The Ministry of Health of the city of Buenos Aires confirmed this Sunday the death of Andrea Amarante, one of the victims of the hate attack in the family pension in the Barracas neighborhood, who remained hospitalized in serious condition at the Penna Hospital with 75% of the burned body.
This is the third fatal victim at the hands of Justo Fernando Barrientos, who on Monday of last week – after several months of harassment – threw an explosive into the room of four lesbian women while they were sleeping: Amarante (42), Pamela Cobas (52 ), who died hours after the attack, Roxana Figueroa (52), who died on Wednesday, and Sofía Castro Riglos (49), who remains hospitalized, the newspaper Página 12 reported.
The attack occurred last Monday at dawn in a boarding house located on 1621 Olavarría Street, when Barrientos, a tenant who had been harassing the women for some time, whom he referred to as “monsters,” “cakes,” and “ “dirty fat girls,” he threw a Molotov cocktail into the room where they were sleeping.
The only survivor was Sofía Castro Riglos, 49, who has minor injuries but on medical recommendation is still hospitalized at the Hospital del Quemado.
Castro Riglos already testified in the case. Barrientos, on the other hand, has not yet been investigated and Judge Edmundo Rabbione, who replaces Court number 14, must determine whether or not the prisoner is not responsible.
Likewise, the magistrate has not yet defined whether the aggravating circumstance of article 80 of the Penal Code will apply to the accused: whether the three deaths were femicides aggravated by hatred of gender or sexual orientation, gender identity or its expression.
hate speech
Opponents, human rights organizations and LGBT community activists accuse Javier Milei’s government of promoting hate speech that moves from social networks to the streets. “This hate crime is not an isolated event and is part of the speeches that are irresponsibly repeated by the national government,” wrote the Ministry of Women of the province of Buenos Aires, governed by the opposition Axel Kiciloff.
Since taking office in December, Milei closed the Ministry of Women, the National Institute against Discrimination and banned inclusive language in all public administration communications. In her speech in Davos on January 17, she called feminism a “ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman,” noting that the movement only serves to “give work to bureaucrats.”
It is worth remembering that Argentina is a pioneer in the region in the defense of women. In the country, equal marriage was legalized in 2010, the feminist movement Ni Una Menos originated in 2015 and the use of the green scarf was born to symbolize the fight for abortion, which was legalized in 2020.
Day against LGBTIQA+Phobia
During the demonstrations on May 17, various people of sexual diversity in Chile demonstrated against these hate attacks in the neighboring country.
