V. Latin America and the Caribbean

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements in Latin America have achieved an astonishing record of success in the last 20 years. (The Caribbean, a distinctive case, will be dealt with in a separate subsection.) LGBT groups have seized on democratic openings to enter the political and cultural spheres. Despite steady harassment, they have become visible and stayed vocal. The intensity of debate among activists, the degree of networking across the continent, and the diversity of identities and demands they bring to bear, are perhaps greater than anywhere else in the world.

The remaining sodomy laws have fallen one by one. Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela now have national protections against sexual-orientation-based discrimination—though none for gender identity. In 2008, Uruguay became the first Latin American country to recognize same-sex relationships by law at the national level, although many cities and provinces in the region already offer domestic partnerships.

Yet progress has had an uneven reach. Brazil, a transgender activist pointed out, “has the largest Pride parade in the world, but also some of the highest levels of hate crimes against LGBT people.” Laws used to arrest transgender people in public places—along with sex workers, gay men, and lesbians—are still on the books across the continent.

What happens next? A Nicaraguan activist says, “Our first goal was to get rid of the sodomy law, which also affected free expression and assembly, because it punished those ‘supporting’ same-sex issues. That is done, and now our priority is to have sexual orientation included in the anti-discrimination law, which now mentions ethnicity, color, sex—but not this. ... Then we will move to civil rights and full citizenship.” Other activists, though, look at such pathways and ask: who would still be unprotected? Who is left out?

Patterns of abuse

The repeal of sodomy laws has left a range of other provisions that enable police abuse. “Homosexuality is not penalized in the Dominican Republic,” says a lesbian activist there, “but the provisions on ‘morality and good customs’ are used to harass gay men and trans people.”

Such provisions are found in state and local criminal codes, and sometimes in national laws, from Mexico to Argentina. For example, 10 (out of 23) provinces in Argentina retain them. Sometimes they punish “homosexual or sexually vicious individuals” engaged in solicitation, sometimes “scandalous prostitution,” sometimes simply “acts against decency” or “public scandal,” sometimes “moral contravention.” (They are often called “contraventional codes.”) Many give police broad authority to fine or detain people arbitrarily and without a court hearing. Transgender people are constant targets.

A Brazilian transgender activist, asked about the most widespread human rights violations she sees, answers: “Everything! For travestis in particular, to survive means ‘to kill a lion every day.’” Police brutality is the most common report, she says, but violence is ubiquitous. In Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries, armed gangs—which many believe include off-duty police—menace, abuse, and shoot transgender people on the streets.

Transgender people encounter the health system in charged ways, as perhaps the key point where they meet the state and officialdom: they report discrimination, abuse, lack of access to services, and comprehensive refusal to acknowledge their identities. In Venezuela, one campaigner claims that “Nine out of ten trans people do not consult doctors even in case of serious illness, because of the mistreatment they know they will face in health services.” A Brazilian leader says many transgender people die from “self-medication with hormones and silicones because they do not trust doctors. ... This is the biggest challenge we face as a movement.”

Many governments still do not permit any change of legal identity for transgender people—and lacking identity papers that reflect their lived gender, many still cannot work legally, rent rooms, obtain passports, or even drive. States that do, however, generally make surgery an obligatory condition. An FTM transgender activist in Chile condemns “the complicity between the justice and health systems to deny us personhood.” A landmark Colombian decision 10 years ago restricted surgeries on intersex children, but such surgeries continue in most countries in the region.

Medical care is also an issue for other groups. A lesbian activist in Ecuador says reports are widespread of psychiatric institutions trying to “cure” lesbians through shock therapy and other abusive means: “We refuse to call it ‘forced institutionalization’: it is torture.”

Workplace discrimination is common. A Nicaraguan woman says, “We hear many cases of lesbians who have been abused at work and who have been fired for being lesbians.” As patriarchal values flourish without mitigation, violence against non-conforming women is also widespread. A Dominican respondent told us, “Lesbians have been murdered by their girlfriends’ families, as punishment.”

Some of those reports are anecdotal partly because lesbians have little visibility, both within the movement and before the state and society: abuses against them go unrecognized and their needs unmet. An Argentinean working against domestic violence said, “Everything that exists in the field of domestic violence is geared toward straight women.”

The rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children—including sexual rights, both to autonomy and to protection from abuse—are at risk in all regions. In Latin America, it is conspicuous that, amid region-wide advances in protection, children have been almost completely left out. A Colombian transgender activist says that “Those under 18 are not considered citizens and their participation in the design of public policies and legal proposals is practically nil. ... Speaking about sexual orientation and gender identity in people under that age raises terrible fears.” She observes, “A travesti is not suddenly born as one the day she turns 18. By that time, she already has a long history of marginalization and abuse behind her.”

“Everything starts with the school,” a Brazilian transgender woman says. “We are not only expelled but also morally and psychologically attacked by students, teachers, and school staff.” The harassment is connected to silence in curricula. In many countries sexual education does not exist—“in Venezuelan schools,” an activist there observes, “sexuality is talked about only in relation to the reproduction of certain plants”—but where it does, activists complain that only heterosexual models culminating in marriage are presented.

Challenges and chances

Almost every activist from the region cited, first and foremost, the power of religion and the Catholic Church—and its politicization of the concept of “family.” In Argentina, the Church combats the inclusion of same-sex couples in the domestic violence law; in Guatemala, it is pushing a bill excluding single-parent or non-nuclear families from the definition of the term “family”; in Honduras, it helped pass a constitutional amendment barring marriage or adoption by same-sex couples. Its opposition to state promotion of safer-sex methods, including condoms, has a disproportionate effect on groups particularly vulnerable to HIV and AIDS. In places like Guatemala or Brazil, growing evangelical denominations also contribute to what one activist calls “a continuous process of desecularization, which is not limited to society but ends by pressing the state to endorse its perspective and to participate in prejudice.”

The Latin American Church has not generally coupled with secular, cultural nationalism to create the complex around “cultural authenticity” other regions see. Religion in the region operates on its own terms. Confronting its authority, for many activists, means countering the reality of a “confessional state” with a “secular state” model. There are also some limited openings within the Church itself: some transgender activists find the hierarchy more sympathetic to people whose identity does not appear defined by “behavior.”

Where laws and policies actually are positive, implementation remains uneven. People point to several levels:

• Training and monitoring officials. If Argentina passes an inclusive domestic violence law, a campaigner says, “We need to change completely the educations that professionals in those institutions that will have to deal with lesbians in abusive relationships receive, and find mechanisms to observe how they are carrying out their duties.” Few groups have resources to do either.
• A “related challenge,” a Brazilian says, is reaching out to local and state governments, “where so many federal laws ‘die’” because they are not enforced.
• Finally, as one Brazilian notes, “Public policies based on social inclusion and the promotion of human rights must be policies of the state, not just the government. They cannot rely on a particular administration alone. This is a key challenge for us ... to guarantee the continuity of the current policies through legal and other kinds of mechanisms,” including dedicated, permanent positions in ministries, “so they will not end with this administration.”

Yet activists pointed to positive opportunities, now and in the near future. Sympathetic governments hold power in influential countries in the region. Several activists noted that such neighbors rarely use their weight regionally on LGBT issues. A Venezuelan said, “If we could have high-level officers from countries that are Venezuela’s allies—like Argentina, Brazil—talking to our authorities about LGBT rights, there would be advances.”

Overridingly, people cited the potential of the hard-won alliances between LGBT groups and other social forces. An Argentinean leader remarked of the region as whole, “The [LGBT] movements in Latin America are not isolated. ... I cannot think of a single movement that is very cut off from the rest of civil society. All have genuine allies in at least one other social movement, maybe women’s, maybe human rights.”

This is the product of the patient, intersectional work of a generation of activists. It is paying off. A Dominican lesbian says, “The feminist movement has long ago stopped being afraid of lesbians. Our proposal for Constitutional reform is being submitted as part of the Women’s Forum for Constitutional Reform, a coalition of women’s and feminist groups from across the country.” A Costa Rican activist also praised “an opening in the feminist movement to welcome trans women and allow us to claim our feminist identities.”

Regional networks and cooperation among LGBT social movements—especially lesbian and transgender groups—have had a powerful effect. “The positive regional trend for LGBT rights is the biggest opportunity,” a Dominican activist says: “Our people, and particularly the younger LGBT generation, see what is happening in the rest of the region.”

