Attacks and hate messages against LGBT people after Milei's victory
Last week saw reports of insults and threats against LGBT people. On Wednesday, a non-binary teacher was assaulted on a bus. There is growing concern about the escalating violence.
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BUENOS AIRES, Argentina. “If people in power incite hatred against us, violence against our community will increase.”
Before the presidential runoff, the LGBT Pride March was massive. Two weeks later, the victory of the far-right candidate Javier Milei marked a setback in the prevailing climate, enabling the public expression of discriminatory and homophobic opinions, as well as symbolic and physical violence in public spaces.
Last week, the situation experienced by a 34-year-old non-binary music teacher in a public transportation group raised alarms throughout the LGBTQ+ community nationwide. There were also threats on social media and public statements, such as the normalization of homophobia by economist Carlos Rodríguez to gay journalist Luis Novaresio , in line with the ideas propagated by other leaders and supporters of La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances).
In the lead-up to the election, Milei's supporters launched a disinformation campaign (CSE). In an interview on the news channel TN, Javier Milei, leader of La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances), stated that CSE "is part of the post-Marxist agenda, and that agenda is about destroying the most important social unit within society, which is the family."
The LGBT community is not backing down and continues to fill the streets. On Monday, November 20, just hours after Milei won the runoff election, there was a large march for Transgender Day of Remembrance. There were also numerous demonstrations across the country on November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women , and thanks to Pride, which continues to march in every corner of Argentina.
Brutal attack on a non-binary teacher
The attack occurred at 8:15 a.m. on Wednesday, November 23, 2023, aboard a bus on line 561, a few blocks before reaching the National University of Lomas de Zamora . Suddenly, a passenger who was about to get off brutally attacked a teacher wearing a lab coat, who was sitting peacefully and drinking mate.
The woman kept yelling at her, "You fucking teacher, I'm fed up with lesbian whores like you."
The teacher who was attacked does not want her name to be revealed, and she says she has never experienced discrimination in the education system. “I didn’t think I lived surrounded by so much hatred,” she responded to the first call from Presentes , the same afternoon as the incident.
What hurts her most is that no one defended her when this woman with burgundy, curly hair was shaking her on the floor of a moving bus. No one intervened either when her mate gourd, thermos, and cell phone (which ended up breaking) went flying. Even her backpack flew off, scattering her belongings across the bus floor. She had to stand up on her own, break free from her attacker, bang on the acrylic partition separating the driver from the other passengers, and beg to be let off. The bravest passenger spoke up to say he was late for work.
Trembling, bruised, hurt, and scared, she contacted a colleague from her teachers' union, Suteba (Unified Union of Education Workers) , who came to pick her up and took her to a medical center.
An alert
Over the weekend, she took to the stage at the Pride March in Almirante Brown and shared her music. Feeling more composed, she spoke with Agencia Presentes . “A friend, Willy, was also attacked last night in the capital; he’s a trans man. They punched him repeatedly in the head,” she began.
“For me, this is a wake-up call, as a public servant and advocate for public education. I’ve never experienced anything like this before. Our community will have to be more vigilant than ever. We need these cases to be brought to light,” she says with profound awareness, and calls for protection from the Province of Buenos Aires. “The Greater Buenos Aires area is a breeding ground for this type of violence,” she believes.
She filed the report through the Buenos Aires Province Ministry of Security . They responded by email that the investigation would be handled by UFI 16 in Lomas de Zamora. She expressed her gratitude for the support she received from the municipal offices of Diversity and Gender in Almirante Brown and Lomas de Zamora. She also thanked a colleague from the Suteba teachers' union's purple list, who gave her a ride and comforted her, as she was afraid to get on a bus again.
“At first glance, I have bruises and my cervical spine is badly damaged, but the deepest damage is emotional. I never would have imagined that wearing a smock with a public education pin and Pride ribbons would lead to this happening to me,” she says, distressed. Her sweet, musical voice, that of an art teacher for over six years, doesn't break.
“I feel like the election situation has opened a cage. Starting December 10th, it’s going to be a witch hunt against all forms of diversity,” Adriana Carrasco emphasized in an article on this topic in the national newspaper Página 12. The journalist, a lesbian feminist activist since 1985, recounts that she too suffered a violent incident in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires at six o’clock in the evening on Tuesday the 21st. She was insulted while sitting at a bar table on the street. An activist from another era, she didn’t hesitate to respond. She wasn’t going to tell anyone, but she is, because her younger friend is still scared: it’s a generation facing violence that had been disguised, silenced, and downplayed in recent years. The phenomenon demands precision in our words.
"Fear does not cloud our commitment, nor the bonds that sustain the fight for equality," the teacher points out, before ending the call.
