LGBT Rights in Colombia - Social Cleansing: Early 1990s

Social Cleansing: Early 1990s

Since the 1980s, amid widespread violence in Colombia, many gay, lesbian, and transgendered Colombians, along with thousands of other adults and children considered "human waste," "disposable people" (desechables), have been the victims of assault, extortion, torture, and murder. For example, Grupo de Ambiente, a now-defunct gay-rights group, documented "328 murders by death squads (paramilitary groups) of lesbians and gay men between 1986 and 1990. Many of the bodies found showed signs of torture and mutilation."

According to one report, in June 1992, in a town on the outskirts of Medellín, five gay men were taken from a gay bar and killed with submachine guns by a group of men. And in July 1994, human-rights lawyer Juan Pablo Ordóñez reported that "around 7,000 of the 40,000 murders in Colombia last year were right-wing death-squad 'cleansings' of gays, transvestites and prostitutes." Ordóñez subsequently was forced to flee for his safety to the United States after alleged persecution by Colombian police. According to a 1996 report by Ordóñez and Elliott, a Canadian lawyer,

Sexual minorities have become targets of the phenomenon known as "social cleansing" - the frequent, and often systematic, murder of those groups commonly referred to in Colombian society as "disposables": street children, vagrants, prostitutes, homosexuals and transvestites, and suspected petty criminals. The perpetrators point to an ineffective judicial system, and play to widespread fears about public safety, to "justify" their actions as "protecting" or "cleaning up" society, secure in the knowledge that they will never face prosecution or punishment for beating, torturing and murdering those who live on the social and economic fringes of Colombian society.