Some activists expressed concern over what they see as a funders’ push to turn informal networks into formal, structured federations, particularly at the national level. “The real agenda,” one said, “is that they want to make the funding simpler.  ... But a formal federation can lead to monopolizing resources by a few. Or you have a truly inclusive federation, and the groups in it spend all their time fighting over power, and it’s a waste of their energy.” Another activist said, “Trans groups participate in the federations. But they don’t get the resources.”

Lack of funding is a continual problem, as well as the demands of specialized funding sources. A Nicaraguan lesbian reports, “Most of the funding that comes to Central America is related to HIV/AIDS and we refuse to do that work just to get funding. We want to work on the issues that matter to us, lesbian and human rights, and we want to get funding for that, explicitly.”

This also affects political horizons. A Honduran activist claims that there, “a political vision of the rights of the LGBTTI community does not exist among community organizations: they are not founded in a vision of defending human rights, but in a vision of preventing HIV.” Concentrating on health also affects institutional relationships. A Brazilian transgender leader says that because the movement has strong ties to the Health Ministry, “the other Ministries (Labour, Education, Culture) do not consider us a priority.”

What are movements doing?

The main question, again, is: what next? Many would agree with the Paraguayan activist who says, “Our absolute priority is the Law against All Forms of Discrimination”; or with Brazilian groups campaigning for a national law to criminalize homophobic hate speech.

Others would qualify or question this. Bills with criminal penalties for unequal treatment raise doubts in some quarters about the wisdom of relying on state punitive measures for protection. Meanwhile, Latin America, says a transgender and intersex activist, “is very much under the influence of the Spanish model—that you protect sexual orientation first, building toward marriage; then gender identity and gender recognition for trans people; and then only can you talk about issues like genital mutilation of intersex people. We [transgender and intersex people] cannot wait for it.”

Further legal change is needed. Repealing “contraventional laws” and “morality” provisions is a priority for transgender groups and others, complicated by how those provisions hide in patchwork state and local codes that must probably be changed one by one. Existing anti-discrimination laws do not include gender identity, nor does Ecuador’s Constitution (the first one in the region to include sexual orientation).[13]

“We have to pay much more attention to family law,” says one Argentinean women’s activist, “and we have not. Then something happens, a custody case for instance, and we run to the family code and see the horrors that are happening.” The 2004 case of a lesbian judge in Chile, denied custody of her child by a court, focused regional attention on family-law inequalities. Beyond that, activists looking toward recognition of same-sex couples face both the Church’s militant opposition, and the question of whether to pursue litigation (which has brought significant partnership benefits piecemeal in Colombia) or social-movement mobilization, or both.

Inadequate funds hamper taking up strategic litigation, or simply providing legal help to people who face discrimination. A Honduran lesbian group cites the “lack of lawyers who want to carry on the fight against discrimination,” the lack of training for those who do, “and lack of financial resources to pay for legal services.”

Alliances continue to be crucial. In Paraguay, a lesbian activist says, “The network against All Forms of Discrimination, a very broad coalition of civil society organizations,” drafted the equality bill and included sexual orientation and gender identity. “We worked really well together. ... The fundamentalists have clearly said that if the bill did not include LGBT people, it would already have been approved. But the coalition is holding its ground strongly. The disabled people’s movement is the strongest partner in our coalition and their motto is ‘All or none.’”

Regional work is also vital. This can mean regional encuentras, trainings, or networks, or the increasing focus on the Inter-American human rights system as a means of moving governments. A growing number of groups are preparing to lobby or take cases to Inter-American institutions. The recent resolution at the OAS General Assembly condemning human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity came after years of work by LGBT groups around Latin America, as well as the Caribbean. Groups are also increasingly documenting human rights violations themselves, including police practice and impunity.

Transgender and intersex activists are trying to work with individual doctors and professional bodies—and, in Brazil, working through the Ministry of Health. An FTM activist in Chile hopes to create “health care networks,” lists of referrals to sympathetic doctors. Beyond that, another activist says, “We need to reach medical schools. And we need to convince lawyers and bioethicists about trans and intersex issues”— about the limits of medicalization and medical interventions. “Challenging the medical establishment, for both trans and intersex movements, is crucial and very difficult,” he says. “At some point, it’s exactly the same as with abortion: you can change laws, even create clinics, but you need people within key institutions to start thinking in a different way. Otherwise the bulk of the profession will say, I simply won’t have anything to do with it.”

