He 5 July 2024, the Federal Criminal Oral Court No. 1 of the city of La Plata condemned 11 personas, including police, military and a civilian, for illegal deprivation of liberty; aggravated sexual torment and abuse; as well as reduction to the servitude of 8 trans women who had been illegally detained in the clandestine detention center, torture and extermination known as “Pozo de Banfield” in the province of Buenos Aires. This important decision constitutes a milestone in the judicialization of crimes against humanity as it is the first to criminally condemn persecution for reasons of gender identity in contexts of State terrorism..
The victims, in addition to suffering the generalized violence that the other captives faced, They were also subjected to acts of sexual violence on repeated occasions and suffered particularly sadistic and merciless attacks.. These events were not isolated, but rather they were part of an attack typical of the systematic plan of illegal repression aimed at disciplining those people who challenged the predominant cisheterosexual system.. Besides, The victims were enslaved and instrumentalized by their repressors to clean blood from cars., cook, clean up places of detention and torture and other actions complementary to their criminal actions.
The Prosecutor's Office, taking into account the inter-American precedent of the case “Vicky Hernández vs.. Honduras” showed that trans people in Argentina lived in a serious situation of social marginality prior to the coup d'état, but that the discrimination and violence against them was considerably accentuated as a result of an annihilation plan that eliminated everything that presented itself as dissident.. This policy of extermination categorized as an enemy anyone who subverted the binary sex-gender model that the last civic-military dictatorship sought to root in Argentine society..
Support for this criminal outlook received public backing from the highest hierarchies of the Armed Forces who usurped public powers on 24 March 1976, such as the dictator and then de Facto President Jorge Rafael Videla, who pointed out that it was a crime to attack the Western and Christian lifestyle, and that those who subvert this value system would be considered terrorists.
Faced with it, The ruling recognizes that dissident gender identities are part of the national identity and, to that extent, Their persecution and extermination partially destroy the Argentine community by ignoring what people of sexual and gender diversity have contributed to the construction of the social fabric..
The Network of LGBTI+ Litigants of the Americas celebrates this historic decision that recognizes the differential violence suffered by trans women in the context of Argentine State terrorism and urges other States in the region, because in the investigation, judicialization and punishment of crimes against humanity always adopt a perspective of sexual diversity, as well as recognize and repair the damages suffered.
More information here
