvador, a person who was settled by his parents as Walter Vigil in 1988 has reason to celebrate: he has just married Gabriel.
Walter has long since ceased to be Walter. One day he was able to take charge of his life and decided to fight to fulfill some of his wishes and for his rights. That is why, that afternoon, Walter defies the system and stars in his dream of marrying Gabriel, whom he considers the love of his life. Although in reality, Walter is no longer Walter, but Valentina, the person he assumed years ago that he is, regardless of how they registered her in the civil registry. And their wedding is actually a sham, a meaningful and emotional representation, but stripped of legality in a country where congressmen often invite pastors and priests to preside over State activities, and where a special commission of the Presidency has convened in 2021 to religious institutions to consult them on possible reforms to the Constitution.
With that symbolic ceremony, Valentina culminated a 17-year cycle from the moment she decided, in her teens, to assume herself as a woman.
And although at the beginning she suffered from the misunderstanding of some people in her family, they never stopped supporting her.
Including his father, a former soldier in the Army special forces.
Valentina was in charge of doing the manicure to the bridesmaids of their wedding, one day before the party.Lissette Lemus
Valentina's wedding collides with the provision of the Family Code that considers a marriage between "people of the same sex" void.
El Salvador has not legislated same-sex marriage and still refuses to recognize the right of individuals to claim their own gender identity.
But, faced with the remote possibility that the country may one day pass a law that allows them to assume their identity, and although the Constitution establishes that family relationships come from the union between "man" and "woman", ultraconservative groups fear that Eventually, this could open the door to marriage between people who are not “man and woman thus born”, and since 2005 they have tried to include the lock of that precise wording in article 33 of the Constitution.
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Valentina, who has already turned 32, knows that she cannot legally marry Gabriel Juárez, 19, and that is why she chose to perform the symbolic ceremony in a rural hamlet in the department of San Miguel.
“I am frustrated that we cannot do this legally.
We don't have the benefits that marriages of a man and a woman have access to, ”he says.
What Valentina points out, the enjoyment of some of the rights of legally united couples, is what constitutes the foundation of the struggle that other human rights defense groups started, since they understand that the Constitution does not prohibit marriages like the one that Valentina and Gabriel want. But the Legislative Assembly has failed to legislate on these unions and the Family Code appears to be an obstacle to doing so.
Manuel Escalante, deputy director of the Human Rights Institute of the UCA (IDHUCA), believes that there is a violation of the principle of equality before the law and that, by not legislating on these unions, people are prevented from exercising some of their rights. "If there is a marital or civil union, the spouses are automatically recognized with a series of obligations and rights that are legally enforceable and respectable," he explains. As an example, he mentions the rights that arise in the areas of inheritance, protection, and social security.
The recognition of the legal unions of homosexual or trans people goes beyond civil benefits such as health insurance or inheritance of property. Bianka Rodríguez, director of the activist organization Comcavis Trans, points out that, for example, unions between people of the same sex do not have access to justice for cases such as violence between couples. But the worst thing, for Rodríguez, is that El Salvador is not only very behind in the recognition of the rights of the LGBTIQ community, but with the government of Nayib Bukele there is a paralysis in the Executive regarding the work that the previous governments; in other words, there is a risk of backsliding. To support his point, he says that, one day after his inauguration, Bukele announced the dismantling of the Secretariat for Social Inclusion,that housed the Directorate of Sexual Diversity.
Valentina poses wearing her dress prior to the mock wedding ceremony in the ElCarreto canton, east of the Salvadoran capital.
"This was a clear message that the issue of lesbian, gay, transsexual, bisexual and intersex rights did not have a priority for this government," explains the activist: "There were already work plans, advanced policies, spaces for dialogue with the State institutions ”.
All that today has an uncertain future.
Amaral Gómez, an academic specialist in gender and sexuality, says it clearly: it is, basically, clear discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Something that, in theory, is prohibited by different human rights instruments that El Salvador has undertaken to respect. The fact that in the country people of the same sex are forced to carry out mock weddings and not a real marriage, shows high levels of social and institutional discrimination. "El Salvador is lagging behind within a group of nations that, in a civilizing process, grant rights under equal conditions to all people regardless of their sexual orientation," he reasons.