Widening possibilities for legal change have not diminished LGBT groups’ projects at the micro-level: the incremental, the local, or the cultural. One Argentinean activist notes the push to persuade hospitals to use the names under which transgender people’s actually live, while calling them “codes” for the legal names the law forces them to employ. “Changing the law on names is very difficult. ... this is not connected with a grand affirmation of social change, but it is a very practical short-term solution.” Similarly, in Brazil activists worked with the Health Ministry on new policies allowing transgender people to use “social names” in hospitals where their legal names still cannot be changed.

Some projects center around simple daily challenges, moving freely or being seen. A Brazilian transgender umbrella group “requests all affiliated associations to include time and money in their work plans for pleasure-oriented spaces for TTT [Travestis, Transexuais and Transgeneros]. The activities can be anything: going to the movies, shopping, having ice cream. The only requirements are that it has to be done in a group and during the day. The goal is ... to teach them to be out during the day, to feel strong in a group and to face those spaces they believe are ‘off limits’ for them. And it is also meant to educate the public, so people can see TTT as ordinary citizens who can have fun ... with whom they can share a movie or a game and the beach.”

Meeting these basic needs can also mean concentrating on cultural activism: images, film, drama. A lesbian in Ecuador says, “Of course we think that legal reforms are important and we do work on specific claims. But we also believe that feminists as a whole have forgotten for a long time to address another dimension: transforming the way our societies think. ... Creativity is little valued in human rights or development perspectives, in spite of its being a key element in unlearning the harmful aspects of particular cultures.” An activist in the Dominican Republic calls art “a very powerful tool to reach people with our discourses, because it is a channel people don’t fear.”

Amid this, most activists also remember acutely the broad social context of their work. “It is impossible to conceive radical democracy without bodies and sexualities, but also without what makes it possible for the population to exercise their rights, that is, economic power,” one told us. “Without a radical change in the economic situation in the region, we can’t have real democracies.”

The Caribbean

Caribbean countries, mostly Anglophone and Francophone, are divided from the mainland by more than language. In Guyana, an activist notes the intense level of “social homophobia rooted in our colonial-era laws.” The combination of an intensely repressive environment in families, communities, and public places, and antiquated laws on sexuality that are still enforced, keeps people underground—and sometimes kills those who emerge.

13 of 15 CARICOM (Caribbean Community) states still criminalize same-sex acts, most under “buggery” laws inherited from the British. Post-independence democratic governments have shown deep resistance to any suggestion of repeal. The laws lead to discrimination and silence in other spaces: organizations unable to operate openly, jobs and homes lost, and police who refuse to protect people against day-to-day violence.

Violence is a general problem in the region. Music and pop culture help channel it toward people who are “manly,” or “womanly,” in the wrong way. Homophobic mob attacks in Jamaica have burgeoned, amid what one regional activist, now working in Canada, calls “a louder voice by the government to excuse homophobia and transphobia. The Caribbean, although a region poised to benefit from [outside] political and economic development, remains resistant to any social or cultural suggestions to advance rights-based approaches.”

A Guyanese activist sees mounting “religious fundamentalisms, Christian and Muslim, and the political conservatism that is tied to them, as politicians are appealing to conservative voting bases more than ever. ... Canadian [evangelical] groups are supporting and organizing with their counterparts in the region, while local LGBT advocacy groups are not receiving similar kinds of tangible support from our global allies.”

Two things have changed recently. One activist notes, “As a society we are recognizing that gender is at the root of a lot of social issues, so mainstreaming LGBT issues as gender issues provides us with opportunities to address homophobia ... which [is] often tied to issues of masculinities, as well as opportunities to build alliances with women’s groups, children’s rights groups, anti-violence and peace-building movements, etc.”

The same activist says: “The response to the AIDS epidemic has provided a forum that brings everyone to the table.” HIV has helped get groups working on sexuality access to policymakers for the first time. A Belize LGBT group notes that it is incorporated into the work of the National AIDS Commission; elsewhere in the region, organizations are engaging in high-level policy advocacy on health.

None of this has added up to significant social change or law reform, however—although upcoming revisions of the Bill of Rights and Constitution in Jamaica provide a possible opening. Groups complain they have “no resources to support lawyer’s fees” for either case work or long-term litigation. Increasingly, though, groups are trying to produce documentation on rights violations (as well as HIV-related practices) among MSMs and LGBT people, hoping to generate sustained pressure to move advocacy forward.