Black and Trans Women Fight for Safety and Visibility in Brazil’s Far-Right Government

São Paulo, Brazil — November’s local elections in Brazil ended with significant yet contradictory results for women and trans candidates: The number of women elected to the city councilor positions in Brazil’s biggest cities has grown, but only one woman was elected mayor of one of Brazil’s 26 capitals — Cinthia Ribeiro, in Palmas, Tocantins. Only 12 percent of mayors elected nationwide were women, but an unprecedented number of trans women were elected to the position of councilors: 30 trans candidates were elected, an increase of 275 percent when compared to the local elections of 2016. Together with several Black women, they are among the most voted in several cities.

But the growth in political representation of Black and trans women has not gone unnoticed by right-wing parties. In addition to their victories in their respective cities, these elected officials also share in common the threats and abuse they’ve received.

Ana Lúcia Martins of the center-left Worker’s Party, the first Black woman elected a councilor in Joinville, in the state of Santa Catarina, said she received threats throughout her campaign and immediately following the election. “During the polls, we had our internet page hacked,” she said. “The day [after the election], I received racist attacks and death threats from a fake Twitter account.”

One of the threats directed at Martins from the account suggested killing her so that a white successor could take her place. Later, police identifiedan individual suspected of sending the threats, and a search-and-seizure warrant was carried out at his home for his electronic equipment. He is reported to suffer from schizophrenia, but police have declined further comment on the ongoing investigation.

Abuse also came to Martins via email. One user, Martins said, called her a “stinky monkey,” adding, “While you earn a councilwoman’s salary just for being a monkey, I’m unemployed and living off emergency aid.”

These attacks, unfortunately, are nothing new for Black women, Martins said. “Hate groups have been acting freely for a long time,” she said. “They threaten, they attack physically and psychologically, and they often kill — and suffer no consequences.”

In Brazil, a Black person is killed every seven hours, according to recent data from the Ministry of Health, and the homicide rate against Black Brazilians keeps growing (11.5 percentbetween 2008 and 2018) as the rate of homicides against other groups fell 12 percent in the same period. 75.9 percent of those killed in violent crimes in Brazil in the decade researched were Black.

The media also often fails to do its job to adequately cover such crimes as it constantly bets on so-called “both sides journalism,” putting aggressors and abusers on equal footing as those fighting against racism in Brazil’s institutions, thereby erasing the anti-racism movement almost entirely.

“These groups feel authorized to commit this violence,” said Martins, noting how President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government has further enabled the violence. “To the contrary, they know that they will not be intimidated.”

Bolsonaro has historically opposed efforts to combat racism and has saidthat he considers the issue part of the left-wing agenda, blaming Black Brazilians for violence committed against them because of their “attitudes.” In 2017, he declared that quilombolas — descendants of slaves living in communities throughout the country — were useless. In 2019, Bolsonaro was sentenced by the Rio de Janeiro Court of Justice to pay a sum of R $ 150,000 (roughly $28,000) in moral damages for racist comments made against singer Preta Gil in 2011. And recently, at the G-20 Summit, he accusedthe Black movement of trying to “destroy diversity” and divide Brazilians.

Authorities have left the investigation into the threats against Martins open but have stopped short of providing her any protection. “It is up to society to mobilize itself, to manifest itself against these practices, and to desist from any practice of oppression, discrimination, or violence,” she said. “This must be a daily practice, and we cannot normalize situations like these; we cannot naturalize the absence of the largest Brazilian population in spaces of power and social control.”

Erika Hilton, a Black trans woman who was elected to São Paulo’s city council, said that she started receiving brutal threats at the start of her campaign in 2019. “I received threats like ‘I’m going to cut off your head’ and ‘I’ll rape you,’” she said.

“I think that these threats are a reflection of the rise of Black women, of trans women who [according to them] should be sentenced to prostitution, imprisonment, and underemployment. And when they break from these statistics, when they break this social sentence, the system organizes itself to try to intimidate them, to try to stop them.”

