Transgender Salvadoran killed despite long search for safety

Rejected by her family, Zashy Zuley del Cid Velásquez fled her coastal village in 2014, the first of a series of forced displacements across El Salvador

SAN MIGUEL, El Salvador -- Rejected by her family, Zashy Zuley del Cid Velásquez fled her coastal village in 2014, the first of a series of forced displacements across El Salvador. She had hoped that in the larger city of San Miguel she could live as a transgender woman without discrimination and violence, but there she was threatened by a gang. She moved away from San Miguel then back again in a series of forced moves until the 27-year-old was shot dead on April 25, sending shockwaves through the close-knit LGBTQ community in San Miguel, the largest city in eastern El Salvador. “Zashy was desperate; her family didn’t want her because of her sexual preference and the gangsters had threatened her,” said Venus Nolasco, director of the San Miguel LGBTQ collective “Pearls of the East." “She knew they were going to kill her. She wanted to flee the country, go to the United States, but they killed her with a shot through her lung.” One day after Del Cid’s murder, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris identified anti-LGBTQ violence in Central America as one of the root causes of migration in the region during a virtual meeting with the president of neighboring Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei. She is scheduled to visit Guatemala and Mexico this week.