The Chilean trans activist Camila Bolocco could not be in the pride march because at the beginning of the month she was murdered in her apartment in Colonia Juárez, in Mexico City.
Her body was found a few blocks from where this Saturday began the massive demonstration that every year commemorates the fight for the rights of the LGBTIQ + community in the world.
Almost a month after the murder, the authorities have not reported any progress or possible culprits.
With more than 70 cases registered in 2021, Mexico is the second country with the most hate crimes due to sexual and gender diversity, only after Brazil, according to data from the Rainbow Foundation's National Observatory of LGBT Hate Crimes.
Even dead, Bolocco continues to be violated.
Her remains have been in a freezer at the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Mexico City for more than three weeks and have not been repatriated with her family, as she would have wanted.
Her identity was preserved thanks to the fact that activists with whom she collaborated alerted the police and went home after four days without her answering the phone, according to Ferrán Baños, a member of Existimos, a group of trans men in the State of Hidalgo.
After two hours on the road, he remembers that they arrived at the same time as the agents and were able to be present during the proceedings.
"The most important thing was that Camila left with her identity," he highlights.
The next challenge is to fulfill his last wish to return to his land.
However, the Chilean embassy has refused to bear the repatriation costs, according to the director of the Casa de las Muñecas Tiresas association, Kenya Cuevas, who is also accompanying the case.
The only options they have been given have been to handle the transfer of the body, but not the funeral expenses, or bury her in Mexico and return her to her country in seven years.
“She has a background of transphobia because when they find out that we are trans women or of sexual diversity, they put a limit.
I have met cisgender people who have died here and the embassy reacts immediately, but that does not happen with trans women, ”she warns.
Since her friend Paola Buenrostro was murdered in front of her eyes in 2016, Cuevas has not stopped fighting for the rights of trans women, the most violent in the LGTBIQ+ community.
Of the 70 hate crimes for sexual and gender diversity registered by the Letra Ese organization in 2021, 46 were perpetrated against them.
However, these murders, of which organizations warn of underreporting, are just the tip of the iceberg of the endless violence that persecutes them.
Six years after the Buenrostro crime, the murderer is still at large, warns Cuevas.
She herself arrested him and handed him over, but hours later she was released.
"After 15 days I obtained an arrest warrant that has not been executed to this day," she says.
In response, the activist has been the victim of threats and attacks, so she now has a personal escort from the Prosecutor's Office.
“They attacked me with a knife in my sex work and later it was an attack with a firearm, and after two months, I went on a trip and my partner was killed in my bed and I had to leave that home displaced,” she recalls.
In the face of adversity, the activist attacks with a smile.
"My greatest revenge is going to be that we are all happy," she says.
“After having experienced all the injustices that have been and have been: I was imprisoned, I have lived with HIV since I was 13 years old, I was on the street for 20 years, I was a sex worker for 30. Now as an activist I have tried to impact the lives of women, empower them , that they be happy and with that collective happiness nobody is going to be able to”, he shares.
Kenya Cuevas and Mahia Mishelle, members of the Casa de las Muñecas Tiresas association, in a park in Mexico City.Maria Julia Castañeda
The activist has managed to recover around 50 bodies of unidentified murdered trans women, of whom she has not yet been able to locate the families of 12. “When I opened the charter of the civil association, I put a clause to be able to rescue the bodies of women in violence and abandonment and provide them with decent funeral services”, he details.
"That gives me legal representation with the bodies and if I find the family, everything is given to them, but they no longer go to a mass grave or a university to investigate them," she says.
Although in 2019, she managed to make the murder of her partner the first transfemicide recognized by the authorities in Mexico, among other challenges, the activist warns that many murders of trans women are classified as homicides.
"They already name them as transfemicides, but before a judge or in the official papers, as long as they don't have their legal legal identity change, it has to remain as a homicide," she says.
On the other hand, the trans activist Jazz Bustamante considers that beyond the legal figure of transfeminicide, it is urgent to have disaggregated data from the entire LGTBIQ+ community.
“Trans women are women, we already know that, but we are at a stage in Mexico, where we need disaggregated information and that is going to be achieved by creating a specific protocol for sexual dissidence, where gender identity can be correctly classified, sexual orientation and gender expression.
If we put it with femicide, its importance would be lost, ”she comments.
Just last March 31, during her presentation at the first trans visibility festival held in Hidalgo, Camila Bolocco highlighted the urgency of increasing the life expectancy of trans women.
“What do we get out of educating them and giving them a job if we can't even keep them alive?” she expounded.
“According to several studies, the life of trans women is up to 35 years old because they are murdered for hate crimes, for transphobic crimes, by neo-Nazi groups, by the same clients.
Many trans comrades also die from diseases and from ignorance and failures in the health systems”, warned the 43-year-old activist.
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