According to the advocacy group Grupo Gay da Bahia, Brazil is the deadliest country in the world for LGBTQ+ people, and statistics point to a rise in violent deaths of Black Brazilians over the last eight years. With seeming government support for racist and homophobic speeches and attitudes — in 2018, the president declared, “I am homophobic, yes, with great pride” — it comes as no surprise that visible Black and trans women are met with such over abuse and threats of violence.

The aim of such threats, in Hilton’s opinion, is to terrorize, paralyze, and debilitate them. “I was afraid to walk inside my own house because I thought someone with binoculars would be watching me from one of the other buildings,” said Hilton. “The threats really generate unease, and huge personal and mental damage — and that’s their biggest objective: to steal our power, to paralyze us.”

Linda Brasil, a trans woman elected to Aracaju’s city council, said she asked her advisors not to pass on hate messages to her during the campaign, but that a week after the elections, she decided to make a dossier of threats and take it to the police.

“I have suffered attacks against my gender identity, using biblical texts to encourage violence [against me],” Brasil told Women Under Siege. “As if I were not a daughter of God, as if I were an aberration, a demon.” One such message she received said, “How could such a thing be elected?”

“It is very, very difficult to digest,” she said.

Brasil also described the country’s steady rejection of human rights, noting how Bolsonaro’s government was working to delegitimize and marginalize social justice agendas and deploying “bolsonaristas” — supporters of the president who range from Nazis and fascists to integralists and monarchists, and who share in common science denial, exaggerated nationalism, and hatred for minorities — to harass and target progressive leaders.

“The threat of annihilation to these people is in line with the element of difference, so the desire is to eliminate any difference — anything that stands out at first sight,” said Larisse Pontes, a social scientist and PhD student in social anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Pontes added that Black and trans women challenging traditionally-exclusive spaces of power “not only annoys but also represents a threat to the status quo of a space that reflects the social structure. In other words, the victory of some of these non-hegemonic people means the opening of some cracks in this social structure that is still thought to be the best, most competent, and most worthy.”

“I am being threatened by groups that call themselves superior, are intolerant, and hate those who are different, especially if the different dare to occupy spaces that they consider to be theirs alone,” said Martins.

Brasil agreed. “The victory of a trans woman gaining a municipal seat in Aracaju makes these people crawl out of their hole because they cannot bear our occupying these spaces in society that have always been denied to us.”

“Black and peripheral bodies, LGBTQ+ bodies, have always been under constant threat,” said Hilton. “Of course, now, we are talking about elected politicians, which puts these threats on another level, but these bodies within Brazilian society have always been threatened.”

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, an anthropologist and professor of political and social science at the University of Bath, reasoned that the attacks are rooted in religion’s homophobia. “Also, Brazil’s [identity] is based on a slave culture, with an ideology of colonized modernity on the one hand, and on the other, its high commitment to Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity. This combination of slavery and religion has not been resolved.”

Pinheiro-Machado added, “It would be a diagnostic error to attribute this violence and conservative anger to Bolsonaro, but he authorizes and gives legitimacy to these groups that once lived underground. Now, they’ve found themselves organized and represented by a voice — in this case, the highest authority in the nation — which legitimizes their hate speech and violence against minorities. What is new is that minorities are also more organized, conquering spaces previously denied to them, and this strengthens the backlash. It reinforces this organized hatred of groups who are gaining space,” Pinheiro-Machado adds.

None of the threatened politicians have received police protection, instead seeking protection from their own communities and supporters and imposing self-safety measures: constantly changing their routines, monitoring threats as they’re received, and traveling in groups.

They don’t plan to back down. “I always say that we will bother [them] even more because we will occupy all the spaces in society that have always been denied to us, not only in politics but in academia, in the arts — in all spaces of society,” said Brasil defiantly, whose surname could not be more symbolic.