Digital bodies, territories in dispute.

Feminist analysis of digital violence against women human rights defenders in Mesoamerica.

Mesoamerican women defenders face increasingly complex contexts, with a rise in digital attacks and the ever present dispute for the digital territory. Between 2020 and 31 October 2025, our Mesoamerican Registry of Attacks documented 8,817 digital attacks against 1,312 women defenders and 174 organizations in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. This accounts for one in four of all attacks registered in the period.

The women defenders who received the most digital attacks are those who defend the right to political participation and to participate in decision-making spaces (23%); the right to information and freedom of expression (23%); women’s right to a life free from violence (17%); the right to truth, justice and reparation (9.4%); and those who work for the right to land, territory, and natural resources (8.6%).

The most frequent digital attacks were: disseminating messages or information through social media that stigmatizes women defenders (spreading false information, smear campaigns, ridiculing, questioning women defenders’ or their organizations’ morality, ethics or professionalism); online harassment or bullying (including hate messages and death threats or threats of rape); monitoring and stalking our actions (frequently by infiltrating our devices – unauthorized access); and replacement and/or theft of identity of those who defend rights.

89% of attacks are perpetrated through social media, spaces where anonymity operates as a mechanism of impunity for those who attack women defenders. It is increasingly clear that these are not spontaneous campaigns; in several instances, we have observed coordinated operations made viral by armies of trolls funded by State structures or powerful actors seeking to impose anti-rights narratives to delegitimize and portray women defenders as internal enemies, with the aim of weakening their advocacy efforts and fracturing the social fabric that sustains them.

This reality and its impact on our lives and struggles, and on our movements, were exposed during the COVID-19 syndemic when, due to imposed isolation strategies, the digital sphere suddenly became crucially relevant for defending human rights. In response, States and de facto powers dedicated significant resources and efforts to silence women defenders’ voices and their presence in digital spaces. This violence is no more than an extension of the repression that we have historically suffered.

IM-Defensoras has taken a critical and feminist approach to reflect on the reality facing Mesoamerican women defenders in the digital sphere. And so, towards the end of 2023, we began a process to collectively build knowledge – a participatory research effort that, based on the experiences of women defenders in their territories, allowed us to recognize the digital sphere as a territory in dispute, and to identify feminist holistic protection strategies to confront this.

The process involved simultaneous research efforts in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico, and included interviews with women defenders and digital security experts in the region, surveys, legal analysis, and literature reviews. By working together with the networks in each country and with the support of feminist experts in protection and digital care, we were able to identify and understand the different ways that women defenders in Mesoamerica relate to technology.

We identified the methods used by those who exercise digital violence against women defenders, and the threads that connect these attacks with the violence we experience in the physical sphere. We also explored the effects of this violence on our bodies, families, communities, territories, movements, and struggles. In addition, the analysis of legal and regulatory frameworks in each country allowed us to understand how these have become instruments to silence human rights defenders.

This collective work will contribute to strengthening Feminist Holistic Protection (FHP) strategies by bringing in a specialized perspective from the intersection of digital technologies, feminisms, and human rights defense; understanding the digital territory not as an isolated space, but rather as a continuum of our lives as women defenders that provides an opportunity to broaden our presence, voices, and demands.

What are the main forms of attack that we face in digital territories?

  • Intimidation

  • Delegitimizing our work

  • Gender disinformation, which involves actions that seek to damage our public image by disseminating false or misleading narratives based on our gender and/or sexuality.

  • Digital harassment

  • Threats to our integrity and that of our close circle

  • Digital sexual violence

  • Illegal electronic surveillance

  • De-anonymization, meaning to reveal sensitive personal information about us in public spaces such as social media, for example, sharing our home or work address, publishing photographs of our children, our telephone number, etc.

Why do they attack us in the digital sphere?

  • To silence our critical voices

  • To demobilize us, seeking to inhibit our participation and that of other women and sex-gender dissidents in human rights defense work

  • To stigmatize us and delegitimize our voices and our work

  • To discipline us for being women and sex-gender dissidents who disobey the patriarchal gender mandate that wants us to be silent and confined to the private sphere

Who are our main digital assailants?

