Reportage • Valen Iricibar • May 24, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Pamela. Roxana. Andrea.

These names have been on the lips of the entire LGBTQIA+ community in Argentina since Sunday, May 6. It was then that the world learned that the previous night a local resident had thrown an explosive into a room in a boarding house where two lesbian couples slept, killing three and injuring another, in Buenos Aires’s Barracas neighborhood. 

Pamela Cobbas died within hours. Roxana Figueroa on Wednesday. Andrea Amarante on Sunday.

The fourth victim, Sofía, whose last name we are not publishing for privacy reasons, remains hospitalized. Doctors expect to release her within a couple of weeks. The attack decimated her support network. She has nowhere to go.

"How do they think that we got to the point of these femicides, if not for the history of stigmatizing [queer folks], women and lesbians," said Lili Torales of the Gender Commission of the Flores Neighborhood Assembly. She was speaking at a demonstration in front of Congress on Friday, May 10. "We have to think through all of this, because if we focus on the crime alone and don't consider how we got here, it will happen again."

Around 300 people surrounded Torales as she spoke. Their signs read, "It was lesbicide" and "This isn’t freedom, it's hate." Participants hugged and chanted as mosquitoes buzzed among them.

Since the election campaign of Javier Milei, who took office on December 10, 2023, hate speech and anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQIA+ actions have become bolder and more frequent in Argentina. Hateful attitudes are a foundation of his political coalition, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), and key members of it circulate dangerous statements on social media.

"In Davos, that creep said that the feminist movement is a global enemy. When he did that, he put a target on women, sexual dissidents and organizers," Torales said, referring to the president.

Organizers warned demonstrators to stay on the sidewalk, as police threatened to impose Security Minister Patricia Bullrich’s anti-protest protocol. 

"We have to stay in the streets," said Torales. “If we don't take care of each other, they’ll keep killing us.”

Past and current attacks

The Barracas massacre took place in the context of growing threats against the queer community. It also occurred in a context of an economic crisis that makes it particularly vulnerable and in a new political context in which government leaders endorse anti-LGBTQIA+ violence. 

The central chant at protests organized after the attack is: "It's not freedom, it's hate." The slogan challenges the government's motto: "Viva la libertad carajo" [“Long live freedom, damn it”]. 

Milei’s administration began attacking inclusivity as soon as it took office. It immediately demoted the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity to a sub-secretariat within the newly created Ministry of Human Capital.

Presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni stated that the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (INADI) is one among "various institutions that serve absolutely no purpose.” In February, the government announced its closure.

The administration has fired hundreds of workers from key posts at both institutions, which promoted and protected LGBTQIA+ rights. On Tuesday, May 21, it dismissed more than 100 workers from INADI, including LGBTQIA+ members of the staff.

"The attack must be understood in a context of a history of inequality, and in a moment in which we are facing the possible elimination of INADI, and when the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity has already disappeared," said Jesi Hernández, an LGBTQIA+ activist. 

"Politicians who are part of this government are making hateful statements toward the [queer] community, and this makes attacks like these more likely,” said Hernández. “Hate speech comes at a cost." 

In the wake of the massacre, Hernández joined Self-Organized Lesbians for Barracas, a new network that plans actions in response to the attack and in solidarity with the victims. The neighborhood assembly of Barracas, a working-class neighborhood in southern Buenos Aires, also joined the protests.

"Some say that the state is absent, but the reality is that it’s very present through its policies," Julieta Lopinto told Ojalá. "It has a policy of vacating the entire field of human rights, of the LGBT community, of women's spaces, of those for people with disabilities, all in favor of big companies, which are getting richer."

Lopinto belongs to Sueño de Mariposas, an intergenerational group that seeks to make lesbian old age visible and hopes to eventually create a “lesbiatric” old-age home for people who identify as lesbians—a safe place to grow old in community.

For Lopinto, the conditions in which the four women lived—sharing a room in a boarding house, working at precarious jobs and receiving threats from a neighbor—are precisely the types of conditions that motivate her work with Sueño de Mariposas.

"This is a reality for many compas, as well as for many who aren’t part of the [LGBTQIA+] community, a reality of fragile relationships, economic instability and limited access to health care,” said Lopinto. “When we live a life of violence and abuse, many of us don’t go to the hospital for a check-up."

