Queer Rights Group in Brazil Receives Death Threats in Local Escalation

The threats might violate Brazilian anti-terrorism law and are a case of the far-right playbook to use violence to achieve suppression of minority rights.

By Roberta Rocinante

Last month, the queer rights group – Aliança Nacional LGBTI+ – received e-mails threatening the organization’s headquarters in Curitiba. These e-mails detailed the use of guns, explosives, and molotov cocktails on the organization's headquarters, and the death and mutilation of its members. 

These same e-mails also had explicit details about the people working for the organization- in addition to the usual arsenal of slurs against queer people.

The organization has reported the e-mails to the Federal Police to investigate. It’s possible that this falls into Brazil’s law of terrorism, due to these being threats to a marginalized group. 

However, the Federal Police has not commented on the case.

According to the organization’s president Toni Reis, “The attack is not only against the Aliança, but against the whole LGBTI+ community and their right to exist with dignity.”

The organization’s communication coordinator Gregory Rodrigues stated, “When a civil rights group is threatened for acting in defense of human rights, these threats not only go over its members but the whole idea of democracy.”

This sort of attack is nothing new in Brazil, as civil rights groups are often the target of scorn by the right and other less civil people, but this is yet another way that the right attacks those that fight for the rights of marginalized people. 

As reported before on The Needle, an NGO in São Paulo was targeted by a now impeached deputy, and there’s been cases of politicians trying to impede Universities trying to have quotas for trans people. 

And as many might have seen, Rio de Janeiro has recently held one of the most deadly police operations in the history of Brazil, killing over one hundred people in an attempt to stop crime, while also urging current US president Donald Trump to send a military intervention.

This is the right’s play book. If they can’t lawfully stop the marginalized and the poor from trying to gain rights and improve their lot, then they’ll threaten violence, and eventually, commit it. 

However, we can’t fall into a fallacy of thinking that they will win and we will lose. What we need is to organize and fight back.