Hate speeches (and crimes) in the Milei era

CECILIA VALDEZ

Andrea Amarante (42), Pamela Cobas (52), Roxana Figueroa (52) and Sofía Castro (49), shared a room in the Barracas neighborhood (Buenos Aires), until May 5 when they were victims of lesbicide. Pamela and her partner, Roxana, were sleeping in a double bed when they woke up engulfed in flames and tried to leave the room, but were pushed inside by Justo Fernando Barrientos. Barrientos lived in an adjoining room and at midnight that day he opened the door to the room where the women lived, threw a homemade explosive at them and started the fire. Pamela, Mercedes and Andrea died as a result of the fire and Sofía remained hospitalized for a few days in the Hospital del Quemado after which she was discharged.

At the beginning of June, one month after the attack, Barrientos was prosecuted for “doubly aggravated homicide” against the three victims. However, the aggravating factors that were applied were treachery and common danger, but the aggravating factor expressed in section 4 of article 80 of the Penal Code, which refers to the specific crime of hate crime, was not applied nor was gender violence considered. This fact occurs in a context where hate speech towards sexual and gender diversities is growing, a situation that multiplied with the arrival to power of Javier Milei.

According to Dr. Micaela Cuesta -coordinator of the Laboratory of Studies on Democracy and Authoritarianism at the University of San Martín-, we speak of hate speech when a statement uttered in the public sphere, which includes social networks and the digital world, seeks to incite or legitimize violence or discrimination towards a person, or towards a group of people, based on the characteristics that relate that person to a historically vulnerable, stigmatized group or that bears marks of segregation. These brands are usually associated with gender, ethnicity, class or religion.

It is also difficult to differentiate between hate speech and insults, not only because it is very significant but because the specificity of hate speech lies in that difference. “An insult can be a disqualification, without focusing or stopping at any of the brands we mention,” he points out. According to Cuesta, to insult, citations are usually made to the past, and to forms of underestimation and contempt associated with historical relationships of subordination: “In other words, not just any word is an insult, words are insulting when they offend esteem, authority or position.” of who is being offended. And they refer to the past, because what they want is to restore the person who is being offended to a position of subordination, and discipline him. Although insults and hate speech overlap, hate speech is more than an insult that usually includes more or less explicit incitement to violence.”

In the Argentina of the Milei era, not only are these types of speeches endorsed, but they are uttered from the same public strata by many government officials, and the agencies in charge of controlling these types of situations are emptied or closed. In this sense, after the Barracas lesbicide, the Argentine LGBT Federation (FALGBT) issued a statement repudiating the attack in which they demand forceful public policies: “We cannot fail to point out that hate crimes are the result of a culture of violence and discrimination that is based on hate speech that today is endorsed by various officials and representatives of the National Government. And the only spaces to which those of us who are victims of these attacks can resort are being emptied or eliminated by the current government, such as, for example, the INADI.” On February 22, the government announced the closure of INADI (National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism) and, along those lines, 3 weeks ago it laid off 40% of its staff, mostly people belonging to the LGBT community. and people with disabilities. 

A few days before the victory that gave the presidency to Milei, graffiti appeared in different parts of the country with homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic messages, such as "Bye indoctrinating parasites", "Green handkerchiefs are over" - characteristic of the fight for the abortion law -, or “Family is a man and a woman”, which the government later endorsed, and enabled, through its public speeches.

For Cuesta, what happened with the murder of the lesbian women is part of a hate crime, because that condition was decisive in triggering the events that led to the death of three of them. “The importance of addressing this type of violent discursivity is directly associated with the effects it produces,” she maintains. “What hate speech does is authorize particular subjects to carry out acts through the legitimation that is given from places of power. That is to say, if places of power dehumanize, stigmatize and incite violent action against certain groups that carry these marks, it is not very difficult for this to translate into real and concrete violent actions that produce deaths.” 

Last January, just a month after her inauguration, in her speech before the Davos Forum, Milei blamed feminisms for “economic hindrance” and described the people who worked in spaces such as the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity. , and all the organizations that promote this agenda, as “bureaucrats who contribute nothing to society.” The ministry was demoted to undersecretary with the inauguration of the new government, and in June of this year, its closure was announced. In this way, in Argentina there is practically no gender violence prevention policy in operation in the national State, and many of the policies that supported and supported the most vulnerable sectors of women and the community were eliminated. LGBT.

Regarding the reasons why there are times more prone to hate speech than others, Cuesta believes that there are moments of crisis -economic, moral or government systems-, and that this is a moment of multiple crisis that contains dimensions of all those elements. “These crises produce an experience of suffering and social suffering, of uncertainties and anxieties, which are often filled with these compensatory ideologies, which establish scapegoats as the culprits of certain subjective sufferings,” he points out. According to Cuesta, the groups and populations that are most at hand are usually blamed for these subjective sufferings: politicians, black people, migrants, women, etc. “As if they were the ones who produce the crisis that everyone suffers in an atomized way,” he adds. “I believe that crisis contexts, without a doubt, are the most fertile for this type of aggressiveness to grow, because it is like a violent reaction to a violence suffered, which does not find, or is not capable of making intelligible, the structural causes of violence, and it is easier to turn against a weak person than to identify the strong one who is effectively producing that discomfort, and combat it.”

Cecilia Valdez She is an Argentine journalist.