The night of last March 3, four Chilean neo-Nazis, led by a brute nicknamed “Pato Core,” found lying, near Santiago’s Parque Borja, Daniel Zamudio, a young homosexual activist who was twenty-four years old and worked as a sales clerk in a clothing store. For six hours, as they drank and joked, they devoted themselves to punching and kicking the “faggot,” to throwing rocks at him and carving swastikas on his chest and back with a broken bottle. In the morning, Daniel Zamudio was taken to a hospital, where he agonized for twenty-five days, at the end of which he died due to multiple traumas caused by the ferocious beating.
This crime, the offspring of homophobia, has caused a vivid impression on public opinion, not only Chilean, but South American, and we are seeing more open condemnation of discrimination against and hate for sexual minorities, so deeply rooted in Latin America. The president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, called for exemplary punishment and asked lawmakers to reconsider an antidiscrimination law that has been languishing for seven years in the Chilean parliament, stalled by the fear of certain legislators that, if approved, it would open the path for same-sex marriage.
We hope that the immolation of Daniel Zamudio serves to bring to light the tragic condition of gays, lesbians, and transsexuals in Latin American countries, where without a single exception they are the object of ridicule, repression, marginalization, persecution, and campaigns to discredit them that, in general, have the open and massively enthusiastic support of the bulk of public opinion.
The easiest and most hypocritical thing to do in this matter is to attribute Daniel Zamudio’s death only to four villainous poor devils who call themselves neo-Nazis probably without even knowing what Nazism is or was. They are no more than the crudest and most repulsive patrols of the time-honored tradition that presents gays and lesbians as sick or depraved creatures that should be kept at a preventive distance from normal people because they corrupt the healthy social body and induce it to sin and to moral and physical disintegration in perverse and abominable practices.
This idea of homosexuality is taught in schools, is transmitted in the heart of families, is preached from pulpits, disseminated in every means of communication, appears in public discourse, in radio and television programs, and in plays where “faggots” and “dykes” are always grotesque characters, anomalous, ridiculous, and dangerous, altogether worthy of the disgust and discrimination of decent, ordinary people. The gay is always “the other,” the one that negates and frightens us, but also fascinates, like the gaze of the cobra that freezes the innocent bird.
In such a context, what is surprising is not that abominations such as the sacrifice of Daniel Zamudio occur, but that they happen so infrequently. Although, perhaps, it would be fairer to say that they are so little known, because homophobic crimes that are publicized are surely only a small part of those actually committed. And in many cases, the families themselves of victims prefer to throw a veil of silence over them, to avoid dishonor and shame.
I have here before me, for example, a report prepared by the Homosexual Movement of Lima, sent to me by its president, Giovanny Romero Infante. According to this investigation, between the years 2006 and 2010 in Peru, 249 people were killed for their “sexual orientation and gender identity.” In other words, one per week. Among the appalling cases detailed in the report, that of Yefri Peña stands out. Her face and body were disfigured by five “machos” with the top of a bottle, and police refused to help her because she was a transvestite while the doctors of a hospital refused to treat her because they considered her a “ground zero of infection” who could infect those around her.
These extreme cases are atrocious, of course. But surely the most terrible aspect of being lesbian, gay, or transsexual in countries such as Peru or Chile is not these exceptional cases, but rather a daily life condemned to insecurity, fear, and a permanent awareness of being considered (and coming to feel so) a reprobate, abnormal, a monster. To have to live in hiding, with the permanent fear of being discovered and stigmatized, by parents, relatives, friends, and an entire prejudiced social environment that is cruel to gays as if they were a plague. How many young people tormented by this social censure have been pushed to suicide or suffer traumas that ruined their lives? In my social circle alone, I know of many cases of this monumental injustice that, in contrast to others, like economic exploitation or political trampling, does not tend to be denounced in the press or appear on the social programs of those who consider themselves to be reformists and progressives.
Because when it comes to homophobia, the left and the right are mixed up as one sole entity devastated by prejudice and stupidity. It is not only the Catholic Church and Evangelical sects that repudiate homosexuals and stubbornly oppose gay marriage. The two subversive movements that in the 1980s undertook armed rebellion to establish communism in Peru, Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru), systematically executed homosexuals in every town they captured (the Spanish Inquisition did no more or less throughout all of its sinister history).
To liberate Latin America from the inveterate defects of machismo and homophobia—two sides of the same coin—will be long and difficult, and the path to this liberation will have many other victims along the way like the unlucky Daniel Zamudio. The matter is not political, but rather religious and cultural. We have been brought up since time immemorial to believe that there is a sexual orthodoxy from which only perverts and the mentally ill stray, and we have seen this aberrational nonsense transmitted to our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, helped by the dogmas of religion and entrenched moral customs and habits. We are afraid of sex and it is difficult for us to accept that in this uncertain domain there are differing and various options that should be accepted as manifestations of rich human diversity. And that in this aspect of the condition of men and women, freedom should also reign, allowing that, in sexual lives, each chooses his or her behavior and vocation without any limitations besides the respect and consent of their partner.
The minority of people who are beginning to accept that a lesbian or gay man is as normal as a heterosexual, and that, as such, she or he should be given the same rights as the latter—such as being able to marry and adopt children, for example—is still reticent to fight a battle in favor of sexual minorities, because they know that winning that battle will be like moving mountains, struggling against a deadweight born of this primitive rejection of “the other,” he who is different, because of the color of his skin, his customs, his language, and his beliefs, and that is the fodder of wars, genocides, and holocausts that fill the history of humanity with blood and corpses.
We have made many advances in the struggle against racism, undoubtedly, although without eliminating it. Today, at least, we know we shouldn’t discriminate against black, yellow, Jewish, mixed race, and Indian, and, in any case, it is viewed very negatively to proclaim oneself a racist. This is not the case when it comes to gays, lesbians, and transsexuals, who can be scorned and abused with impunity. They are the most eloquent demonstration of how far a good part of the world is from true civilization.
Lima, April 2012