“There’s a wave of attacks. We’re being murdered. I feel vulnerable. We are exposed,” said Marco Vinicio, a gay activist who heads Somos, a Guatemalan LGBTQ+ rights group. “To be trans is to be a target shot,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
Vinicio spoke after three murders across Guatemala over six days, bringing the total of LGBTQ+ murders in the country to at least 13 this year, according to rights campaigners.
In 2020, at least 19 LGBTQ+ people were killed, according to the country’s Ombudsman’s Office. Andrea Gonzalez, who at 28 was head of transgender rights group Otrans Reinas de la Noche, was gunned down by unknown assailants on June 11 in the capital Guatemala City.