Argentinian President Emboldens Anti-LGBTQ Hate

In an attack that sent shockwaves through a country long considered a pioneer in LGBTQ rights, four lesbian women were set on fire in Argentina. Only one of them survived.

It happened at a boarding house in the Barracas neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where Pamela Fabiana Cobas, Mercedes Roxana Figueroa, Andrea Amarante and Sofía Castro Riglo were sharing a room. Witnesses say a man broke in and threw an incendiary device that set the women on fire.  Pamela died soon after. Her partner Roxana died days later of organ failure. Andrea died a week later in the hospital. Andrea’s partner Sofía was the sole survivor. She spent weeks recovering in the hospital and is alive today only because Andrea threw herself on top of her to shield her from the flames, Sofia’s attorney Gabriela Conder told CNN. “Her partner saved her,” Conder said.

Local LGBTQ rights advocates condemned the attack as a hate crime and lesbicide, saying the women were targeted because of their sexual identity. Police have arrested a 62-year-old man who lived in the building but, according to Conder, aren’t currently treating the incident as a hate crime as they say the motive is still unclear. 

For Argentina’s LGBTQ groups the attack represents an extreme manifestation of what they consider a growing wave of hostility against them. Those they blame most for this rising intolerance are the people in power. Chief among them, they say, is the country’s new far-right leader Javier Milei.  “Things changed with the new government of Javier Milei,” said Maria Rachid, head of the Institute Against Discrimination of the Ombudsman’s Office in Buenos Aires, and a board member and founder of the Argentine LGBT Federation (FALGBT).  “Since the beginning of the new government, there are national government officials expressing themselves in a discriminatory manner and those hate speeches before our communities from places with so much power, of course, what they do is generate – actually legitimize – and endorse these discriminatory positions that are then expressed with violence and discrimination in everyday life,” Rachid said. 

When Milei ran for president in 2023, he and his party were accused of making offensive remarks against LGBTQ communities which were deemed hate speech by many groups. In an interview ahead of the election, Milei compared homosexuality with having sex with animals.  Diana Mondino, who would later become Milei’s foreign minister, told an interviewer that she supports marriage equality in theory, but at the same time, compared it to having lice. 

After taking office, Milei took steps that critics say weakened protections for LGBTQ groups. He banned the use of gender-inclusive language in government; replaced the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity with a less powerful undersecretariat within the Ministry of Human Capital; and effectively closed the national anti-discrimination agency, saying the Ministry of Justice would absorb its functions.