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Gabriela Cabrera, a 23-year-old trans woman, was found dead on Thursday, November 11, on the banks of the San Lorenzo stream, located at the intersection of Saturio Ríos and Fortín Arce streets in the city of San Lorenzo. Gabi , as she was affectionately known to her friends and family, was a volunteer at Casa Diversa, Paraguay's first shelter for LGBT victims of violence. She arrived there in March of this year after six men kidnapped, beat, and tortured her inside a vehicle before throwing her into the San Lorenzo stream.

Eight months later, the police found her dead in the same spot. Her neighbors saw Gabi on the ground with a man weeping over her motionless body. At ten in the morning, they notified both human rights activist Yren Rotela and the family, and together they went to identify the young trans woman's body. According to Rotela, the person sleeping next to Gabi's lifeless body was Reinaldo Manuel Fernández Gonzalez, her partner of 25 years. 

The prosecutor's office ordered Reinaldo's arrest and took his statement, but he was detained for less than six hours. Speaking with Presentes , prosecutor Gerardo Mosqueira said they didn't arrest him because they didn't have enough evidence to do so. "We can't just make accusations without evidence; we have to have grounds to support an accusation," he stated.

However, Reinaldo stated that before finding her dead, they had had an argument. He said he left her for ten minutes and that when he returned, he found her lifeless, with a rope around her neck very close to a tree. “He told us that Gabi hanged herself from the tree. That they were together, then he left the area and when he came back he found Gabi hanging from the tree. Then, startled, he jumped after her and the rope broke and they both fell to the ground and he fell asleep. That was the scene we found,” Mosqueira recounts. 

The prosecutor indicated that the medical examiner preliminarily determined it could be a case of suicide, but to determine the actual cause of death, the body underwent an autopsy. “The autopsy was performed last Friday, and the results will be available in two or three weeks, at which point it will be determined whether or not it was a suicide,” Mosqueira added. His family and loved ones demanded a thorough investigation of the case. 

Yren isn't sure it was suicide. She finds it odd that everything happened within a 10-minute span, that the rope broke as they fell to the ground together, and that Gabi's body showed no signs of injury. Yren last saw her on Tuesday the 9th in the afternoon. At that time, she asked how she was, and Gabi told her she was injured, that some men had beaten her up over the weekend. "They humiliated me a lot," she told Yren, who noticed that Gabi was limping. She also said she had a headache, a detail corroborated by Mónica, a health promoter from the Panambí Association. 

“Mom, I’m leaving on Friday and staying until Sunday because that’s when Paola Cacho comes back with everything,” Gabi told her, referring to her parents’ house. Paola Cacho is an artistic character she created for the show Diversas, which airs on Sundays with Casa Diversa. “She tells me that, and I believe her. I didn’t see her sad. In fact, I asked her how she was, and she said she was fine. Only later did she tell me she’d been beaten up,” Yren recounts.

Regarding the location, Mosqueira stated: “The thing is, they were a couple and they went to live there. According to her mother, she lived there for three months and didn't even go home very often. She only told me that she went out to work at night and that she was always with her boyfriend. Until we have the autopsy results, it's difficult to know for sure.” 

Attempted transfemicide 

On Saturday the 13th, Yren posted two videos on her social media accounts, recorded in the early hours of Saturday, November 6th, four days before Gabi's body was found. The videos clearly show Gabi being attacked by a group of men outside a nightclub in San Lorenzo. "I received those images on Friday," Yren says, "and when I made Gabi's death public, the people who recorded the video contacted me on social media." 

Gabi worked as a sex worker on the corner near one of the nightclubs and frequented that location. One of the people who contacted Yren with the images from that night recounts that, for fun, they threw a full champagne bucket and then a beer glass directly at her head. “That’s the one I saw when we met days later. Then, she reacted because she felt hurt and started throwing bottles in the middle of the road. At that moment, one of the bottles crossed the road and it’s said that it hit a windshield,” she says. 

There's another version that says the same people who threw the glass at her were the ones who then attacked her. A third version that reached Yren maintains that one of the bottles nearly hit a girl, and five men started beating Gabi, after which more people joined in to continue assaulting her. All versions agree that several people beat her until she lost consciousness. 

One of the people who shared the video with Yren told her that she desperately called 911 and they never arrived. She lay on the ground for over an hour. In the video, only a woman in a black t-shirt is seen pushing away the people who were hitting her and moving Gabi out of the way. “She was beaten by more than 10 people for 20 minutes. People inside one of the nightclubs filmed it and sent me the video. And there were security guards who saw everything and didn't defend Gabi,” the activist says. 

“I know what it feels like to be humiliated. What Gabi went through, many of us have gone through and healed on our own. I endured it in that corner for a long time. Today I have to speak out; I can't stay silent. If the club had turned off the music and someone had said over the microphone, 'Stop, that's enough, we're going to call the police,' it would have been a different story. We can't remain silent as a society just because she was trans. If Gabi hadn't died, this would never have come to light,” Yren stated.

According to prosecutor Mosqueira, this case has no connection to Gabi's death. "This incident was also reported, but I want to clarify that it has nothing to do with her death because the blow allegedly occurred on November 6, although we don't know the exact date. Gabi's body, when it was found that Thursday, showed no signs of blows. This was confirmed by the forensic doctor," he stated. 

The prosecutor in charge of this case is Viviana Riveros. According to the Public Prosecutor's Office, after the blow Gabi received on Saturday, she received medical attention and then went home. Riveros stated that they have some closed-circuit television footage and are looking for witnesses to the incident who must give statements in the coming days. The Ministry's statement reads: "The death in these circumstances is being investigated to determine if it was the result of prior acts of violence."

Since Sunday, the hashtag #JusticeForGabi has been trending on Twitter. Users are demanding a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding Gabi Cabrera's death. Casa Diversa, the LGBTI Coalition, and the Paraguayan Feminist Platform, responsible for organizing and convening the marches on March 8th and November 25th, are demanding a “thorough investigation” to clarify the circumstances of her death and ensure that it “does not become just another statistic of impunity.” 

The Human Rights Advisory Commission of the Senate issued a statement Monday afternoon condemning the acts of violence that have come to light in recent weeks. “The LGBTI population is a daily victim of discrimination and violence in various spheres, preventing them from enjoying or exercising their rights on an equal footing. It is necessary to demonstrate, through concrete actions, the State's commitment to ensuring compliance with the rights enshrined in the Constitution and laws, and to protect with even greater diligence those groups that are most vulnerable and at risk,” the statement reads.

Gabi loved to dance and act. She was part of the cast of Transformando realidades (Transforming Realities) under the acting direction of Omar Mareco and was in charge of the garden at Casa Diversa (Diverse House). If this is a transfemicide, it would bring the total to 63 murders of trans people in Paraguay's democratic transition. In October 2019, the Paraguayan justice system issued its first conviction for a transfemicide ; the other 61 cases remain unpunished.