There are already two women dead after a fire that started due to a neighbor’s attack on four lesbian women who lived in a family hotel in the Barracas neighborhood, in CABA. The 62-year-old attacker remains detained after being accused of setting the victims on fire with a homemade bomb.
Read Also
Without much to celebrate, a new anniversary of the Gender Identity Law marks
On Monday afternoon Pamela Cobos died as a result of the serious injuries she suffered in the fire and yesterday afternoon Mercedes Figueroa passed away, after two days of hospitalization with burns on 90% of his body. Another woman is still hospitalized in critical condition with 75 percent of her body burned and the fourth woman was also injured but is stable.
According to testimonies, the incident occurred due to an attack by a man, who ended up cut with a saw, and who was transferred by SAME to the Argerich hospital, as a detainee. The attacker is accused of setting the four women on fire. According to the neighbors’ story,The fire was motivated by homohating reasons, since it was a group of lesbian women.
Read Also
Manuel Lozano responded to Márquez’s homophobic sayings: “Speeches like yours taught us that we are not valuable”
“He set fire to another room where four girls live. “She threw a Molotov cocktail,” said one of the neighbors in dialogue with Crónica TV., who stated that “several had problems with him.” For his part, another neighbor told C5N that when he opened the door he found “the two women on fire.”
The Argentine LGBT+ Federation expressed its condemnation of the fire and subsequent death of a lesbian woman in Barracas. “Hate crimes are the result of a culture of violence and discrimination that is sustained by hate speech which today are endorsed by several officials and representatives of the National Government. And the only spaces to which those of us who are victims of these attacks can resort are being emptied or eliminated by the current government, such as, for example, INADI,” the organization said in a statement.
«We point out this with concern and demand strong public policies against hate speech and crimes in Argentina. As well as the strengthening of INADI, the only organization in charge of generating public policies to prevent them«, he pointed out.
Hate speech against LGBT people
According to figures from the Argentine LGBT Federation, there were 133 hate crimes in 2023. Different organizations and leaders expressed their concern and linked the attack against women with the amplification of hate speech in recent days, such as that of the lawyer, friend and reference of Javier Milei, Nicolás Márquez.
«In the name of the supposed critical pluralism, the tirades about homosexuality as state-subsidized insanity today they managed to burn and leave a lesbian couple in agony,” said journalist Franco Torchia.
Read Also
Repudiation and protest against Márquez during his presentation at the Book Fair: “That is not freedom, it is hatred”
The national representative Mónica Macha of Unión por la Patria also gave her opinion, saying: «It is not free to enable hate speech in all social spaces. “It is not freedom, it is violence and persecution.”
“We strongly repudiate these facts that show us that the normalization of figures and references of fascism in the media has concrete effects,” they expressed from the Ni Una Menos collective.