RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil continues to witness the murder of transgender citizens in what local rights groups and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists have said is “alarming.” Brazil remains the “transgender murder capital of the world,” and it does not appear to be slowing. A young transgender woman was found in a dumpster in São Paulo on September 16. The 20-year-old woman, who investigators have not yet identified publicly, had been “murdered and mutilated, her genitals and an ear removed.” Police say they suspect she was a sex worker, who was taken to the location and murdered by a john. But the month before, another murder rocked the city's LGBT community when a 23-year-old trans woman was murdered in Clementina and four other transgender women were shot in the city of São José do Rio Preto, of which two died. Suspects have been arrested in both cases, one of them reportedly a former police officer. According to Grupo Gay da Bahia, an LGBT organization in Brazil, there were 266 murders of LGBT people in Brazil last year, six times more than in 2010. One recent Grupo Gay da Bahia report, according to Gay Star News, concludes that Brazil has the highest rate of LGBT murders in the world; the risk of a gay man being murdered in Brazil is 800 percent higher than in the United States; and one Brazilian LGBT person was murdered every 33 hours in 2011. For Martina, that number is scary and she fears going to certain areas of Rio de Janeiro, where groups of men often look for those that appear different. “If a gay or lesbian was found in these slums, they would probably be beaten or raped, but a trans woman, that would be unthinkable and I don't think coming out alive would happen,” she told Bikyamasr.com, herself a trans woman. She believes that the police do little to crackdown on such crimes before they happen “because they actually promote it in many ways by what they tell the community. All trans people must be sex workers, right?” For her, this is the issue, and at the heart of the matter for the country. If Brazil is going to tackle its prejudice, “it has to understand that we have to talk about it.”