In her speech outside Congress, Lopinto evoked the memory of Alicia Caf, the lesbian who founded Sueño de Mariposas in 2017 while she was unhoused. She later told Ojalá that Caf died in the same conditions that she had been denouncing, drawing a parallel to the Barracas massacre.

In the case of Sofia, the survivor of the massacre, "they incinerated her social network and left her without a bed, without clothes, without shoes. She was left with nothing. She doesn’t even have socks or underwear," said Hernández. "Our community needs to repair itself after so many deaths. It’s time to pitch in, in this case economically. The women have no family and it’s up to us to pay for the funerals.”

It was lesbicide

On May 13, as the first autumn chill fell, without discouraging the voracious mosquitoes, hundreds of people gathered in Plaza Colombia, a few blocks from the boarding house in Barracas, to mark a week since the attack. 

Hernández wore a red sweater and a black jacket. She read a document written by the Self-Organized Lesbians for Barracas that demanded justice and stressed that the four women were immolated for being working-class lesbians. 

The plaza filled with signs and banners. The crowd cut through Montes de Oca Avenue as they shouted, "Hey, you, don't be indifferent, lesbians are being killed right before our eyes." Protesters disregarded the new law that attempts to stop people from seizing streets, even as a couple of officers crowded the march on a motorcycle.

The marchers arrived at 1621 Olavarría Street, the site of the attack. The community set up an altar with flowers, flags and posters. The building was again enveloped in smoke, but this time it was perfumed. 

"Hate speech isn’t just a matter of the past. It’s getting worse in the current political context and the rulers themselves permit it," said Lopinto. The banner that she carried read, "Elder lesbians in resistance".

Milei and his entourage have discursively targeted the LGBTQIA+ community since the campaign, when he called comprehensive sex education a post-Marxist plan to exterminate human beings. 

When asked about his stance on homosexuality two days before taking office, Milei replied: "What do I care what your sexual choice is? Suppose you want to be with an elephant, if you have the elephant's consent, that’s between you and the elephant." 

Days before the attack, Nicolás Márquez—Milei’s friend, biographer and a key member of the LLA party—described homosexuality as an "unhealthy, self-destructive behavior” on a popular radio program. On social networks, Márquez replied to an article titled "Burned for being lesbians" by commenting: "So don't become a lesbian and they won’t kill you. Another good reason to be heterosexual." 

He later deleted the comment.

At the commemoration that took place on May 13, the news of Andrea Amarante’s death the previous morning was fresh. There was a great deal of pain and shouts of "Lesbiana!" rose among the traditional chants outside the boarding house. The call of the poem by Macky Corbalán, a lesbian poet from the Argentine province of Neuquén, was taken up then and there: "Lesbiana lesbiana lesbiana lesbiana lesbiana, say it as many times as you kept it in."

The perpetrator of the attack is currently hospitalized. Prosecutors charged him with homicide. The Buenos Aires Office for the Protection of LGBT Rights has requested that they charge him with lesbicide instead. In support of this, it submitted its 2023 report to the court that documents LLA's statements against the LGBTQIA+ community during the election campaign. 

To date, the government has not issued a response, other than the president’s spokesperson denying that the attack was a hate crime against lesbians. María Rachid, head of the Buenos Aires Office for the Protection of LGBT Rights, told Ojalá that this is among the cruelest hate crimes that has occurred in Argentina in recent years and that there’s reason to worry about the future. 

"Hate speech has not diminished, not even since this crime. On the contrary. And the president's spokesman even stated that he had nothing to say about the Barracas massacre because it was a murder just like any other,” said Rachid. “He steadfastly refused to condemn what took place or to express any concern about it."

Rachid pointed out that the legislature of the City of Buenos Aires approved a draft declaration denouncing the attack, but LLA legislators abstained. “Their messages endorse, legitimize, and empower those who use violence," she said.

"Everything is harder now. We have to think twice before putting on a pride pin because now any old John Doe will come around and punch you," said Hernández in an interview with Ojalá. "This sort of harassment has always happened, but before there might not be any physical violence. Now, with the hate speech coming from above, people are not only speaking, they are also attacking."

Activists have painted and postered Olavarría Street with the four names. Pamela. Roxana. Andrea. Sofía. Candles are lit, rainbow flags are draped over railings, the street is festooned with mourning and memory.