A book about hate crimes against LGBTI people in Latin America

The international organization ILGALAC published Hate Crimes against LGBTI People in Latin America and the Caribbean, a book by Martín de Grazia that explores the concept of "hate crime" and the regional contexts and problems that contribute to this violence motivated by prejudice based on sexual orientation, gender identity or expression…

July 8, 2020

The international organization ILGALAC published Hate Crimes against LGBTI people in Latin America and the Caribbean , a book by Martín de Grazia that explores the concept of "hate crime" and the regional contexts and problems that contribute to this violence based on prejudice related to sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and sex characteristics.

The book, which can be downloaded here , delves into the definitions of heterosexism, heteronormativity, and LGBTIphobia, and develops the concepts of "hate speech" and the use of the expression "crime of passion," which continues to be prevalent in the press when discussing crimes against the LGBTI community. Transfemicides and travesticides, as well as lesbicide, are covered in separate chapters.

Below we reproduce the preface by E. Raúl Zaffaroni, judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and professor emeritus of the University of Buenos Aires.

These pages are filled with horror, but perhaps above all the horror that each of the crimes mentioned can produce, there remains the aftertaste of a specific horror: the perpetrators of these crimes belong to the same species as us, and it is not a matter of anesthetizing this horror with the well-known resource of pathologization.

In general, hate crimes are characterized by the fact that the victim's identity is not as important as their membership in a group of discriminated and hated people. Therefore, when the legal aggravation of these crimes was questioned, arguing that it was about punishing motivations, it was rightly responded that this is inaccurate, because objectively there is a double violation of legally protected rights and a consequent plurality of victims: the life or physical integrity of the victim and the intimidation of all those who share their situation, a topic we have addressed for some time.

Every hate crime stems from discriminatory prejudices and is equally despicable. The number of people who seem incapable of imagining and empathizing with others is ultimately what produces this specific horror. Is this incapacity inherent to the human condition, or is it merely a surmountable cultural neurosis? We believe the latter, because if the former is true, we are doomed to disappear in a world where 1% of the population possesses wealth equivalent to what the poorest 60% need to survive or die peacefully, and where, moreover, the conditions for human life on the planet are being rapidly destroyed to continue accumulating wealth.

But the discrimination that gives rise to the hatred of these aberrations also has particularities that differentiate it from others . In general, group discrimination is suffered from birth, and its victims are aware of it from childhood; their upbringing supports them, and their socialization takes place with a clear awareness of their victimization . With sexual orientations and gender identities, as a rule, this does not happen: they surface in puberty, when the victim has internalized the stigmatization of their condition, even from their upbringing and social environment. This is why they are much more problematic in terms of psychological damage.

Furthermore, it's best to stop referring to them as minorities, since the old Kinsey reports have shown that they aren't truly minorities. Therefore, this discrimination affects the mental health of the entire population, even though the majority conforms to heteronormative patterns. The repression and stigmatization of sexuality under the aforementioned conditions, with its serious psychological impact on victims, causes neurosis in a large number of people. And, of course, a society that produces this outcome through discriminatory prejudice is not demonstrating a very good level of mental health; quite the contrary.

Secondly, this text acknowledges state efforts, particularly legislative ones, to overcome these prejudices. It recalls, in Argentina, both the legislation on same-sex marriage and gender identity, as well as the landmark repeal of the edicts by the Constitution of the City of Buenos Aires and the subsequent code and justice system for minor offenses—the latter of which, at the time, led to my being stigmatized by my own political allies, given the onslaught from the mainstream media and corrupt elements within the security apparatus. Similar legislative advances could be mentioned in other countries of our region.

But the question then arises as to why, despite all this, there isn't a clear decrease in violence based on prejudice against sexual orientations and gender identities. The answers provided in the text are good, but I would like to add some thoughts that I believe are useful for moving this fight forward.

I firmly believe that we must recognize that the fight against any discrimination is fundamentally cultural, because that is the very nature of discrimination. Laws are important, but they alone do not erase the prejudices internalized by culture. Cultural change takes much longer, and in this case, it is a change deeply rooted in culture and conditioned by very strong power dynamics. It is essential to consider these dynamics to properly assess the challenge ahead.

Every society that becomes hierarchical through the exercise of punitive power, when the prince declares "I am the victim," assumes the form of an army and, once hierarchical, sets about colonizing whomever it can. This first happened in Rome and then in Europe, when, starting in the 16th century, it began to colonize almost the entire planet.

Every army has smaller units commanded by corporals and sergeants, and the head of the smallest unit in the colonizing society is the paterfamilias. Colonization and patriarchy are inseparable. The misogyny of demonologists burning witches was part of the preparation for European colonialism . Heteronormativity, with women subjugated as inferior human beings—unfinished men, lacking something and less intelligent—capable of making pacts with Satan, persists to this day; the Middle Ages are not over. And different sexualities are considered betrayals of the colonizing social army. The hate-motivated criminal doubts their own identity, fabricated by the colonizing power, and through their crime seeks to confirm it: to destroy the traitor in order to kill the potential traitor within.

We are fighting against a culture that began with the codification of sexuality around the 11th century, that is, a thousand years ago. We are shaking the discriminatory prejudices that fueled the culture of lords and masters—the culture that produced colonial genocides in the Americas, Africa, China, and India.

Becoming aware of the magnitude of this undertaking should not be demoralizing, but quite the opposite. The dignity of the effort is strengthened by the full recognition of its far broader significance within the perspective of Human Rights. Ultimately, it is about the struggle for equality which, in this moment of global power, is a struggle for the very survival of our species.

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