“There’s also a strong sense of community that persists. During the pandemic, we started a community kitchen, Bondi Cultural . We’re a group of independent artists from the South Zone, and currently, we’re running the kitchen every Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., open to the community. The people who come to eat are generally retirees, and there’s a trans woman too: Luz. She’s a survivor because she’s over 40,” she points out. She started her activism in the student union at her high school; at that time, she lived in the Moreno district. She trusts in the solidarity of the Argentine people and defends arts education and comprehensive sex education as fundamental tools for addressing the problems that arise in communities.
The attacks are increasing
Facundo, a young man from La Rioja, reported being attacked over the weekend, in the early hours following the Pride March. "Faggot, dirty, we're going to kill you, son of a bitch," he recounts several cisgender men shouting at him in a group.
"The only thing I thank God for is that it happened during the day. If it had been at night, I wouldn't be here to tell you what happened to me," a young man said, visibly moved, in a video produced by Pares Social Lab, where he shared details of the attack he suffered.
“Argentina free of LGBT lobbying”
“We already know where some of you live.” These two messages appeared on Monday, November 27, infiltrated into a WhatsApp group that had been active since 2019. The group had been created when the Ministry of Health was downgraded to a secretariat—as part of the Macri administration's restructuring of the national government—and there was a shortage of supplies for medical treatments, guaranteed by National Law 26,743. This is how lx negrx recounts it on their social media.
This is Ese Montenegro, a transmasculine human rights activist, who explains that “one of the transgender and non-binary people's organizing groups where the threats appeared was an 'open' group that you joined with a contact.” The same number was used yesterday to infiltrate several groups, with the same threats and forms of violence.
“After what happened, in addition to removing that number from the group list, the group was closed and can no longer be accessed via the link. This creates a barrier for many comrades who need these spaces to access information about our rights, job searches, experiences with healthcare, support networks, etc. We use these spaces to share information that often wouldn't reach many comrades if it weren't for the efforts of our own communities,” the activist laments.
The complaint was not filed with any institution. “The judiciary tends to minimize and/or disbelieve these complaints. This judicial system, as it exists, does not usually provide restorative or preventative responses to LGBTI+ people,” she argues.
There are several proposed schemes for “care in digital spaces.” However, the root problem is that “violence against LGBTI+ people continues to be deeply endorsed by broad sectors of our society,” she points out.
“Hate speech is constructed by the media, but also from positions of power. Agustín Romo , for example, will be sworn in as a national deputy in 10 days. He's the one who made public statements about trans children, declarations that put our lives at serious risk. And if people in positions of power, like this public official, fuel hatred against us, violence against our community will increase,” she analyzes. She points out: “Those responsible for any attack our community receives will be those who, from their positions of power, dehumanize us, pathologize us, want us dead. And they use these extermination rhetoric for political gain.”
“We are going to rape them for being feminazis”
On Friday, another complaint went viral on social media. It consisted of screenshots from a WhatsApp group detailing an alleged plan by a group of fourth-year students to rape and even kill their female classmates at the San Juan Evangelista religious school in the La Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires.
The messages are extremely violent. The rape threats against one of their classmates are labeled "feminazi." In another message, they promise to "dismember" another and "take them to the river" to "drown." To achieve their goal, they claimed they would "tie them up with headphone cables."
The chats were revealed by user @afterglowflor on the social network X, formerly Twitter: "I'm going to leave the chats below, but I'm warning you that they are quite intense."
The post went viral, and school authorities filed a complaint. The situation is being investigated by Buenos Aires prosecutor Carolina Aneley Zanni, who specializes in gender violence.
Trenches of tenderness
Using the same number and the same stickers of the genocidal dictator Jorge Rafael Videla that can be seen in Ese's post, they infiltrated the mundillotrans , a community communication space produced by trans and non-binary men.
A video from the International Transgender Day of Remembrance closes by candlelight, lit in memory of Tehuel de la Torre Trans Memory Archive takes the floor :
“This community has two things in abundance: street smarts and tenderness,” they say from the social network.
Montenegro contextualizes the phenomenon as follows:
“Anti-rights and fascist groups are gaining ground globally; this isn't strictly an Argentinian phenomenon. In Argentina, we have a long history of struggle and organization. In times when they want to instill fear in us, when party leaders call the opposition 'orcs,' that's when we most need to organize, to not be indifferent. And to remember that, sooner or later, memory always wins. We learned this from the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. And we owe it to them and to all those who, like us, dream of a world where everyone fits!”
Journalist Adriana Carrasco concludes her piece by trying to “banish these specters.” She appeals “to the unity of all democratic forces who do not want hatred or violence to escalate in Argentina.” And she recalls the poem that begins, “First they came for the Jews, but I didn’t care because I wasn’t one…”
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