By Anita Alberti. The organization Otrans filed a complaint with the Provincial Commission for Memory alleging that four of its members suffered violence during a search in the early hours of Saturday, November 4, in the city of La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires. According to the complaint, more than twenty local police officers beat, pepper-sprayed, and threatened Juana, Kimberli, Romina, and Chantal – the victims prefer to keep their last names confidential out of fear. “We are very worried because this is a significant step backward,” Otrans president Claudia Vázquez Haro told Presentes. She added, “We’ve gone back to the 1990s, when the police were so brutal in arresting our comrades and violating human rights.” The Provincial Commission for Memory filed a writ of habeas corpus regarding the attack. “We requested anonymity and asked that the injuries be documented, that police harassment cease, and that the investigation be referred to the on-duty prosecutor's office to investigate the alleged crimes committed,” explained Rodrigo Pomares, coordinator of the Justice and Democratic Security Area of ​​the CPM (Provincial Commission for Memory). The legal action was filed yesterday afternoon in the La Plata Court of Guarantees, both individually by the people who filed the complaints and on behalf of the entire group, since the CPM considers that “this is a particularly vulnerable population,” Pomares clarified.

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The young women recounted in their complaint that several police officers in two private cars and another fifteen on motorcycles, whom they were able to identify as members of the local force, surprised them around 5:00 a.m. It happened at the corner of Diagonal 73 and 4, a central area of ​​the city of La Plata, where the women—between 25 and 30 years old and working as prostitutes—often hang out. And according to their testimony, some of the officers belonged to the 9th Police Station, located nearby. “They grabbed me first. We were up against the wall and I said, 'Don't you get tired of searching us every day?' He replied, 'Shut up, you're in my country. You have no rights here.' Juana told Presentes. Like her three companions, she is Peruvian. After that, she said they sprayed pepper spray on her, pushed her to the ground, and started hitting her with a metal rod.

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When they threw Juana to the ground and started hitting her, Kimberli yelled at the police to leave her alone. Then, the girls recounted, they grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the floor. “They grabbed us by the neck until we were almost suffocating. They said we had drugs in our mouths,” she reported. While they were being beaten, they were also insulted: “They started yelling at us, ‘Fucking Peruvians, get out of my country because we’re going to have to deal with you every day.’” Chantal, another of the women who was assaulted, reported that she was hit on the forehead with a baton. The bruise went down to her right eye and caused a hemorrhage: she still can’t see and doesn’t know what the consequences will be. Kimberli is spitting up blood. Juana has five large cuts on her left arm. None of them want to go to the hospital. They say, “We’re afraid of how the doctors will treat us.”

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“These are deeply rooted practices of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police.”

“This is not exceptional but routine. These are practices deeply rooted in the Buenos Aires Provincial Police with people who are in situations of prostitution. “Only in this case, a relatively new police force is involved: the local police,” Pomares told Presentes. In February 2017, Otrans had already denounced police persecution against transgender and transvestite people in the same area of ​​La Plata. The organization directly accused the Women's Police Station and Police Station 9.

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Last week, the Ministry of Security presented a protocol for the detention of LGBT individuals, detailing which security forces are authorized to detain a person and outlining the initial steps of an arrest. The protocol was condemned by several LGBTQ+ organizations, who consider it more of a warning than a guarantee of rights. Otrans considers it to be a "tool for the institutionalization of police violence."

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