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El Salvador is infamously known internationally for torturing impoverished women.
In November 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights left it firm with the case of Manuela, one of 74 women whom the Salvadoran justice system sentenced to 30 years in prison after an obstetric emergency.
Manuela died in 2011 of cancer a few years before clemency was a viable option for women like her.
When she lost her baby, she had not yet been diagnosed with an illness that, it was later learned, affected her pregnancy.
It took 10 years for her innocence to be restored in an international court, but that recognition paved the way to ending the nightmare for the others.
In December 2023, El Salvador released Lilian, the last woman convicted of an out-of-hospital birth.
Lilian's release closes a cycle in the lives of these women about whom we knew little or nothing until April 2014, when the
Una flor por las 17
campaign was launched.
The campaign reported on the conditions in which they had had to face their pregnancy and give birth.
Women who lived in conditions of poverty and who, for the most part, had not finished basic education and whose income came from informal commerce or care work.
The story was almost always the same: contractions confused by a stomach pain that led them to a bathroom, almost always a septic tank, where they gave birth to their babies without any attention or help.
When help reached them, instead of seeing them as a person who needed help, they were labeled as suspects, handcuffed to a stretcher and accused by the Prosecutor's Office of being “bad mothers” who did not comply, in the midst of pain and physical effort. what a birth means, with their duty to guarantee the life of their sons and daughters.
All of them were subjected to justice marked by gender stereotypes between 1999 and 2019, the decade in which we became the country with the most restrictive law against abortion.
In 1998, the reform of the Penal Code came into force in El Salvador, eliminating three grounds under which abortion was permitted, and in 1999 the Constitution was reformed to incorporate in article 1 the recognition of life from the moment of conception.
Although all of them had premature or full-term births, the initial accusation was of abortion, because according to the authorities they had consciously attempted against the lives of their children.
The impact of the reform was such that it filled the Salvadoran medical union with fear, which, in the national hospitals where these women were treated, was given a memorandum to notify that anyone involved in an abortion would lose their license as a doctor.
The story of the 17, the initial number of pardons that the campaign requested, went around the world with the intention of generating pressure on the authorities to review the circumstances under which these women were imprisoned.
The echo was greater outside the border, from where correspondents began to arrive to cover their stories and amplify what was clearly an injustice.
At home, however, the campaign was met with a society, above all, indifferent and a violent reaction on the part of people with political and economic power, the same ones who promoted the reforms of '98 and '99. The then director of the Institute of Medicine Legal, José Miguel Fortín Magaña, was in charge of attacking them and the campaign, and made use of the files to which he had access to “prove” that the newborns had been murdered.
Fortín Magaña was not only openly Opus Dei, but his wife was part of the Board of Directors of the 'Yes to Life' Foundation.
This is one of the foundations that for years led a movement against the liberation of the 17, about whom he set up a website where he attached images not only of them to remove them from anonymity, but also of the babies.
But the fear was not only among the doctors.
Since abortion and everything similar to it is taboo in El Salvador, no lawyer or human rights organization wanted, in principle, to litigate these cases.
Morena Herrera, one of the leaders of the feminist movement in El Salvador and President of the Citizens' Group for the decriminalization of Therapeutic, Ethical and Eugenic abortion, says that in 2013, when they were compiling the cases, she remembers how they went "from lawyer to lawyer, from office to office”, and what they found was a no for an answer, under the argument that the cases “were already res judicata.”
It was not until the first court admitted the first review of the sentence in 2014 that institutions such as the Human Rights Institute of the Central American University (UCA) and the Foundation for Studies for the Application of Law (Fespad) – important allies since then – decided to join to the campaign as part of the defense.
International organizations also joined the campaign and were key in putting pressure on them, but the success of finally freeing 73 women is the absolute result of the tireless work of the feminist movement, from taking over the streets outside the courts every time one of them he faced a hearing, until taking Manuela and Beatriz's case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Of the 73 women released, only one was granted pardon, and ten were acquitted.
This despite the fact that all of them, without exception, were recognized as having been tried without procedural guarantees and with insufficient evidence.
Although freedom was the most desired thing for them, not all of them recovered their innocence.
And even those who were declared this way by a judge faced threats.
Teodora del Carmen Vásquez was convicted of a natural abortion and sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2008, in El Salvador.Marvin RECINOS
For María Teresa, for example, the judge who reviewed her case acquitted her in 2016. But instead of going out to rebuild her life with her son and family, she had to flee.
The Prosecutor's Office said that she was going to file an appeal to have her conviction reconfirmed.
She now lives in asylum in Switzerland.
Teodora, one of the best-known faces of this campaign, was denied her innocence on two occasions.
After almost 11 years in prison, she managed to get out of it “for good behavior” and her sentence was commuted.
On the day of her release, the official in charge of her said that thanks to the time she had been in prison (unjustly) she had managed to complete her high school diploma, as if the State had done her a favor.
In 2022, a documentary about her judicial process was censored from movie theaters in San Salvador for being considered an “apology for crime.”
Not in all cases, but over time the arguments of some judges in charge of their cases also began to see beyond the taboo.
Imelda, a 19-year-old girl who had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather, and whose baby survived the obstetric emergency, had to admit that she was guilty of having abandoned her newborn daughter in the hope of being sentenced for a sum of years of release from prison.
In December 2018, after 20 months in jail, the judge did not accept her guilt and instead declared her innocent, claiming that it was impossible for her to understand that she was committing a crime.
Although in 25 years since the reform, the laws remain unchanged in El Salvador, there has been no protest in vain.
73 women regained their freedom, protocols were created to care for obstetric emergencies and guarantee medical secrecy, and the judges who judge these cases have a ruling from the Inter-American Court that sets a precedent to avoid unjust convictions.
Nothing is perfect, of course, there are still 11 women facing criminal proceedings for similar cases and the country continues not to accept its responsibility and provide reparation to them and their families.
The path has been paved and these women whose voice was once taken away by justice are now protagonists who demand non-repetition.
Thank you very much for joining us and see you next Monday!
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