Valentina says that her wedding to Gabriel was a claim for her rights.
"We are human beings and we have the right to formalize our relationship with the State, just like everyone else."
Acceptance and transformation
Valentina's wedding took the residents of the El Carreto village by surprise, on the slopes of the San Miguel volcano.
She greeted her guests with a striking off-white dress, a sparkly tiara and her favorite shoes, with which she walked among family, friends, neighbors, and members of the LGBTIQ community through a downpour-lashed courtyard.
The custom of a town party, neighbors and friends of the couple came to cook in large pots very early.
The chosen menu — stewed chicken and rice — was cooked on makeshift stoves, placed on the dirt floor of that house where Valentina grew up with her grandmother and aunt.
Valentina was born on October 4, 1988 and was registered as Walter Vigil.
His father, José Moisés Herrera, served in the special forces of the Armed Forces and was fighting in the civil war that left some 75,000 dead.
When José learned of the birth of his first-born through a triangulated message from his mother to the brigade, and of the brigade by radio transmitter to the battlefield, he came to feel that any danger related to the war was little in front of the joy of having a male child.
Community members are surprised by Valentina's “wedding” ring, under a portrait of her grandmother. Lissette Lemus
José met his son two months after he was born: the military campaign prevented him from returning home frequently.
The first two years of Walter's life were similar to those two months: a father absent due to the war and a mother, Reina Amparo Vigil, with many needs.
That forced Reina to emigrate to the United States, as thousands of Salvadorans did in the late 1980s.
Then the little boy, barely 15 months old, was left in the care of his grandmother Erlinda and his aunt Mabel, Reina's sister.
He was not reunited with his mother until he was 7 years old, when she returned from the United States.
They lived together for eight years and Valentina remembers that her mother began to notice that
her Walter
preferred to play with girls and avoided the usual activities of boys his age.
Her father, who also returned to live with Reina upon his return from the United States, scolded her for her "effeminate" behavior and on more than one occasion punished her, recalls Valentina.
Reina developed leukemia and died when Valentina was 15 years old, and was again under the care of her aunt and grandmother, with the consent of her father, who after Reina's death started a family again and had another son and daughter. .
Valentina discovered from a very young age that her preferences were different from those of most children.
Respect for her mother kept her silent the entire time.
But after Reina's death he dared to show in public, first to his family, and then to his friends, what he really was like.
One by one, she bought women's clothes, which her grandmother even burned to reject her decision to express her identity.
Valentina decided to leave school because she was sure that they would not allow her to go to classes dressed as a girl.
It was then that she began the hormonalization process to transform her body, despite the danger to her health that undergoing the procedure without medical supervision.
Today she sees it clearly: she says that she gave up the right to seek medical support for fear of further rejection of the discrimination she already suffered.
The violation of other rights
Escalante takes the example of Valentina and the countless barriers and chains that society has placed on her to explain that, very often, people who are discriminated against because of their gender identity have their rights violated in many areas of the community. life: in their personal and sexual integrity, in their economic, cultural, educational, housing and health rights.
Valentina Vigil defines herself as a trans woman and decided to hold a mock wedding in El Salvador, where equal marriage is not legislated.
For human rights defenders, the gaps to which the LGBTIQ population is exposed, and which are exacerbated according to their socioeconomic origin, are only the spearhead.
Denying them the possibility of joining legally and with full recognition of rights with another person of the same sex aggravates their situation: "The State, instead of protecting dignity, affects it greatly," says Escalante.
Activists agree that the State, instead of raising the possibility of reforms that help reduce these gaps, formulates processes that increase this inequality.
For example, the request to reform article 33 of the Constitution that was promoted by conservative sectors on several occasions to be approved.
The first idea for this reform came from a plane returning from Rome in 2005.
One of the passengers on that flight, a Salvadoran deputy, was returning from a meeting with Joseph Ratzinger, then Pope Benedict XVI. They talked about equality, family and marriage. They sowed the seeds of what could become the definitive lock to equal union in El Salvador.
