Cristiana Chamorro Barrios is a Nicaraguan journalist and founder of the Nicaraguan Foundation for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit focused on promoting freedom of expression and public access to information, as well as providing training and support to local journalists. Cristiana was arrested on June 2, 2021, in Managua, Nicaragua, on accusations of tax evasion (International Society for Human Rights 2025). At the time of her arrest, Cristiana, a member of a prominent Nicaraguan family, had recently announced her intention to challenge Daniel Ortega in the November 2021 presidential election and was widely considered the favorite in the race. The charges against CristianaFootnote ¹— including the vague claim of “abusive management and ideological falsehood” — though made with no evidence, disqualified her from running for office. She was later tried in sham proceedings and sentenced to eight years in prison. In 2023, Cristiana was one of hundreds of political prisoners forcibly expelled from the country and later stripped of their citizenship (Abi-Habib Reference Abi-Habib2023; Confidencial 2021).Footnote ²

The accusations made against Cristiana were part of a broader campaign by the Ortega-Murillo regime to dismantle civil society organizations through the introduction of a law requiring all organizations that received funds from international sources to register as “foreign agents.” More than 700 NGOs in Nicaragua have lost their legal status because of this law (Human Rights Watch 2022). Foreign agent laws are not unique to Nicaragua but have proliferated across Latin America under the pretext of protecting national sovereignty (Duchiade Reference Duchiade2024). In El Salvador, for example, a similar foreign agent law was passed in 2025, requiring any person or entity “controlled or financed, directly or indirectly, by a foreign principal” to register as a foreign agent or face steep sanctions, including the cancellation of their legal status. The law also imposed a 30% tax on all foreign funding (Human Rights Watch 2025).

Using law and legal tools as a form of repression against women elected officials and/or women’s organizations is a powerful strategy for “constructing the lawfulness and morality of protestors and movements” (Earl and Braithwaite Reference Earl and Braithwaite2022, 238). In Central America, this strategy has manifested in the criminalization of protest, the tightening of restrictions on NGOs and civil society organizations, and the introduction of new forms of surveillance. Significantly, the content of these attacks “often relies on gendered scripts, focusing on women’s bodies and their traditional social roles — primarily as mothers and wives — to deny or undercut women’s competence in the political sphere” (Krook and Restrepo Sanín Reference Krook and Sanín2016, 136). Thus, political attacks (physical and psychological) on women (whether elected officials, activists, journalists, or researchers) are attacks on their identity as women, their bodies, and their sexuality. Importantly, not all women are equally vulnerable to these attacks; low-income, racialized, and rural women are disproportionately likely to face threats or abuse for their political activities, whether inside or outside government institutions.

On their face, laws restricting the activities of civil society organizations appear gender-neutral in nature. However, closer examination reveals their gendered impacts. More specifically, these kinds of laws are one of the tools that states are increasingly using to silence the voices of women who have taken on active roles in a variety of public spaces, including journalism, nonprofit organizations, and government. This kind of legislation — which avoids directly naming or targeting specific organizations — has the insidious impact of setting in motion legal/criminal proceedings against women who produce inconvenient content (research, reporting, and so on) that calls into question the benevolent narratives the state seeks to promote about itself, particularly related to crime and security.

Other seemingly neutral laws exacerbate these dynamics. Establishing nomination procedures for judges, for example, leads in practice to the exclusion of candidates (including many women) who are perceived as threats to the interests of political and economic elites, as Seider, Braconnier, and De León (Reference Seider, Braconnier and De León2022) found in their study of these dynamics in Guatemala. The political capture of the judiciary drastically reduces state responsiveness to corruption and violence and enables violence against women, including those active in politics, to continue unabated across many arenas of society (Beck and Stephen Reference Beck and Stephen2021; Blitzer Reference Blitzer2022). Given the wide range of spaces where these exclusions may take place, we find it important to maintain an expansive lens when it comes to defining and analyzing violence against women in politics — taking into consideration not only those women who hold elected or appointed positions in government, but all those who seek to enact political and social change through their work, including activism.

