MEXICO CITY — Marking a new victory for women’s rights in Latin America, Evelyn Hernández, who was convicted three years ago of aggravated murder after delivering a stillborn in El Salvador, was acquitted in a retrial on Monday.

She has become the latest standard-bearer for the dozens of women accused of homicide after having miscarriages in the deeply conservative and machista Central American nation where abortion is banned in all cases, including when the woman's life is in danger.



Her defense attorneys said that prosecutors ignored scientific evidence during the first trial. For the retrial, they centered their strategy on the presence of meconium in the baby’s lungs as evidence that it died of asphyxiation.



The final hearing of the retrial began on Thursday but the verdict, expected to be delivered that day, was postponed twice. This time around, the prosecution had asked for a harsher sentence: 40 years, a decade longer than the original sentence.

Hernández’s acquittal comes at the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision to commute the 30-year sentences of three women jailed for abortion convictions. Still, legal reform is unlikely to pass the right-wing-majority legislature in the foreseeable future. El Salvador has bucked the regional trend toward liberalization of abortion laws, even as reports of sexual violence have increased in recent years.



“We celebrate today, but we keep fighting tomorrow," Paula Ávila-Guillén, director of Latin America Initiatives at the Women’s Equality Center, told BuzzFeed News in a phone call after the verdict was announced.



Raped by a member of a local gang while she was still a teenager, Hernández became pregnant but said she didn’t become aware of it until 32 weeks later, when she delivered a baby in a latrine in her home in rural El Salvador. Bleeding profusely, Hernández passed out. She woke up in the emergency room, where she was detained by police.

Hernández served 33 months in jail before her sentence was annulled in February following an appeal from her lawyers. Prosecutors called for a retrial, underscoring the aggressive persecution of women suspected of inducing abortions.