Rodolfo Parker, a former deputy for the Christian Democratic Party, participated in that meeting with the pope along with 12 representatives of similar parties from Africa, Europe and America.
Parker took advantage of the long hours of the flight back to El Salvador to think about the issue of the family "as the basis of society and marriage as the foundation of the family," and decided to put his ideas on paper, the lines of which became the first draft of the proposed amendment to article 33 of the Constitution.
Parker claims that this is how the draft amendment was born and claims that it was never intended to become an electoral flag.
"I was the one who presented the first constitutional reform in the direction of reaffirming, in an explicit way, at the primary norm level, that marriage is between a man and a woman born that way," says Parker.
Many things have changed since that meeting;
among them, that now the Catholic Church is led by a new pope, with a more flexible line in relation to homosexual people.
In October 2020, Francisco's words went viral when he said in a documentary that homosexual people have the right to be in a family because they are children of God.
When asking former MP Parker if this does not influence the Christian Democratic Party to change its position, he clarifies that he and his party now support the possibility of a legal reform in which the union of people of the same sex is enabled, but under a name other than marriage because, according to him, "starting from a common and anthropological sense, the purpose of marriage is procreation."
Parker didn't explain about the anthropological sense.
The reform presented by the legislator in July 2005 was the first attempt to put a lock on equal marriage in the country.
On that occasion, the 2006-2009 legislature approved the motion, but it did not materialize because the next legislature did not ratify it.
In El Salvador, the law establishes that a constitutional reform must be approved by a legislature by a simple majority (43 votes) and be ratified by the next legislature by a qualified majority (56 votes).
Ten years after the presentation of the first bill, on April 16, 2015, a favorable opinion was issued for the fourth time to approve this reform, which had to be ratified in the 2015-2018 legislature.
But in the following months, eight citizens presented three different lawsuits of unconstitutionality and, three years later, on January 31, 2018, the Constitutional Chamber ordered Congress to refrain from carrying out any ratification of the proposal, since the magistrates considered that the legislature that approved the reform had bypassed the phases of dialogue, public deliberation, information and publication.
Valentina hopes that one day marriage between both sexes will be legal in the country.Lissette Lemus
Erick Iván Ortiz, founder of the Colectivo Normal - a citizen organization that fights for the rights of the LGBTIQ community - and former candidate for deputy for the Nuestro Tiempo party, considers that initiatives such as changing article 33 of the Constitution incite hatred and are used electorally against a population that has historically suffered exclusion and discrimination.
Academic researcher Amaral Gómez also maintains that these proposals are used by some political parties and legislators as a proselytizing tool in each campaign, when they activate a discriminatory discourse against the homosexual population to attract the conservative vote.
Valentina's “wedding” in October 2020 took place exactly 20 years after, in the municipality of San Juan Nonualco, in the department of La Paz, Raúl Antonio Herrera - known as Perla Lins Herrera - and Cristian Vladimir Chirino, perform a symbolic act that they called "marriage."
That ceremony caused a sensationalist echo in the media and on the internet you can still find a journalistic note published by the Associated Press, entitled:
Controversy over alleged marriage between men in El Salvador
.
The marriage even led the Prosecutor's Office to open an investigation against Perla and Vladimir, but as it was later discovered that in reality it had all been a simulation like Valentina's, they were acquitted.
Valentina did not know that precedent.
The months before her symbolic union with Gabriel were not easy for her or him.
As in any wedding, they decided to take care of every detail: from the design of the bridesmaids' dresses to the invitation cards, the cake and the decorations.
They wanted to surprise everyone, but that torrential rain cut the number of guests waiting in half and spoiled the act of handing over the bride to her younger brother.
On the eve of their wedding they had difficulty sleeping and even lost their appetite.
A week before the ceremony, Valentina commented: “I am nervous because it is a dream that I have always had.
Even hunger has been taken away from him and there are nights that give us insomnia because we are thinking that everything will go well ”.
