SAN JUAN – Francheska González looked into her attacker’s eyes as he kicked and punched and saw her own death.
“He kept saying, ‘Faggot! You have no right to exist!’’’ said Ms González, a 41-year-old transsexual. “I’d cry and scream, ‘What happened? Why are you hitting me?’ He said: ‘For being like that.’’’
Ms González’s vertebrae was broken and right breast implant ruptured in the April beating, making her a survivor of a series of deadly attacks against transgender and gay people in Puerto Rico. When transgender teenager Jorge Steven López was decapitated, dismembered and set ablaze in November 2009, it marked the start of what activists say is an escalating wave of hate crimes in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
Eighteen gay or transgender people have been killed since then. Three were murdered in a single week earlier this month.
The murders have been committed in various areas across the island and by different perpetrators, which advocates say underscores their belief that widespread homophobia – not a serial killer – is the culprit.
Fundamentalist rhetoric
“A lot of church people are not teaching peace and to love thy neighbour,” Ms González said. “They are teaching to hate gays. For me, the people who do this are men who know they are gay and don’t want to be.”
The attacks come amid growing fundamentalist rhetoric on the island, where senior politicians are often influenced by conservative religious leaders who speak out publicly against homosexuals. Even as arrests are made and long sentences handed out, experts here say murders and harassment have continued, because the government has failed to implement anti-discrimination policy and remains largely mute on the disturbing trend.
In Puerto Rico, gay and transgender people say, it has become socially acceptable to despise them – especially men who dress as women.
In the 1980s, serial killer Angel Colón Maldonado was found guilty of killing six gay men.
Pedro Julio Serrano, the communications manager for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said today’s anti-gay rhetoric is largely led by Puerto Rican Senate resident Thomas Rivera Schatz, who makes it a point to ask senior government job candidates up for confirmation hearings whether they support gay marriage.
“Change will come to the Supreme Court… a Supreme Court that will defend the rights of the Puerto Rican family, traditional family values, not this twisted family some try to implement through legislation or jurisprudence,” he said at a judicial confirmation hearing.
Puerto Rico’s top prosecutor said the hate crime law has not been applied because it’s a difficult element to prove and he fears that a case could collapse if enough evidence is not presented. Cops and prosecutors are being trained about sensitivity and how to gather such evidence, Department of Justice Secretary Guillermo Somoza said.
“I’d rather have a first-degree murder conviction than see the case collapse because we failed to prove the killing was motivated by prejudice because the person was white, Puerto Rican, Dominican or lesbian,” Mr. Somoza said. “I’d rather have a bird in the hand then two flying around.”
His office’s special task force on hate crimes found there have been 23 murders of gays and transgender people in two years.
“We show 13 of those cases resolved, with seven people serving prison sentences and others awaiting trial. That is an excellent track record,” he said. “Of course the killings are worrisome, but we prosecute our cases regardless of the victim’s race, creed, gender or ideology.”
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