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BUENOS AIRES, Argentina. Lautaro Jaime, a 25-year-old gay man, reported a hate attack he suffered outside the Amérika nightclub on Sunday morning, March 5, at the hands of three men. One of them punched him in the face from behind, leaving a cut while yelling “fucking faggot.”

“They beat me up because I’m gay,” Lautaro told Presentes . The incident occurred around 7 a.m. at the intersection of Córdoba Avenue and Pringles Street , in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

After a few days, when he felt better, Jaime filed a report at the 14A Precinct First Instance Criminal, Misdemeanor, and Petty Offenses Prosecutor's Office No. 2 is handling the case. The charge is "Minor Injuries."

What happened

On Sunday, March 5, the young man was with a friend at the bus stop for the 68 bus, when three cis men between 20 and 25 years old approached to attack them.

“They started asking my friend what he was doing recording them, which wasn’t true, they started pressuring him and then suddenly pushed him. They started circling him and throwing punches out of nowhere,” Lautaro said in a series of stories on his Instagram account. 

When the group walked away, Jaime approached his friend to check on him. “In the two seconds that I had my back turned, I heard one of them yell 'fucking faggot.' And the next thing I knew, a punch came from behind and landed right below my eye, and they just left,” he recounted.

“The first thing I thought was how ‘cheap’ I got. Those who know me know I would never get into a fistfight with anyone. They didn’t even give me a chance to defend myself because, like the cowards I am, they attacked me from behind,” Jaime said.

Another hate attack

Jaime claims it was a hate crime motivated by his sexual orientation. “Did they hit me to rob me? No. They hit me because I’m gay, because of how I was dressed, and because they felt they had every right to do it,” he said.

Lautaro told Presentes that he came out at 22, a process that was difficult for him to go through. “I started to experience who I was as an adult. When I stopped being 'afraid' and worrying about what people would say. What happened stirred up a lot of things for me.”

The attack occurred a month after five rugby players were sentenced to life imprisonment and three to 15 years in prison for the murder of Fernando Báez Sosa outside a nightclub in Villa Gesell. It also followed a 2022 marked by an escalation of violence against LGBT+ people in nightclubs and their surrounding areas .

LGBT+ activism emphasizes the hatred that motivates these attacks, and asserts that they are not isolated incidents.

According to Juan Ignacio Verdeja, a member of Conurbanes por la Diversidad , by decontextualizing these attacks or crimes, by treating them as isolated and unconnected events, "the marks that the perpetrator seeks to leave are erased."

“Those who perpetrate this violence not only seek to harm that individual, but beyond punishing and teaching them a lesson, what they seek is to send a disciplinary message to society as a whole. It serves as a warning to all those who dare to challenge the current social order: that of hegemonic masculinity, of binary thinking,” Juan Ignacio Presentes

And he clarified that "obviously, LGBT identities are precisely what they do to challenge that hierarchical social order based on the superiority of men."

For him, moreover, “behind this violence there is also the fact of seeking to make visible the power that they, who are generally, if not 100%, heterosexual cis men,” have.

People who do

The LGBT Advocacy Office contacted the young man about what happened. Jaime expressed his gratitude for the support he received from some people, including a neighbor who, at the time of the attack, "came down from her apartment and started shouting."

Also from the nurse at Fernández Hospital where he was treated for his injury, which was diagnosed as a "facial laceration." She told him: "Lauti, thankfully there are still good people in the world, and surely there still are."

“I wanted to express my gratitude for the support I felt from the entire community. I felt their incredibly warm embrace and all their empathy towards me,” he added.

"These acts have a degree of cruelty."

Regarding the characteristics of hate attacks or crimes, Verdeja emphasized the cruelty with which they are committed. “These acts, motivated by prejudice toward sexual orientation and gender expression, have a particular way of leaving their mark on the bodies of those who defy this order. They carry a level of cruelty, of torture, far greater than a typical crime not driven by prejudice. There are visible marks on those bodies.”

Furthermore, he warned that these incidents were repeated throughout 2022. “Of these, eight were classified as hate crimes. That is to say, this violence was taken to the extreme, and eight people died across the country. There were also well-known cases such as the Grindr perpetrator, who used that app to try to 'hunt' gay men . By gaining access through sexual contact, he ended up committing acts of violence and robbery, taking advantage of their vulnerability,” he explained.

Complaint

Although the incident occurred on Sunday, she went to file a report on Tuesday. “While I hadn't planned to go because I know the justice system—or lack thereof—in this country, many friends, acquaintances, and family members told me not to let it go, at least to have a record of what happened,” she said. She added, “Although the wait was long, the two officers who attended to us were quite kind.”

After what happened, Jaime wanted to leave a message. “Although the hatred and violence of some people want to extinguish what we worked so hard to make shine, they will never succeed, because our pride will always end up winning, and what happened makes us even stronger.”