The key that the Constitutional Chamber reviews
In 2016, the Normal Collective filed a lawsuit in which they asked the Constitutional Chamber to analyze the omission of the Legislative Assembly when it comes to legislating on the issue of marriage.
According to the plaintiffs, Article 33 of the Constitution must be interpreted extensively in the sense that it includes both the relationships made up of “a man and a woman”, as well as “a man and another man” and “a woman and another woman. ”, So that LGBTIQ people are not deprived of the right to form a family union.
Three years later, the Chamber admitted the lawsuit, but has not yet resolved.
At the time the claim was admitted, a second one filed by citizen Hermán Duarte Iraheta was linked to it, since the reasons alleged by both plaintiffs were linked.
Meanwhile, a decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court) led to the opening of another debate regarding marriage between people of the same sex in Central America, and El Salvador has not been exempt from that discussion.
In November 2017, the Inter-American Court told Costa Rica that it should allow same-sex marriage.
This position was expressed in an "advisory opinion" requested by that country as a result of citizen demands to guarantee this right.
With this, Costa Rica became the first Central American country to allow equal marriage, and the sixth in Latin America along with Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay.
Relatives and neighbors congratulate the couple after the dance at the wedding ceremony.Lissette Lemus
There are those who argue that, although that response from the Inter-American Court was based on the consultation of a specific country, its effects should necessarily be extended to the rest of the member countries of the inter-American system.
For Ortiz, an activist from the Normal collective, this resolution constitutes jurisprudence and, therefore, is one of the elements that make up what is considered a system of rights in any country.
But for the lawyer Rodolfo González, former magistrate of the Chamber, there is no unanimity on the binding power of the opinion of the Inter-American Court.
“It is an opinion, not a sentence.
I cannot say that there is a universal consensus that on these issues there is a violation of rights and therefore jurisprudence or legislation has to go in a certain direction ”.
González was one of the 11 magistrates who, in February 2017, endorsed that a person officially registered as a male in El Salvador could be recognized with a female name, after a court in the State of Virginia, United States, endorsed this change .
That resolution represented a small victory in the battle for the recognition of identity rights for the transgender population in El Salvador.
Escalante, from the Institute of Human Rights, assures that everything that has to do with human rights, especially with the expansion of rights, should be mandatory for countries that recognize the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court, but not based on a legal obligation, but on a principle of good faith of the States.
Today, the legal scenario of equal marriage is uncertain in El Salvador: on May 1, the new legislature that took office in the country, controlled by Bukele, dismissed the members of the Constitutional Chamber and elected its new members without respect. due process, which has set off alarms in the international community, which has seen this action as a threat to the rule of law.
Trans activist Bianka Rodríguez considers that the outlook is very doubtful with the resolutions of this new Chamber. For Rodríguez, the recently dismissed Chamber left a debt with the LGTBI population by not resolving on equal marriage. Although the Executive of Nayib Bukele from the beginning paralyzed the work processes that had been developing with the previous administrations, the activist tries to see the change with optimism: “This new Chamber will have the opportunity to regulate rights that have been owed to us for years. LGTBI people. The challenge will be to give that legality to vulnerable populations, it must take up and respond to the interests of the Salvadoran people ”.
For now, the Government has not given many reasons for optimism: this Friday, May 14, the Women's Commission of the legislature, made up of mostly deputies from the ruling party New Ideas, shelved the Identity Law in one fell swoop. of Gender along with 29 files more pending study, considering them "obsolete and not in accordance with reality".
The Permanent Table for a Gender Identity Law criticized the decision of the new deputies.
This initiative, they said in a statement, "is an effort from trans civil society organizations, it does not respond to a party political agenda, but rather to the recognition of our rights."
In the El Carreto farmhouse, Valentina is still married to Gabriel.
They live alone in the same house and she makes a living in a small business where she sells rice, beans, bread, and basic necessities.
Meanwhile, Gabriel weaves hammocks and plays soccer with Valentina's childhood friends.
This report was produced with the support of the
International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF)
as part of its ¡Exprésate! Initiative.
in Latin America.
