COLOMBIA
LGBT community suffers greatly from war
The following is excerpted from remarks to a New York
meeting by Juan Carlos Vallejo, a human rights activist and
university professor from Colombia, on the repression of
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people there.
Some years ago, after one of the many military
confrontations in Colombia that generally result in civilian
deaths and a large amount of material destruction, I traveled
in the company of two Norwegian colleagues for humanitarian
endeavors in a village far east of Medellín.
In one of the destroyed streets, we found a corpse covered
with a white sheet.
What was interesting about it was that two days after the
end of the battle, no civil, military or humanitarian authority
had taken the legal task of removing the corpse. When we asked
in the neighborhood who he was, they responded: "It is Marina,
the town's queer. He has not been removed because the priest
from the church has forbidden to even touch him and they will
not bury him in the cemetery because he was a sinner."
My two partners and I collected some money and we paid a
cemetery worker to help us bury the corpse, clandestinely, at
night. I improvised a "removal certificate," using black shoe
polish that I gathered from the neighbors. The rigor mortis and
state of decay was evident.
He was a man approximately 30 years of age, white, dressed
with female clothes and rollers in his hair. He had keys that
we assumed were from his house. He had a bullet penetration in
his right head bone and the left side of his face had been
partially destroyed from the exit of that bullet. According to
the story I gathered, the man was caught in the crossfire
between the two armed groups in the conflict.
That same night, in the middle of a great storm, we gave
him, as the religious call it, a "Christian burial." In a cross
that we set we wrote an improvised name--"N. N. Oscar Wilde
II"--to avoid that he be exhumed by instruction from the
church's priest. We left his certificate and keys in a closed
envelope with the worker who helped us, with instructions that
it be given only to the first civil authority or police that
reached the place.
The LGBT community is one of the great victims of the
conflict in Colombia. Not only because of the civilian deaths,
which are missing from the statistics and the books, but also
from the same acts of discrimination and continuous aggression
to their rights and physical well-being that they suffer in the
streets and villages of Colombia.
The LGBT community is invisible to humanitarians, to war
scholars, to the media. Their suffering, pain and tragedy are
not addressed in the aid and reparation programs offered by
governments. They are taken as victims for study purposes, but
they are discriminated against even for burial.
Today I raise my voice, once again, to claim a space, an
acknowledgment, a repa ration for the Colombian LGBT community.
From my condition as heterosexual, I have defended for many
years the freedom for any sexual preference of every human
being. A freedom that yet today, in the dawn of the 21st
century, continues to be violated by those who take upon
themselves the right to think and choose for others.
Here in New York City, capital of the world, we have a clear
example. People oppos ed to the education and progress of this
community. People opposed to the opening of the Harvey Milk
School for LGBT youth, so that members of this community may
finish their secondary education.
If this happens here, can you imagine what happens in a
country rife with war?
Reprinted from the Sept. 18, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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