Yaritza Angélica Millones López
Age 2728 Apr 2019
Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Beaten and suffocated
TDoR list ref: tgeu/28-Apr-2019/Yaritza Angélica Millones López
Yaritza was found in her apartment in the Balvanera neighborbood. She had been dead for several days.
Yaritza had moved from Peru to Argentina three years earlier after experiencing systemic discrimination in her birth country.
She was born on December 6, 1991 in Peru and had lived in Argentina for three years. Her family heard the news last Sunday. Her mother is a housewife and her father a taxi driver. He traveled to Buenos Aires this weekend to identify her body. "Her mother, her brother Cristian and I are very sad. My daughter was a very calm, good girl who loved little animals. We talked on the phone often, and the last time, she asked her mother, 'If something happens to me, will you take me and take care of my animals?' She said they had threatened her," Carlos Alberto told Presentes.
Yaritza survived through sex work. She lived with two dogs and a cat in a two-room apartment, on the eighth floor of a building in Balvanera. Her neighbors worried because they stopped seeing her and her pets were restless. Friends had a bad feeling: it was not normal for Yaritza to not answer their calls. "They approached the building and as nobody answered, they and the neighbors decided to call 911. They also communicated with the person who rented the apartment to enter. The Homicide Division entered and found her body. She had been dead a few days without life, "Marcela Tobaldi, coordinator of the Rosa Naranja, told Presentes.
Yaritza had approached this organization to ask for advice on the procedures to make the gender change.
"We met sometimes," recalls Tobaldi. "She started going to the Defensoría, where I work. Then we got together in La Rosa Naranja and we had some friends around to my house. She was a sweet girl, very loving. She recently called to say that her updated ID had come through.
This weekend, Tobaldi and Yaritza's friends met with the father of the victim to see how to move forward. "I want Justice to be done," he said. "At 13 or 14 we already knew who Yaritza was. I accepted her and did not want her to leave. But she wanted to make her life in her own way, that nobody told her anything, that's why she left Peru with a friend. I studied computer science and worked. My daughter finished high school, but there they all discriminated against her. In Peru it is like that," says the father.
For La Rosa Naranja, Tobaldi asks: "we want the UFEM (Special Prosecutor in Violence against Women and LGBT + people) - which intervened in Diana Sacayán's transvesticide investigation - to be part of this investigation as well" . There are strong suspicions that the crime was committed by someone who knew her. Her companions believe that she was suffocated and beaten on the head.
Tobaldi adds: "The fact that she is a migrant must be highlighted. Justice is not the same for a poor person, trans and migrant as for a trans and middle class Argentinian. It is proven that transgender people suffer double discrimination because they are migrants and the structural and systematic discrimination that transgender people have. They suffer double. Being a transvestite in the city of Buenos Aires means paying a very high price in life and also in the final destination, death. "
https://www.facebook.com/FALGBT/posts/10157212301019710
