Violence has ripped open a gaping wound on the body of the American continent, right in its gut in Central America. Homicide rates in El Salvador and Honduras are similar to what they were during that region’s civil wars. The current civil war is an undeclared one involving rival gangs (most notoriously, Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13) as well as police and military forces from across the Americas.

I was recently a legal observer in Tijuana among a group of LGBT+ people coming north with the Great Exodus from Honduras. That border city’s infrastructure is stretching at the seams as it acts as a holding tank for refugees, as Trump illegally restricts their access to enter the US and ask for asylum. The transgender and lesbian women that I was with in Tijuana had faced grotesque crimes at the hands of gang members, partners, and state and security forces in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Sexualized violence is so pervasive in these societies that the LGBT contingent also faced harassment in the greater caravan that they travelled with, and they decided to split off and travel on their own.

Many people assume that gender-based violence is the logical result of a culture of machismo, but femicide and the rape culture that it begets was a conscious tool of social control imposed on Central American communities in the eras of dictatorship and civil war.