A man set fire to a lesbian couple’s house in the Buenos Aires province town of Cañuelas on Wednesday, gutting the property. The arson attack was perpetrated one week after Argentina’s President Javier Milei linked homosexuality and the fight over gender equality with pedophilia at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

The couple and their five-year-old daughter were unharmed because they were not in the house at the time. They had moved out because they were experiencing constant harassment from the arsonist, who was a neighbor.

“We had to leave that place from one day to the next. We were being threatened, he was coming for us and nobody was paying us any attention — not the prosecutor, not the authorities, not the police,” Agui, one half of the couple, said during an interview with Radio con Vos. The Herald is not publishing the family’s full names for privacy reasons.

The attack bore a sinister resemblance to an arson at a boarding house in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Barracas in May. Justo Fernando Barrientos threw burning rags into a bedroom where two lesbian couples were sleeping, and pushed the women back into the flames when they tried to escape, witnesses said.

Three of the women — Pamela Cobbas, Mercedes Roxana Figueroa, and Andrea Amarante — died of their injuries, while the fourth was hospitalized but ultimately survived. Days before the killings, Milei’s biographer, Nicolás Márquez, had made homophobic statements on one of Argentina’s most popular radio shows. LGBTQIA+ activists have said that homophobic rhetoric from the highest levels of government is emboldening such attacks.

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Agui and their partner moved to the town of 30,000 in 2022. They first learned of their neighbor’s violent behavior when he assaulted a same-sex couple who lived just 300 meters away. After constant harassment and what they considered a death threat, they had to move away.

Buenos Aires province’s Security Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Agui said the man constantly monitored their movements, stood in front of their car filming them, made obscene gestures at them, and spied on their daughter with binoculars. Agui added that the man had burned the power cable post outside their house while the couple was at home. 

The final straw came two months after the couple finished building their house. Their daughter was spending the night there for the first time, and the couple realized the neighbor was aiming at the family with a laser pointer. To Agui, it was “a direct death threat.”

The couple’s house was gutted in the blaze, which the arsonist fueled with a jerry can of gasoline. Footage from television channel C5N showed that the little blue bungalow had been reduced to charred pillars and beams beneath a metal roof. It was two hours before firefighters reached the scene because they were not initially told about the fire. Agui’s family are now living with a friend.

Agui linked the attack with Barracas arson, and with “this terrible week we’re having with hate speech, which is something that has to stop.”

“I have no doubt that he [the attacker] is fueled by the attitude of the person who’s in power right now,” said Agui, before asking people to participate in the anti-fascist march scheduled for Saturday.