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By Jandira Queiroz*
Participants of the 5th ILGALAC Conference
Between the 28th and 30th of January, 2010, around 430 LGBTI activists and researchers working on gender and sexuality came together from different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, to participate in the 5th edition of the International Lesbian and Gay Association’s regional conference (ILGA-LAC) in Curitiba, Brazil. Their objective was to develop effective strategies for challenging homophobia; at the same time as focussing on the distinct ways in which it affects lesbian, gay, bisexual, travestis/trans and intersex people in the region. Homosexuality is still criminalised in 11 of the 33 countries in the region, and of these, eight countries were represented at the conference. In total, participants from 37 countries attended, 30 from Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as France, Belgium, Pakistan, the United States, Canada, and Spain.
Conference opening panel
At the conference opening, ILGA co-Secretary General and member of SPW’s Steering Committee, Gloria Careaga highlighted that homosexuality is still criminalised in more than 60 countries; at the same time that in various international development spaces such as the UN and OAS, discussions proceed about the formulation of sexual rights as human rights. On the other hand, she emphasised, in the 13 years of the existence of the ILGA, there have already been advances in terms of legislation and recognition of LGBTI rights, such as the approval of the Declaration of Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, signed by 66 countries by the UN General Assembly, in November 2008. “The ILGA conference programme in Latin America and the Caribbean marks important initiatives and challenges on the course towards state recognition and protection of the citizenship rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, travestis and intersex people, of their existence as political subjects, rather than as merely visible ones”, observed Careaga.
The ILGA world trans representative, Belissa Andía, welcomed participants by quoting a range of names related to sexual identities, used in different countries in Latin America: “It is important that all these agendas are unified, and forces are joined in search of advances in local, national and global policy”, she said, recalling that a generation ago, trans people were just beginning to be considered “companions” by those in the homosexual movement. “Today, they have stopped being exiles in their own land to conquer citizenship and now present themselves as autonomous representatives of themselves”.
Pedro Paradiso, one of the ILGA representatives from Latin America and the Caribbean, called attention to the urgent situation of LGBTI people who are living in the two countries in the region undergoing political crises – Honduras and Haiti – and stressed the importance of discussing strategies for supporting LGBTI people in these countries.
One of the visible marks of the 5th Conference, compared with previous ones, was the greater presence of lesbians, trans people and young people. Toni Reis, co-ordinator of the event, brought up the importance of the thematic pre-conference events for these three segments, with the objective of bringing concrete proposals to the main conference. He highlighted that such a large representation of the feminine gender, relied on specific support from the state department for women’s policy (Secretaria Especial de Políticas para as Mulheres, SPM) as well as from international cooperation. “All the grants allotted by the SPM were designated to women, and we also had a lot of support from the international level, for the participation of trans people. It isn’t ideal, because the ideal would be to have gender parity in all conferences, but it was very good,” he observed. The pre-conference event on the media, according to Reis, was an important step in the integration of the LGBTI movement with the industry. Equally important were the pre-conference meetings that discussed initiatives and strategies adopted in different countries regarding legislative and executive powers, and the discussions about the HIV/AIDS epidemic as it relates to men who have sex with men (MSM).
For Gloria Careaga, the organisation of the pre-conference events, which ran throughout the two days before, helped to bring to the main conference, a broader approach about what it is “to be LGBTI”, focussed not only by the affirmation of sexual identities, but also by a critique of the LGBTI condition in terms of citizenship, as about claiming rights and conceptualising this condition in different social spaces.
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> INTERNATIONAL INSTRUMENTS, COMMITMENTS OF THE UNITED NATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY
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* Journalist and Project Assistant of SPW
