Martina Jaureguy Three homophobic attacks in 10 days have left Argentina’s LGBTQ+ community in shock. Assailants broke a young man’s jaw after he left a night club, while two homes were vandalized just days later.
There were over 100 such attacks in the first seven months of 2025, a 70% increase compared with the same period of 2024, according to a report by the LGBT Argentina Federation. In January, President Javier Milei linked homosexuality and the fight for gender equality with pedophilia in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
On August 16, 24-year-old model Juan Sabín was leaving Rheo, a gay club in Palermo, when two men approached and started to mock his friend, who was crying because he had just learned that his grandmother had passed away. When Sabín tried to intervene, they attacked him.
“They threw me on the ground and one said to the other, ‘Leave him to me, I’ve always wanted to punch one of these,’” Sabín said in an Instagram story. The men fractured his jaw in two places.
“They didn’t want to mug me. They just wanted to punch me because I’m gay. They wanted to kill me,” he said.
He needed an operation to have two metal plates implanted, raising the AR$7 million (around US$5,000) to pay for the surgery via online donations.
Sarín says that the attack left him disfigured and he is now ashamed to appear in public. On Friday, before the operation, he gave an interview with TV channel América TV while wearing a device to hold his fractured jaw in place.
He has reported the attack to the authorities.
On Sunday, just a week after Sabín was assaulted, a social media user posted a video showing a riverfront cabin in Tigre, Buenos Aires Province, that had been graffitied with drawings of penises and homophobic slurs. The attackers also burned the cabin’s electronic latch.
Then, on Tuesday, journalist and LGBTQ+ activist Franco Torchia shared news of another attack, this time against the home of psychologist Norberto Lorenzo, who co-founded the Buenos Aires Gay Catholic Community group in the early 2000s.
Photos of the aftermath show shards of glass on the ground next to a bed.
“The escalation of violence against the #LGBTIQ+ community isn’t stopping,” wrote deputy Esteban Paulón on X. “When those who are most powerful encourage hate, we are in danger.”
The consequences of hate speech
Several activists and critics of the government have attributed the rise in such attacks to government hate speech.
Leandro Cahn, executive director of AIDS prevention nonprofit Fundación Huésped, told the Herald that he did not believe the attacks were isolated events. “They respond to a culture in which violence is being legitimized with the goal of disciplining bodies and identities,” he said.
“Hate speech circulating nonstop in media and social networks, often from the top of political power, has consequences,” Cahn said. He added that Fundación Huésped not only offers medical services to survivors of attacks, but also listens and assists those who feel they’re at risk.
Days after Milei’s Davos speech, a man set fire to a lesbian couple’s house in the Buenos Aires province town of Cañuelas, gutting the property. In May 2024, four lesbians were set on fire inside their room by a neighbor in their boarding house. The group consisted of two lesbian couples. Three of the women died, while the other survived, but suffered severe injuries.
At the time, Presidential Spokesman Manuel Adorni denied in press conferences and online that the word “lesbicide” — the killing of a lesbian because of her sexuality — exists, dismissing the demands to address the deadly attack as a hate crime.
