Brazil Is Confronting an Epidemic of Anti-Gay Violence

brazilianism:

RIO DE JANEIRO — The assailant struck as Gabriel Figueira Lima, 21, stood on a street two weeks ago in a city in the Amazon, plunging a knife into his neck and speeding off on the back of a motorcycle, leaving him to die.

A few days earlier, in the coastal state of Bahia, two beloved teachers,Edivaldo Silva de Oliveira and Jeovan Bandeira, were killed as well, their charred remains found in the trunk of a burning car.

Late last month, it was Wellington Júlio de Castro Mendonça, a shy, 24-year-old retail clerk, who was bludgeoned and stoned to death near a highway in a city northwest of Rio. (…)

While Americans have fiercely debated how to respond to the massacre last month at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Brazilians have been confronting their own epidemic of anti-gay violence — one that, by some counts, has earned Brazil the ignominious ranking of the world’s deadliest place for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

Nearly 1,600 people have died in hate-motivated attacks in the past four and half years, according to Grupo Gay da Bahia, which tracks the deaths through news articles. By its tally, a gay or transgender person is killed almost every day in this nation of 200 million.

Such statistics can be hard to square with Brazil’s storied image as a tolerant, open society — a nation that seemingly nurtures freewheeling expressions of sexuality during Carnival and holds the world’s biggest gay pride parade in the city of São Paulo.

Here in Rio de Janeiro, host to the coming Summer Olympics, fear of violent crime is on many people’s minds. Amid a crushing recession and soaring unemployment, street crime is up 24 percent this year and homicides have increased by more than 15 percent.

At the same time, human rights activists say members of the Rio police force, eager to clean up the city ahead of the Aug. 5 opening ceremony for the Games, have shot dead more than 100 people this year, most of them young black men living in poor neighborhoods.

But advocates say the constant homophobic violence also threatens to upend an idealized national ethos that promises equality and respect for all Brazilians.

“We live off this image as an open and tolerant place,” said Jandira Queiroz, the mobilization coordinator at Amnesty International Brazil. “Homophobic violence has hit crisis levels, and it’s getting worse.”

Brazil’s near-mythic reputation for tolerance is not without justification. In the nearly three decades since democracy replaced military dictatorship, the Brazilian government has introduced numerous laws and policies aimed at improving the lives of sexual minorities. In 1996, it was among the first to offer free antiretroviral drugs to people with H.I.V. In 2003, Brazil became the first country in Latin America to recognize same-sex unions for immigration purposes, and it was among the earliest to allow gay couples to adopt children.

In 2013, the Brazilian judiciary effectively legalized same-sex marriage.

Some experts suggest that liberal government policies may have gotten too far ahead of traditional social mores. The anti-gay violence, they contend, can be traced to Brazil’s culture of machismo and a brand of evangelical Christianity, exported from the United States, that is outspoken in its opposition to homosexuality.

Evangelicals make up nearly a quarter of Brazil’s population, up from 5 percent in 1970, and religious leaders reach millions of people through the hundreds of television and radio stations they have purchased in recent years.

American-style Pentecostal congregations are also playing an increasingly muscular role in Brazilian politics. Evangelical voters have helped send more than 60 lawmakers to the 513-member lower house of Congress, doubling their numbers since 2010 and making them one of the most disciplined blocs in an unruly and divided legislature.

Jean Wyllys, Brazil’s only openly gay member of Congress, said evangelical lawmakers, the core of a coalition known as the “B.B.B. caucus” — short for Bullets, Beef and Bible — have stymied legislation that would punish anti-gay discrimination and increase penalties for hate crimes.

“Evangelicals are getting increasingly powerful and have taken over Congress,” Mr. Wyllys said. (…)

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Brazil Is Confronting an Epidemic of Anti-Gay Violence