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News > Latin America

Bill Asks Reparations for Violence Against Argentina's Trans

  • The campaign #ReconocerEsReparar is meant to raise awareness in Argentina about abuses against the transgender community.

    The campaign #ReconocerEsReparar is meant to raise awareness in Argentina about abuses against the transgender community. | Photo: ‏@JomaAlejandro

Published 5 October 2016
Opinion

Argentina has been in the vanguard of LGBTI rights in Latin America.

A bill demanding Argentina's state pay historic economic reparations for transgender and transvestite victims of institutional violence will be introduced in the national congress on Friday, said LGBTI organizations to teleSUR.

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Transgender association AboSex, one of the 40 LGBTI associations who mobilized for the initiative, is confident that the bill will pass.

“The legislation has received the support of 15 lawmakers so far, and our campaign #ReconocerEsReparar (To recognize is to repair), was a huge success on social media,” said Luciano Sapinelli from AboSex in a phone interview.

It will be formally introduced by Diana Conti, from the progressive coalition Front for Victory—which was governing before President Mauricio Macri—and will be reviewed by the legislative commission of interior security in the following months.

The transgender community is demanding economic reparations for the fines and prison sentences illegally imposed on them between 1954 and 1997, when cities across Argentina issued edicts criminalizing anyone on the street on the pretext of being sex workers or for wearing clothes of the opposite gender, despite being ruled unconstitutional at various times.

The federal police would systematically arrest transgender people and transvestites in the street; transvestites would be heavily fined, or detained for 30 days without trial and were not given legal defense.

Police officers would insult and beat them until they were forced to repeat their given gender name instead of the name they went by. Besides enduring verbal and physical abuse, transgender victims would be offered lighter sentences in exchange for money or sex, said Sapilleni.

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The economic reparations correspond to an evaluation of the reparations granted to the relatives of the forced disappeared during the dictatorship by the Argentine state. The transgender community, said Sapilleni, is “the community democracy forgot.”

The campaign, which started two weeks ago, is meant to raise awareness in Argentina's society around this issue, and empower transgender people and transvestites by making visible the abuses they have suffered.

For instance, shortly after Buenos Aires' provincial congress passed a bill forcing the public sector to hire a minimum of 3 percent transgender people, eight transgender people were murdered the following month, including Diana Sacayan, the prominent LGBTI activist who had led the mobilization for the bill.

Educating society, especially security forces, is crucial, added the activist, and will hopefully help stop the current wave of transvesticides.

Argentina was the first country in Latin America to allow same-sex marriage, and remains one of the few countries in the world that allow people to change their gender on official identification documents.

If the bill on reparations were to eventually pass, it would also be a pioneer law for the region, making the state recognize institutional violence for the first time.

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