The UN human rights agency has urged the Mexican government to investigate the killing of Mireya Rodríguez Lemus, a Mexican LGBT human rights activist.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said Lemus had signs of a violent death. Lemus was found dead in her home in the town of Aquiles Serdan in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua.
Calls for protection of transgender individuals
The agency noted that Lemus, the founder of a transgender advocacy group and promoter of AIDS education and prevention campaigns, was the seventh rights activist killed in Mexico for this year.
Her group, the Union and Force of Chihuahua Trans Women, reported that she had gone missing several days before her death.
The local transgender community has become afraid, especially after the recent death of another transgender woman, Leslie Rocha, in the border city of Ciudad Juarez.
Last March, another member of the LGBT community, Patsy Andrea Delgado, was also killed in Chihuahua
The members of the LGBT community accused the local police of not taking the deaths seriously as Rodriguez had received threats but the authorities hadn’t acted on them.
Protests for Mexican LGBT human rights activist’s death
The activists staged a protest in front of the state police station in Juarez. They also staged a play decrying the violence targeting transgender individuals.
Devora Alvarez, a transgender activist of Colectivo Fanny, told Reuters: “You can’t imagine what all us trans people have lived through to arrive here, for us still to see that we haven’t been defended.”
“We are not asking, we are demanding that this hate crime against our sister Mireya Rodriguez be solved. Enough is enough. We are citizens, too,” Alvarez said.
The group reported that at least four transgender women had been murdered in Juarez this year. However, the police were reluctant to investigate them as hate crimes, they said.
They added that police found it easier to say the killings were done by drug traffickers allegedly going after their rivals.
Group condemns killing of Mexican LGBT human rights activist
IM-Defensoras– a group of women human rights defenders from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua– condemned the killing of Lemus,
“We wholeheartedly repudiate this hate crime and demand that it be subjected to a prompt, exhaustive investigation that is free from prejudices,” the group said.
They warned that there is “a wave of murders and hate crimes against LGBT persons” in Mexico with at least 25 crimes registered since the beginning of the year.
The group called on government authorities “to adopt timely, effective measures in order to do away with impunity, guarantee protection of these communities.”