In our own research, we have focused particularly on analyzing the impacts of legal and other forms of attacks against women and women’s rights organizations, including women researchers, journalists, activists, and lawyers, in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua (Menjívar and Neumann Reference Menjívar and Pamelaforthcoming). Consistent with prior scholarship on violence against women in politics, we observe that many attacks on women in public life can be understood as both a reaction to women’s gains in rights, power, and status (Restrepo Sanín Reference Restrepo Sanín2022) and opportunistic maneuvers made possible by the ongoing impunity with which crimes against women are treated (Henderson Reference Henderson2004; Walsh and Menjívar Reference Walsh and Menjívar2016). These attacks take both highly visible forms (such as high-profile detentions and physical violence) and more subtle forms of stigma and ridicule, such as calling into question the moral character and/or competence of women active in social and political life (Ferree Reference Ferree, Myers and Cress2004; Fallon, Aunio, and Kim Reference Fallon, Aunio and Jessica Kim2018). We found the latter tactics to be especially prominent in the case of Indigenous women communication professionals in Guatemala (Menjívar and Neumann Reference Menjívar and Pamelaforthcoming).

Legal attacks against civil society use the cover of law, supposed “neutrality,” “fairness,” and “objectivity,” to justify not only generalized forms of repression, such as detentions, disappearances, and torture. They are also utilized to engage in sexual and sexualized violence and harassment, tactics that are disproportionately employed against women (Enloe Reference Enloe2023). For example, after Guatemalan journalist Michelle Mendoza uncovered evidence of criminal networks within the government, she became a target of online harassment and stalking, aimed not only at her but also at her two daughters. “I couldn’t go to the supermarket anymore, take my daughters for a walk, to the movies, or even for a car ride. They took photos of me and published them. I represented a danger to my daughters,” Mendoza explained in a published interview (Maldonado Reference Maldonado2022). Salvadoran journalist Mariana Belloso, who is now living in exile in the United States, reflected on the attacks she experienced in an interview with Latin American Journalism Review. “It is very, very, very rare to see a male journalist threatened with rape online. But that is one of the most common things said to us. Or we’re told to go back home, find a husband, or take care of our children,” Belloso said (Higuera Reference Higuera2025).

These attacks occur in a broader context of gendered governance that is openly hostile to the work of women reporters, activists, and organizations in Central America. According to Iniciativa Mesoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Humanos (IM-Defensoras), between 2012 and 2022, there were a total of 20,326 documented attacks on women’s rights defenders in Central America. Across the region, a significant portion of these attacks were perpetrated by police, military, or other public authorities (25.7% in Guatemala; 54.4% in Honduras; 29.8% in El Salvador; 56.7% in Nicaragua) (IM-Defensoras 2024). The state is thus complicit in the legal and political violence to which women are increasingly subjected.

Importantly, states have increasingly relied on familyism ideology — a set of beliefs that justifies prioritizing family unity, with a male partner as its head, over women’s lives and rights (Facio Reference Facio1992) — and alliances with conservative religious groups to accomplish their goals (Menjívar and Diossa-Jiménez Reference Menjívar and Diossa-Jiménez2023; NeumannReference Neumann2024). State alliances with conservative religious groups have led to rollbacks in reproductive rights (Viterna and Guardado Bautista Reference Viterna and Bautista2017) and violence against women laws (Neumann Reference Neumann2022), while also weakening the collective power and voice of women’s organizations in the region through physical, legal, and online attacks at both the individual and collective levels. Individual-level attacks consist of harassment and intimidation to discredit their character as women and mothers, while attacks on organizations prevent them from engaging in collective activities like demonstrations or community outreach by rescinding their legal status or seizing their property.

Significantly, all of these different forms of violence directed at women’s groups have cascading impacts on women’s rights and safety. Not only do they directly harm women involved in those organizations, but they also indirectly affect all women who rely on their support when facing situations of violence. As Nicaraguan feminist sociologist and activist Maria Teresa Blandón told us, “The [Nicaraguan] State banned women’s organizations from accompanying victims [of domestic violence], and the victims have been revictimized by police, by attorneys, by judges in the judicial branch.” Over the long term, as such attacks become normalized across Central America, it becomes increasingly dangerous for many women to participate in public life. These realities have grave consequences for the advancement of gender equality and democracy — the latter of which is impossible to achieve without the former.