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Hate crimes is Brazil are a sad reality. Most go unreported and many are committed by the very authorities that should be protecting the victims. As a gay person, I was never the target of physical violence, but hardly a day goes by without some sort of verbal abuse (I don't exactly "pass" as straight, a choice that never got me as much as a batting of an eye here in Canada).


This is sad and not new, but there it goes:

In 2008, 190 homosexuals were killed in Brazil, one every two days, representing a 55 percent increase on the previous year – a veritable "homocaust" according to gay rights activists.

The Annual Report on Murders of Homosexuals, produced by the Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB), says that 64 percent of the victims were gay men, 32 percent were transvestites, and four percent were lesbians.

"A transvestite is 259 times more likely to be murdered than a gay man," says the study which is based on media reports, since there are no official statistics on hate crimes in Brazil.

The findings in GGB's 2008 report, which has been cited by institutions like the government's National Secretariat for Human Rights and the U.S. State Department, are "disturbing," says the head of the gay rights group, Marcelo Cerqueira.


According to the report, Brazil is the regional "champion in homophobic crimes," followed by Mexico, with 35 gay-bashing murders in 2008, and the United States, with 25 such killings last year out of a population that is 100 million people bigger than Brazil's.

http://thegoodblood....percent-in.html