Trans Sex Worker Who Transformed A Gang-Controlled Prison

J. Lester Feder and Nicola Chávez Courtright report on Karla Avelar, [Meet] The Trans Sex Worker Who Transformed A Gang-Controlled Prison.

Avelar was so at ease inside the prison that it is hard to imagine that she was regularly raped and tortured while she was incarcerated there between 1996 and 2000. Avelar, now 37 years old, was one of the many trans sex workers from San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, who has done time there over the past several decades. The ones who passed through there around the same time as Avelar report being abused by guards and pressed into a kind of slavery by the gangs who controlled the prison.

Those days are over, thanks in part to a legal complaint Avelar herself filed after her release. The women who rubbed her back on her recent visit, just before Christmas, are among the roughly 50 inmates who live in Sector 2, a special unit that houses trans women along with a handful of gay men. They still interact with the other prisoners in some common areas — several of them have boyfriends in the men’s unit, and the prison supplies them with condoms — but they live and sleep in a part of the prison that is walled off from the men’s unit for their safety.

Like many stories out of El Salvador, this one is both horrifying and inspiring.