By Luciana Sánchez* San Martín de Porres is a district in Lima, Peru, that made headlines because its 2017 Local Citizen Security Plan included, among other points, the “eradication of homosexuals.” When this came to light, it generated a minor scandal, and the municipality had to issue an apology, although LGBTQ+ organizations denounced it as “pure window dressing.” In the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), governed for more than ten years by the PRO party, currently by Rodríguez Larreta, the same plan to “eradicate homosexuals” (although in practice they are transvestites and transgender people) exists and is systematically applied as in San Martín de Porres. It just has a different name.

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The latest Conflict Report published by the Public Prosecutor's Office of the City of Buenos Aires includes the figure of "men detained for violating Article 81" – the supply and demand of sex in public spaces. In both cases, the Peruvian and the Argentinian, the official statistics speak of the eradication and social cleansing carried out by the State against transvestites and trans women in prostitution. Source: CODISEC San Martín de Porres Source: https://www.fiscalias.gob.ar/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/OctavoInformeConflictividad-baja.pdf The results of this policy, which is one of extermination, have been denounced by the transvestite-trans collective. As early as 2006, in "The Quest for Proper Names: Report on the Situation of the Transvestite Community in Argentina," Lohana Berkins and Josefina Fernández denounced from ALLIT (Association for the Struggle for Identity Transvestite-Transsexual) Not only the low life expectancy of trans women and transvestites, who rarely live beyond 40, but also the causes that cut their lives short. This report was updated this year in “The butterfly revolution.”  Eleven years after ALLIT's complaint, even with the paradigmatic legislative and policy changes, lInstitutional violence remains among the top two causes of death for trans women and transvestites in Buenos Aires, alongside HIV/AIDS. To be more direct: transvestites and trans women are murdered by the police before the age of 40, or due to transphobic healthcare that excludes them from access to medical treatments that would allow them to survive. The police are a constant threat to the lives of transvestites and trans people. 

Disciplinary control

Never metaphorical, Rodríguez Larreta's gender policing carries out rigorous disciplinary control over the transvestite and trans woman population, a veritable census transformed into judicial and police statistics. As the MPF report shows, Article 81 of the Buenos Aires City Code of Misdemeanors and Minor Offenses, which criminalizes the offering and soliciting of sex in public spaces, is currently key to this operation.

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This legal provision enables and legitimizes constant police harassment of trans women and transvestites, both in public spaces and in their homes. It deprives each transvestite and trans woman, and the community as a whole, of their autonomy, and it is the police who decide their lives and their deaths: in which neighborhoods they can live and in which they cannot, at what times they can move about and where, and when they are arrested—and they are always arrested—what criminal charge will be brought against them, whether they will spend one night or several years in jail, whether they will survive the encounter.

Armed causes

While approximately 90% of these fabricated cases for violations of Article 81 are ultimately dismissed, the police harassment is not condemned by the public administration. The police officers and their superiors, who carry out and enable this constant harassment, are never investigated or punished for it.

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To end the extermination of transvestites, it is necessary to effectively prevent police harassment. In this regard, repealing Article 81 could drastically reduce involuntary contact between trans women and transvestites and law enforcement. These encounters, due to their repetitive nature, routine procedures, and consequences, currently constitute the most frequent tool of harassment and targeting that police officers legitimately employ. However, history demonstrates that police and judicial practices will extend the "homosexual eradication plan" to other criminal offenses (indecent exposure, petty drug dealing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, etc.), which we must always be vigilant about. *lesbian and feminist lawyer. ]]>