Chile: Hate messages spray-painted on the outside walls of LGBT-rights organization MOVILH

Photo captured by Chilean web magazine NORTH.

This past weekend several of Chile's leading LGBT-rights organizations held a "unity" march in observation of the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia which, by some estimates, drew as many as 50,000 people.

The country recently elected president Michelle Bachelet on a platform that includes debating marriage equality although she has since put it on the back burner saying that the debate won't happen until at least next year.

The country has also seen a series of vicious anti-gay attacks and murders in the last few years including Daniel Zamudio who was beaten to death in 2012 and whose aggressors carved swastikas on his body using broken beer bottles

Sometime during Sunday night or Monday before dawn someone spray-painted a number of hateful messages outside the offices of the MOVILH, one of the leading LGBT-rights organizations in the country. The messages read: "Death to faggots", "AIDS-ridden faggots", "Put your marches up your ass, fucked faggots", "More AIDS, less fags" and "Do me a favor AIDS, and kill more faggots".

There has been an outpouring of support for MOVILH and international condemnation for the attack. The United Nation's Office of the High Commissioner released a statement in Spanish through it's South American Regional Office which they call on the state to investigate the crime and hold those who did it accountable. The Chilean government under Bachelet has also responded quickly sending a spokesperson to the site of the attacks to express strong support for MOVILH and a commitment to address the crime.

If you would like to express support for MOVILH, please take a couple of minutes and drop a line or two on their facebook page: Movilh Chile.

Related:

• Homophobic attack at MOVILH's headquarters (I love Chile) 

Marcia Alejandra, the first transsexual woman in Latin America, has died

[NOTE: The image used for this post is that of legendary queer poet and provocateur Pedro Lemebel, who alerted media to the news, not that of Marcia Alejandra]

Friends of Marcia Alejandra - the first woman in Latin America to undergo gender reassignment surgery to change her anatomical gender from male to female - say she has died from a stroke.

"With her departure, this country loses - perhaps - a part of its memory," said queer activist and friend Pedro Lemebel to Chilean newspaper La Nación,

"Marcia was never acknowledged as the great mold-breaker of her era", he added.

Marcia Alejandra, who made a living as a hairdresser, underwent gender-reassignment surgery in Chile back in March of 1973 (that's almost 40 years ago!).

A report published by Chilean newspaper La Cuarta in 2004 says that news of the historic surgery didn't reach the public until a year after it happened when some newspapers finally caught wind of it.

At the time, Marcia Alejandra bravely stood up to reporters and said she was "a man with the soul of a woman" (remember, this were the early 1970's in Latin America).

Dr. Antonio Salas Vieyra, who performed the surgery, went on to worldwide acclaim and I still see his name pop up from time to time in reference to Latin American LGBT history.  He is currently the president of the Chilean Sexuality and Sexual Education Association.

Marcia Alejandra's name, by all accounts, has been mostly relegated to the sands of time, at least until now.

La Nación says that when they reached out to the leading Chilean LGBT rights organization, MOVILH, they didn't even recognize her name.  Pablo Lemebel, speaking to the paper, blamed it on institutional transphobia on their part (Lemebel has been a long time critic of the organization).

Lemebel also penned an ode to Marcia Alejandra published by El Nortero on January 10th in which he tries to rescue her name for historical posterity and highlights what it might have meant for someone in the early 1970's to have the courage to go under gender-reassignment surgery.

Of course, to call someone the first person in Latin America to undergo gender-reassignment surgery is highly subjective. In the comments section of the La Nación article, someone argues that someone else in Chile might have been the first transsexual woman in the country.  And maybe that's correct but, if it is, it wasn't anyone who went public then nor now.

Marcia Alejandra did go public, though, and did so at a time when it was absolutely heroic.

In the United States, Puerto Rican-born transgender idol Sylvia Rivera has always been held high on a pedestal when it comes to te origins of the current LGBT-rights movement and her role in the Stonewall riots of the late 1960's.

Please help me welcome Marcia Alejandra to the same pantheon as that of Sylvia Rivera's.

Chile: "Divine" fire from 1993 resolved, inside job instead of homophobia, culprits go free

If, like me, you have kept an eye on all things LGBT and Latin America during the past two decades, there are few iconic events that stand up when you think about discrimination.

Key among them was the tragic 1993 fire at "Divine", a gay bar in Santiago, Chile, which took the lives of 16 patrons and left another 29 people hurt (archive photo to the right taken the morning after the fire).

Now comes word, after 17 years, that the fire wasn't a homophobic crime after all.

