Seven murders of LGBTI + persons in Brazil in the last two weeks
In the last two weeks, from April 6th until April 19th, there were at least seven LGBTI + deaths in Brazil. Among the seven deaths, six of them were trans […]
In the last two weeks, from April 6th until April 19th, there were at least seven LGBTI + deaths in Brazil. Among the seven deaths, six of them were trans people. The first of these occurred on April 7th: a trans person´s body was found charred in Franca, a city in the state of São Paulo. There was no news in the media about this murder, which was only discovered by the National Association of Transsexuals of Brazil (ANTRA) because local informants passed on information about the case.
On April 9th, the trans woman Marqueza, 51, was shot dead in her home in the city of Campina Grande, Paraiba, while she was asleep. Media reports on the case identified the trans person as a homosexual man and referred to her with the name she was registered with at birth and not the name she identified with.
On April 12th, a 38-year-old cross-dresser was stabbed to death by a man she was talking to outside a bar in the town of Sapezal, Mato Grosso. According to witnesses, she had been beaten before she was murdered. The news treated her as a male and referred to her only by the name she was registered with at birth.
On the same day, in the city of Boa Vista, in Roraima, the trans woman Sandrielly Vasconcelos, 24, was found dead with her hands and feet tied, a deep cut on her neck, and part of her back burned, which shows that Sandrielly was tortured before she was murdered.
On April 13th, the trans woman Sabrina was shot dead in João Pessoa, Paraíba. Residents of the area called the police when they heard the shots, but Sabrina had already died.
On the same day, Alessandro Fraga, a 33-year-old gay man, was found dead 100 meters from his car in the city of Lauro de Freitas. His body was found with gunshot wounds, strangulation marks, and bruises on the head. Alex, as he was known, was former the president and founder of the Gay Group of Lauro de Feitas and also worked coordinating the Center for Testing and Counseling, advocating for patients to receive counseling and diagnosis of infections such as HIV, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis.
On March 17, the trans woman Eliana Pascolar was murdered in Rio de Janeiro downtown. Her body was found tied to a tree, with marks of physical aggressions.
These deaths are a picture of the grave situation facing LGBTI + people in Brazil: extremely violent deaths accompanied by torture, with reporting in the media that does not respect the gender identity of the victims. According to the Dossier of Assassinations and Violence against Cross-Dressers and Transexuals in Brazil in 2018, almost 40% of the reports of murders of trans people did not respect the gender identity of the victim, which reveals that trans people have their stories deleted, their names ignored, and their gender identities contested even after their deaths.
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Race and Equality is committed to its struggle for equality and calls on the Brazilian State to ensure that all people can express their sexual orientation and gender identity freely in Brazil without the context of violence and threats to which they are currently subjected, as well to seriously investigate the deaths of all LGBTI + persons that occur in an intense way in the country.
