2023-11-12 19:38:19
The reference of the trans community, Diana Zoe López García, was murdered in the last few hours by her partner in a hotel in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Balvanera. The woman worked in the Casa Rosada from 2021which he had accessed through the Trans Labor Quota Law.
For the crime, there is a detainee and the Justice plans to include the aggravating circumstance in his accusation because it is a transfemicide.
López García was 47 years old and was from the province of Salta. She She served as president of the Hotel Gondolínan establishment located in the Villa Crespo area, which houses the transvestite/trans community.
According to information from Télam, on Saturday she was attacked by her partner, a 38-year-old man identified as Norberto Villegaswho was the one who notified the Police regarding what had happened.
In this way, troops went to the hotel on Mexico Street at 2300 in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Balvanera. Once at the scene, they found the body of López García, with a sharp puncture wound to the groin. Then, staff from the Emergency Medical Care System (SAME) confirmed his death.
Villegas was detained, at the disposal of the National Criminal Correctional Court No. 11. He was charged with the “qualified homicide” of the trans community leader, but several aggravating factors are expected to be added. since it is a transfemicide.
Who was Diana Zoe López García, the murdered trans ref and Casa Rosada worker
The woman had started working in the Casa Rosada dining room in July 2021 following the promulgation of the Transvestite Trans Quota Law. The legislation establishes that transvestites, transsexuals and transgender people must occupy at least 1% of positions in the national public sector.
“On the day of the promulgation they call me for an interview at the Casa Rosada and that’s when they give me the great news that they tell me: ‘Zoe, you’re already hired and that’s when my life totally changed.’”, he said in a video that was broadcast by the official account of the Presidency to commemorate the sanction of the Law.
In that sense, he reflected: “For me, before the Police opened the door to the cells and patrol cars for me and today they open the door for me to enter my work”.
López García highlighted on more than one occasion the importance of law enforcement. “It is a fight with different organizations, different colleagues, many of them left their lives and might not access the Trans Labor Quota. And I am here to train, to continue studying, because that is the opportunity that the Trans Labor Quota gives you.”, he expressed.
In this way, she expressed her intentions that “it will also be the turn of other colleagues” and explained: “There are many of us who want to work and who needed formal and paid work, like everyone else. It’s a right and I think we deserve it.”.
Two years following her hiring, Zoe López García referred to the Casa Rosada as a “very important place” and assured that, with her work, she broke “all the barriers” that were imposed on her. “What happened to me, I want it to happen to them and to everyone,” she confirmed.
Zoe López García’s fight was long-standing, since she ran the Gondolín hotel, a civil association that has 24 years of history. It is a self-managed cooperative that aims to provide shelter and support to those people in the community who have escaped from their provinces or their families.
After the promulgation of the law, the leader of the trans community also requested that the regulations be expanded to the private sector, so that “comrades can enter private organizations.”
Farewell to Diana Zoe López García: “We are overcome with anger”
Friends and acquaintances of the trans figure referred to her as ““the great mother of a huge family, with many daughters and nieces” following her work as president of the Gondolín Hotel that houses the transvestite-trans community, and they highlighted her vocation to “accompany, listen and understand.”
«We are in shock and in this strong pain that hits us as a community, because transvestites and transfemicides continue to be sporadic, but they are there. and we don’t stop telling our sisters that they are dying,” theater director and activist Daniela Ruiz, a friend of Diana since she was 14, told Télam.
In turn, he referred to Zoe López as a person with a vocation “very companion, very sister” who “always accompanied, listened and understood each person’s situation.”
“When we were in Salta we grew up together in the red zone, and we also grew up in activism and the fight for rights,” she added.
It was her work at the establishment over the years that made her ““the great mother of a huge family, with many daughters and nieces”highlighted the psychologist and activist, Marlene Wayar, in statements to this agency.
«Very strong bonds of love and care have been built. She was the mother, the reference, the one who had the most commitment and the greatest capacity for love to be president, in bureaucratic terms, but in the hearts of the girls she functioned as a mother and as an aunt,” she explained.
As with Ruiz, both friends met when they were 14 years old, which led them to go through “a thousand situations,” including accompanying each other through illness when Zoe López suffered from tuberculosis.
«He was able to get out of that and many other things. At 18, she was able to settle in one of the hotels in Palermo, where we all lived for the first time, because before she was a minor, but since she was 12 she was on the street,” she recalled.
“Four Legendaries at the Gondolín Hotel” is a book written by López and Wayar together with Marisa Acevedo and Viviana Borges, which the psychologist defined as a “collective discourse”, within López’s objective to “so that the girls have the tools they “we didn’t have it.”
In that writing, the reference expressed herself in search of finding strategies for the transvestite-trans collective that would allow them to “survive”, as «finish secondary school or get involved in sustaining life collectively»Wayar noted.
“From a very young age she was on the street and with a very loving energy to build the bond, to set up a table, to make a pot, to sit down to eat together, or to have a party,” her friend highlighted.
And she added that she “always looked for those other spaces where we are a group, pack or community, building other things to the alternative that is proposed to us, not remaining satisfied with the basis of the community of the group and the family.”
For his part, journalist Franco Torchia, who had known Diana for approximately five years, referred to the “right to courtship” for trans and transvestite identities as something that “Not only is it not a conquered right, but if it is close to being conquered it is a guarantee of death.”
Zoe López, the trans woman in charge of the Gondolín Hotel – a historic residence space for transvestites and trans people – was murdered by her partner Fabián Villegas, who stabbed her in the groin with a knife.
Villegas called 911 and Neighborhood Police Station 3B intervened.
It was transfemicide. pic.twitter.com/bzK9dJTL76
— Franco Torchia (@francotorchia_) November 12, 2023
This occurs since «In addition to all the structural violence, the battlefield of trans and transvestite identities is in the interior that they inhabit with their emotions.
In this sense, “the boyfriends, partners, companions of transvestites and transvestites very often tend to be their own murderers, their own transfemicides and transvestites.”
For her part, the Minister of Women, Gender and Diversity, Ayelén Mazzina, stated in her X account that “a Zoe López was brutally killed by her partner. She was the administrator of the Gondolín Hotel, a home that saved the lives of hundreds of companions«.
«We are invaded by anger, indignation and injustice. It was transvesticide. And from @mingenerosar we are going to insist that there be justice.”
Zoe López was brutally killed by her partner. She was the administrator of the Gondolín Hotel, a home that saved the lives of hundreds of companions.
Anger, indignation and injustice invade us.
It was transvestite. And from the @mingenerosar We are going to insist that there be justice. pic.twitter.com/kqnXFKjav0— Ayelén Mazzina (@AyelenMazzina) November 12, 2023
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