In a report released last Friday and backed by the leading LGBT rights organization in Chile, the Movement for Homosexual Liberation (MOVILH), authorities named the bar's owners as the true culprits.

According to the report, a month before the fire, bar owners Nelson Arellano and Arturo Masafierro, were seen covering the walls and ceilings of the bar with materials that had been deemed not to meet the fire hazard standards of the day. They also lined up the walls with electrical cables, television sets and stereo speakers in a way that violated fire safety guidelines as well.

Carlos Hernández, a firefighter who had visited the bar on the eve of the fire and in its aftermath, told investigators that the owners had ignored previous fire violation warnings.

"Not only did [the fire escape] have a latch; it also had a chain and lock and, worse still, it opened from the outside in, which didn't allow for it to be opened on time and forced firefighters to tear it down," he said, "as a matter of fact, Arellano was told to correct that danger and he did not".

That according to El Mercurio, which also says the investigation of the case was shut down in 1994 only to be re-opened in 2003 at the bequest of MOVILH.

The report also indicates that, when it comes to crimes committed in Chile, there is a 10 year statute of limitation law in the books which means that the owners of the bar cannot be prosecuted for their actions back in the early 1990's.  It most probably mean that they will not be held accountable for the 16 people who died at "Divine" on September 4, 1993.

As for "Divine", the tragic incident was certainly turned into legend. There even was a movie made about it...



Below, the full report released last Friday by Chilean authorities (it's only available in Spanish)...

III Informe Movilh Divine Final

Chile: Dismissed for being gay, former police officer seeks justice in court

A former Chilean police detective who says he was dismissed from his post for being gay after fifteen years of service, has gone to Santiago's Court of Appeals to challenge the ruling. From the Santiago Times:

On Thursday May 7 ex-Investigations Officer César Ricardo Contreras Segura presented a demand letter to the Santiago Court of Appeals requesting reinstatement in the police, reimbursement of his wages lost since his 2006 expulsion, and damages [...] on claims that he was fired because the police department is homophobic.

Contreras was dismissed from the police in January of 2006, according to El Mercurio, and says that he decided to go to the Court of Appeals only after several attempts at seeking resolution through the Comptroller General office were ignored.

“From 2006 to date, I have lived in family, emotional and economic hell because of my unjust and inhumane expulsion from the Civil Police, where I served for 15 years on a faultless path that police civil servants wanted to sully only because of my homosexuality" says Contreras.

Rolando Jimenez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (MOVILH), also appeared at the May 7th press conference and said that Contreras had the organization's full support. Jimenez called the dismissal one of the most brutal instanced of homophobia known to the organization and said that it was immoral for the police department to investigate the detective's private life prior to dismissal based on suspicions that he was gay.

Chilean gay news portal OpusGay quotes Contreras as saying that, days before dismissal, he was confronted by superiors and shown pornographic movie files captured from his computer's temporary memory folders without his knowledge, and made to listen to surreptitiously taped telephone conversations in which he seeks sexual encounters with other adult men.

In dismissing him, the police alleged that some of the pornographic images showed underage individuals and that Contreras was part of a pedophile ring. Those charges were later cleared by a cyber-crimes court in 2007 and, later, by the Human Rights Commission of the Legislative Chamber of Deputies.

I've edited part of a sentence from the Santiago Times article above which gave an erroneous figure in the amount of monetary damages that Contreras is requesting. According to El Mercurio and 123, Contreras is asking for $50 million Chilean pesos in lost wages (not $5 million as the Times says) which is approximately $65K US dollars.

Chile to stop identifying gays as a "risk group" for sexually transmitted diseases

EFE reports today that Alvaro Erazo, the country's Health Minister (right), has announced that the government will "eliminate instructions in medical exams in which gays were identified as a risk group for sexually transmitted diseases and by which they were submitted to specific blood tests."

The announcement came after a meeting held with Rolando Jiménez, President of the Homosexual Movement for Integration and Liberation (Movilh).

According to the article, the LGBT rights organization had already gotten the government to eliminate a ban on blood donations by transgender individuals and gay and bisexual men back in 2003. But instructions that remained in official preventive medicine manuals still instructed health practitioners to ask a person if their partner had been exposed to a sexually transmitted disease and to tell the person that STD's were more frequent among people who had sexual relations with same-sex partners. If the person indicated having a same-sex partner, health practitioners were instructed to urge them to take blood tests.

Under the directive announced today, health practitioners will not be instructed to ask those questions and gays will not be instantly urged to undergo blood tests if they disclose their sexual orientation.