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[NOTE IN PROGRESSION]

This morning in the city of La Plata, Hermann Müller, a 30-year-old actor, was attacked in a hate crime. “This guy’s a faggot, let’s kill him!” two men yelled before attacking him. Hermann kept walking, but before he knew it, they were beating him. He says that the police station refused to take his report.

By Lucas Fauno Gutiérrez 

It was around 7:20 when Hermann Müller was walking to work along Diagonal 76. While sending an audio message on WhatsApp, he crossed paths with two men. “Uh! This guy’s a faggot, let’s kill him!” he recounted them yelling at him. “I kept walking, I didn’t think anything was going to happen, so I didn’t see when one of them jumped up to kick me in the face,” he explained.

“Luckily, my glasses fell to the ground and I wasn’t hit in the face by them. I was able to run away,” he told Presentes.

[READ ALSO: He was attacked by a gang: “I haven’t been beaten up for being gay since the '90s”]

On his way to the police station, he called 911. Along the way, he ran into a police officer who, after listening to him, went to the scene to see if he could locate the attackers. At the 2nd Police Station in La Plata—located on Avenida 38 between 7th and 8th Streets—Hermann recounted that he was attended to by a female officer. "She had zero desire to help, zero empathy," he said. There, the young man explained that he had been attacked out of hatred, for being gay. He said that the officer asked him, "But were you robbed?" and kept insisting on asking if it had been a robbery, "completely ignoring the hate crime," he said.

[READ ALSO: Brutal homophobic attack on member of the Ciervos Pampas rugby team]

“If nothing was stolen, I suggest you wait a while for the supervisor to arrive because the one on duty now won't take your report since her shift is over,” the officer concluded. Müller recounted in his social media post that at that moment, a prosecutor entered the station with Airport Security Police personnel, and the already limited attention he was receiving was further reduced. After another officer told him that, given the location of the attack, he might have to report the incident at a different station, Hermann stated that the officer who first attended to him finished by saying, “Go see a doctor, get checked out. I don't want to be responsible if something happens to you in here. I suggest you come back this afternoon to file your report because we won't be able to help you now.”

Hermann filed the complaint with the Functional Instruction Unit No. 7 of La Plata, under the direction of prosecutor Virginia Bravo. He also told Presentes that he would formalize the complaint with the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (INADI).

[READ ALSO: Homophobic attack in Quilmes: couple holding hands assaulted]

"There is a resurgence of violence"

Franco Zerené is an activist and belongs to the Zona group, which supports and organizes its own activities alongside the Argentine LGBT Federation (FALGBT). Zerené, active in La Plata, was asked by this publication about the violence in that city, saying: “Generally speaking, there has been a resurgence of both physical and verbal violence. Since 2015, there has been an increase in cases that, while they may have occurred, were not usually so frequent or so violent. This reflects a lack of effective public policies.”

Darío Arias, a representative of Conurbanxs por la Diversidad, said: “We condemn this act of violence and hatred against our identities and bodies, which is not unrelated to a political context in which the combination of increased social violence against LGBTI people and the escalation of police repression since the right wing came to power, puts us in a permanent state of alert and mobilization.”

[READ ALSO: #Argentina: LGBT Observatory reported a hate crime every three days]

While Argentine law continues to fall short of updating anti-discrimination laws for the LGBTI+ community, statistics shared by the Observatory of Hate Crimes against the LGBT community of the Ombudsman of the City of Buenos Aires and FALGBT indicate that street attacks against LGBTIQ+ people increased in 2017.

“In our city, violence against the LGBTI community is on the rise while Mayor Julio Garro poses with colorful signs on the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. This is part of the cynicism with which the municipal government operates, while it defunds public policies for the prevention of violence and discrimination. Once again, we see the impunity with which an absent state seeks to force us back into that closet we promised never to return to,” stated Vicente Garay, a member of the Gender Secretariat at the Faculty of Journalism and Social Communication of the National University of La Plata (UNLP).

[READ ALSO: #HateCrimes2017 Drastic increase in street attacks in Argentina ]

“I had such a bad time at the police station that I didn’t want to risk it any further,” said the young man, who hadn’t gone to the hospital by midday. He’s in good health, but said that what makes him angrier and more powerless “is living in the society we live in, rather than the physical pain.”