After starring in an important mobilization this Monday in Barracas, the Buenos Aires neighborhood where Andrea Amarante, Pamela Cobas, Roxana Figueroa and Sofía Castro Riglos were cremated by their neighbor, Fernando Barrientos, in the hotel where they lived; and with the result of three of them dying, while Sofía remains hospitalized, Members of the Argentine Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Trans -FALGTB, Self-convoked Lesbians and other organizations and activists approached the Chamber of Deputies to report the situation.
They were received by Esteban Paulon (PS), Myriam Bregman y Christian Castillo (PTS/FIT-Unit), Romina Del Pla (PO/FIT-Unit), Monica Macha (Union for the Homeland), Maximiliano Ferraro (Civic Coalition) and Carla Carrizo (UCR).
“They were killed for women, for lesbians and for being poor,” highlighted from the organizations, and highlighted that behind the social invisibility they suffer, is the reality of a large part of the diversity, hit by unemployment, precariousness, lack of access to health or housing, if not the absence of accompanying family networks. The Pepa Gaitánalso murdered as a lesbian, was present in the speeches, and also in the memory of the support points left by the fight for the recognition of her crime, as a hate crime.
For this reason, among other things, there was no shortage of vigorous repudiation of the presidential spokesperson’s statements. Manuel Adorniwhich in statements to the press and on social networks permanently tries to minimize – re-victimizing – the unprecedented severity of the Barracas lesbicide: it was a hate crime, although the multimillionaire minister of the national government denies it.
However, as activists and representatives present at this first meeting denounced, what happened in Barracas was not only a lesbicide. “It was a planned massacre and It cannot be ignored that it was encouraged by hate speech“, they said, and stressed that these speeches have nothing to do with freedom of expression: they are narratives to incite violence and discrimination against socially oppressed sectors (such as people who are simply lesbians), and seek to guarantee that this system works without question.
As Congresswoman Myriam Bregman denounced, this means that we have to talk about the “high political content” of this crime, which has to do “with languages and policies that are legitimized by the State itself.”
That the biographer and presidential advisor, Nicolás Márques, says that homosexuality is an “insane and self-destructive behavior”, and maintains that this “explains” lower life expectancies; that the chancellor Diana Mondino compares diversity with “being full of lice “; that President Milei maintains that the trans job quota is a “privilege” (like receiving a social program, a subsidy for being a victim of gender violence or a moratorium retirement); that denies the existence of the gender gap at work, maintaining that it only seeks to “attack the private sector”; that attempts to prohibit inclusive language and Comprehensive Sexual Education because it considers them amoral, is more than hate speech. It is a speech to install indifference, discrimination and gender violence. A discourse that seeks to go back more than 100 years.
This is not an episodic issue or some problem of errors or ignorance. In the battle against the gender ideology promoted by the La Libertad Avanza government, attacking the rights won by women and diversity with their struggle in the streets is the order of the day. ““This massacre is a first result of their policy,” said the deputy Christian Castilloand highlighted that “only with the mobilization of millions in the streets will this be able to stop and the reestablished rights will not be able to be torn away.”
At the end of the meeting, the PTS/Left Front deputy participated along with Myriam Bregman and Romina del Plá in the information meeting called by the Education Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, where the secretary of this portfolio was invited to give reports, Carlos Torrendella renowned anti-rights activist and promoter of privatization, enemy of secular education and Comprehensive Sexual Education.
There, Castillo addressed the also member of the University Pastoral of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, reminded him of the recent statements of the biographer and advisor of Javier Milei and questioned: “If you do not repudiate these statements we have a serious problem, because someone who promotes discrimination is in charge of the education portfolio, which later crystallizes in massacres like the one in Barracas: 3 women murdered for being lesbians“.
Torrendell’s silence spoke for itself. The streets, which yesterday began to make people hear more loudly that “it is not freedom, it is hate,” too.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
