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On New Year's Eve, some 120 people gathered in San Salvador for a party thrown by Entre Amigos, the shorthand for the Salvadoran Association for Integral Develo pment of Sexual Minorities. The celebrants were brave as well as festive-- and that was the point. Three times in the previous two months, death threats were phoned in to the group, singling out William Hernandez, Entre Amigo's director. Last June 29, when Hernandez was leaving the office for the evening together with another gay man, a gunman opened fire, hitting and wounding his companion. And a few weeks before the New Year's party, on December 10, a man in drag, leaving the bar where he worked, was gunned down and killed. A large gay party would have been opportune for any death squad targeting homosexual "undesirables." But in San Salvador, as elsewhere, the new year rang in peacefully.

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The recent killings and threats are part of a pattern in El Salvador. Last year, there were seven bias-related murders of drag queens and homosexuals, down from around a dozen in 1998, according to the San Francisco-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). "None of those cases has been solved, or even seriously investigated, by the police," says IGLHRC's Jaime Balboa.

Some of the recent threats and killings appear related. In October, Jose Armando Rivera, a drag queen who went by the name "Doris," was shot to death on the street. The latest rash of death threats against Entre Amigo came after director Hernandez was interviewed about the murder in the San Salvador daily El Diario de Hoy. On the night of December 10, 1999, Nestor Adonai Marcneo, age 37, was leaving Tulito, the bar where he had worked for the last 15 years. The bar is near to Doris's murder, to which Marcneo had been a witness. As he walked with two friends, the trio in drag, a taxi approached with five men dressed in black. Marcneo tried to run away, but was shot twice in the head, dying instantly.

"There is a group of people who feel bothered by the existence of homosexuals," El Diario de Hoy quoted a witness to Marcneo's killing who, not surprisingly, asked to remain anonymous.

After months of inquiries, Salvador's police chief met recently with Hernandez and agreed to provide special protection to Entre Amigos. But Salvadoran police are part of the problem of anti-gay violence, and not simply by inaction. In two incidents last year, member of the Presidential Battalion and the National Civil Police threatened homosexuals with their weapons or subjected them to blows, insults, and death threats.