  • Actors linked to the State

  • Public officials

  • Mining companies

  • Organized crime

  • Conservative and anti-rights groups

  • Candidates to public office

  • Actors in our close circle:

  • Colleagues

  • Family members

  • Neighbors

  • Other activists in our movements

  • Friends

  • Ex-partners

How do digital attacks work?

  • Criminalizing our work through public statements, threats, laws, etc.

  • Constantly monitoring our activities

  • Gathering personal data, including information related to our intimate sphere

  • Attacking us in specific strategic moments

  • Accusing our social movements of being internal enemies of the community or society

  • Taking advantage of the hegemonic media’s complicity

  • Harassing independent, alternative, and critical media

  • Carrying out strategies to viralize attacks by using hashtags, trolls, influencers, campaigns, etc.

  • All this in a context of widespread impunity marked by:

  • Social normalizing of digital violence

  • Weak legal frameworks

  • Distrust in reporting to authorities

  • Growing inefficiency of social media platforms’ support channels for women defenders

  • Difficulties in exposing who is behind the attacks

  • Opting not to denounce because of the emotional and economic toll that this entails

How does digital violence affect us?

  • It creates fear and demobilizes us, often completely paralyzing our activism

  • It subjects us to emotional exhaustion

  • It carries material and political costs

  • It may lead us to lose our jobs

  • Some of us are forced to move from the place where we live

  • It forces us to be extremely cautious and careful, and to self-censure what we post on social media

  • It often leads us to leave social media

  • It leads to loss of credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of our movements, communities and other actors and entities.

A look at the countries

EL SALVADOR

Between 2020 and 31 October 2025, we registered 2,041 digital attacks against women human rights defenders in El Salvador, accounting for 62% of all documented attacks. The majority of these digital attacks (85%) include violent messages that seek to reinforce the gender-based patriarchal order – for example, ridiculing women defenders’ sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical appearance; demanding that they return home to cook for their husbands; and questioning women’s right to political participation (“giving women a vote is a mistake”). We have identified the possible use of trolls funded by the State and/or anti-rights groups as being behind digital attacks in El Salvador. Additionally, high-ranking public officials and communications media aligned with the State use public speeches and social media to smear, defame, and criminalize those who defend human rights, reinforcing a hostile climate of reprisals against women defenders.  

HONDURAS

In Honduras, we documented 971 digital attacks between 2020 and 31 October 2025. 52% of these attacks were against women defenders and organizations that defend land, territory, and natural resources. The most frequent forms of digital attacks were: harassment, threats, and smear campaigns with racist and misogynist messages. These attacks stigmatize women defenders and their organizations, ridiculing their spiritual practices and their struggles, painting them as enemies of “progress” for opposing neocolonial projects that threaten life and community rights, such as mining, dams, and tourism.

MEXICO

Between 2020 and 31 October 2025, we documented 2,289 digital attacks against women defenders and their organizations in Mexico. This represents one in five attacks against women defenders. 68% of these digital attacks reveal forms of gender-based violence, such as intimidating messages and threats with sexual connotations; discrediting the leadership and professionalism of women defenders and journalists based on baseless accusations; and verbal violence based on women defenders’ sexuality, gender identity, and age.

NICARAGUA

In Nicaragua, we have seen how the digital sphere has become a territory for extending attacks against women defenders who – from exile – continue to denounce the totalitarianism of the Ortega-Murillo regime. Between 2020 and 31 October 2025, we documented 3,516 digital attacks; these are usually full of misogyny and hate speech, with attempts to discredit women defenders through mocking, threats, stigmatization, and constant harassment. This number accounts for one in three of all registered attacks. In some cases, attacks replicate the discourse of sectors of the ultra-conservative right that seek to maintain the patriarchal order, using terms like “feminazi”, “abortionist”, “lefty trash”, “femicrazies”, among others. Although the harassment, threats, and bullying are perpetrated by unknown online users, it is suspected that behind the attacks are members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) as well as some of its opponents, who replicate the hate speech employed by ultra-conservative right-wing sectors against feminists and women defenders who were part of the FSLN in the 1980s.

Digital bodies, territories in dispute.