How did Nayib Bukele go from supporting the LGBTIQ+ cause to promoting conservative policies?

When Nayib Bukele was seeking the presidency of El Salvador in 2019, his political ideal was detached from the conservative wing. Bukele not only rejected the way of doing politics of the traditional parties, but also sought to include historically excluded populations in his government, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer and other groups (LGBTIQ+).

“I believe that the civil rights struggle of our time is the LGBTI community, and I want to be on the right side of history, I will not be on the side of discriminators,” Bukele said in 2014 when he had only been in Salvadoran politics for two years and was seeking to govern the capital of El Salvador.

Bukele immortalized that moment in a photograph where he appears with LGBTIQ+ people holding up a flag with the colors of diversity.

But that project remained an ideal, since the president, who was re-elected in 2024 to remain at the head of the presidency of El Salvador for five more years, has been categorical in prohibiting from educational spaces all material alluding to gender ideology and sexual diversity. In addition, he has eliminated government entities related to this population.

One of his last decisions was to fire, at the end of June, 300 employees of the Cultural Department for allegedly promoting “agendas that are not compatible” with the vision of their government.

Although he did not speak about specific agendas, pro-government legislators supported the president, adding that “El Salvador is traditionally pro-life and pro-family” and that the 2030 agenda “has no place” in the Salvadoran government.

The 2030 agenda is a list of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which include provisions for the coming years, among other topics, objectives on gender equality, legal recognition of gender and non-discrimination against the LGBTIQ+ population.

The mass dismissal of Culture employees occurred after the play “Inmoral” was screened in the Great Hall of the National Theater of San Salvador, starring drag actress Irene Crown, which the government considers “content unsuitable for Salvadoran families.”

“What is happening in El Salvador is a bit of what is experienced precisely in contexts of authoritarian governments, where one of the characteristics is the attack on diversity. And, the attack on diverse groups such as the LGBTIQ+ population generates a certain popularity in this type of political leaders,” he told the Voice of AmericaGonzalo Montano, sociologist and member of the training department of the Amate Foundation, a non-governmental organization that promotes the rights of the Salvadoran LGBTIQ+ population.

Although Bukele as a candidate assured inclusion of the LGBTIQ+ population, in his first days as president he eliminated the Directorate of Sexual Diversity, a way that civil organizations for the rights of the LGBTIQ+ population used to approach the president. Then, he closed the Secretariat of Social Inclusion, whose projects were handed over to a cultural office.

Furthermore, in 2021, when Bukele’s party had been controlling the majority of the Salvadoran Congress for 15 days, several laws from the previous administration were archived, including the Special Law for Equality and Non-Discrimination and the Gender Identity Law, which has blocked the right to recognition of the self-perceived gender identity of transgender people.

His ministers also follow this vision. On February 27, the Minister of Education, José Mauricio Pineda, said on his X account: “We have removed all traces of gender ideology from public schools.”

A decision for which he did not give further explanations, but which comes after Bukele said in the Conservative Political Action Conferenceheld in the United States last February, that it is “important that the curriculum does not include gender ideology”, since it is an education “contrary to nature, contrary to God, contrary to the family and contrary to what parents want”.

Montano is concerned about the government’s stance, as El Salvador approved an executive decree in 2010 that prohibited all forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in state institutions, and in his opinion this is not being complied with.

“This decree allowed social human rights organizations to approach any of the ministries or departments of the Executive to provide perspectives on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity within institutions, in order to prevent it. We lost that,” he told the VOA.

According to the sociologist, with these offices, the LGBTIQ+ population achieved that in the area of ​​public health all forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation were prohibited. They also achieved the creation of a series of specific programs that addressed, for example, the issue of sexually transmitted infections through surveillance clinics that had an inclusive approach.

“In the data collection forms of people who were tested for STIs (sexually transmitted diseases), every trace, concept or category that refers to sexual diversity has been eliminated. This has caused LGBTQ+ people to feel less welcome within the health sector and these are now hostile spaces,” added Montano.

With these decisions, Bukele seems determined to close the door to projects for the LGBTIQ+ population in at least three government departments: the health, education and cultural sectors.

“There is no agenda as they proclaim, but rather this is a human rights issue, and in the end they end up affecting people’s human rights. The increase in hate speech that is evident on social media, which is evident from people who hide behind profiles where they ask for jail time for people from the LGBTIQ+ community. That is what we are experiencing,” he told the VOA Karla Guevara, general secretary of the LGBTI Federation.

The VOA She made a request for comment to the government press department to delve into the reasons for the removal of gender ideology material from schools and the elimination of categories that segment the LGBTIQ+ population from health forms, but there was no response.

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