Lesbian couple reports beating perpetrated by military personnel in Chile

Two lesbians, aged 21 and 22, reported that they were assaulted and insulted by two soldiers during the early morning of October 12.

November 1, 2019

By Airam Fernández, from Santiago, Chile

Photo: Josean Rivera

Two lesbians, aged 21 and 22, reported that they were assaulted and insulted by two soldiers during the early morning of October 12, in a square in the city of Llolleo – Valparaíso region – in a context of widespread military and police repression and abuses since the social uprising that has been going on for two weeks.

The girls are a couple and were hanging out with a group of friends when one of the men approached them and started harassing them with sexual innuendo, says Paz Becerra, a lawyer with the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (Movilh), who took the case after receiving an email with the victims' complaint on Thursday, October 17.

"If I want them, I'll catch them, faggots."

When one of them asked him to leave them alone and to leave, a second assailant arrived with a baseball bat, shouting, "If I want, I'll get you, faggots." Then he started hitting them.

Becerra recounts that someone in the group alerted the Carabineros (Chilean police) and that the beating didn't stop even when the police patrol arrived. “What they say is that even in front of the Carabineros, they tried to continue the attack. When the situation calmed down a bit and the officers asked for identification from everyone involved, the girls realized that their attackers showed Military Identification Cards,” Becerra says. The Movilh (Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation) reported in a statement that they were identified as Jorge and Omar Rivera Alarcón and turned out to be brothers. Both were detained pending investigation and transferred to a military academy.

The victims filed a formal complaint at a police station that same night. The beating left them with bruises on their faces, eyes, and arms. They don't want to speak to the media because they are very psychologically traumatized, explains their lawyer. The information she has is that the assailants were, at least until last Friday, at the Tejas Verdes School of Engineers, belonging to the Chilean Army, which during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship functioned as a detention and disappearance camp. Many military personnel learned torture methods there.

Presentes attempted to contact the military facility to confirm whether the Rivera Alarcón brothers are still being held there, but at the time of publication, they did not answer the phones.

On October 18, at the height of the social unrest sparked by a metro fare hike, but fueled by decades of inequality, Movilh arranged for the young women to be referred to the Victim Support Center in their city, a program of the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security designed to help repair the damage caused by experiencing a crime. Due to the intensity of the protests over the past two weeks, many public institutions are not operating on their regular schedules. Therefore, their appointments were scheduled for November 5.

Movilh sent a letter to the Army demanding information on the arrest of the aggressors, urging them to expedite internal procedures and to find out how they will be sanctioned or brought to justice.

“These men attacked two young lesbians in the street without any justification, solely because of their sexual orientation,” Becerra maintains. The case mirrors the findings of the study “ Being a Lesbian in Chile ,” published in 2018 by the lesbian group Breaking the Silence, following a survey of 800 women. Seventy-five percent of them revealed, among other things, that they had experienced some form of harassment and violence in the street due to their sexual orientation.

“With these types of cases and with the human rights violations that have been reported in the context of the protests of recent days, we realize that it is absolutely necessary to have external control of the military institution and the actions of the military,” demands the lawyer from Movilh.

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