MEXICO CITY — The first brazenly nonbinary individual to imagine a judicial place in Mexico was discovered lifeless of their residence Monday within the central Mexican metropolis of Aguascalientes after receiving demise threats due to their gender id, authorities mentioned.
The Aguascalientes state prosecutor’s workplace confirmed that Jesús Ociel Baena was discovered lifeless Monday morning subsequent to a different individual, who native media and LGBTQ+ rights teams recognized as their companion.
State prosecutor Jesús Figueroa Ortega mentioned in a information convention that the victims displayed accidents apparently attributable to a knife or another sharp object.
“There are no signs or indications to be able to determine that a third person other than the dead was at the site of the crime,” he mentioned.
Mexico Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez mentioned in a press briefing that authorities had been investigating the demise and it remained unclear if “it was a homicide or an accident.” Some homicide investigations in Mexico have a historical past of being shortly minimized by authorities as crimes of ardour.
Alejandro Brito, director of the LGBTQ+ rights group Letra S, mentioned that Baena’s visibility on social media made them a goal and urged authorities to take that context into consideration of their investigation.
“They were a person who received many hate messages, and even threats of violence and death, and you can’t ignore that in these investigations,” Brito mentioned. “They, the Justice of the Peace, was breaking via the invisible obstacles that closed within the nonbinary neighborhood.
Baena was among the many most seen LGBTQ+ figures in a rustic the place queer communities are sometimes violently focused, and had already acquired demise threats.
Baena, an brazenly nonbinary individual, made historical past in October 2022 after they assumed the function as Justice of the Peace for the Aguascalientes state electoral courtroom. They had been believed to be the primary in Latin America to imagine a judicial place. In June Baena broke via one other barrier after they had been amongst a gaggle of individuals to be issued Mexico‘s first nonbinary passports.
Baena would regularly publish photos and videos of themselves in skirts, heels and toting a rainbow fan in court offices and advocating on social media platforms with hundreds of thousands of followers.
“I am a nonbinary person, I am not interested in being seen as either a woman or a man. This is an identity. It is mine, for me, and nobody else” Baena posted on X, formerly Twitter, in June. “Accept it.”
Just weeks before their death, Baena was presented with a certificate by the electoral court recognizing them with gender neutral pronouns as a “maestre,” a significant step in Spanish, a language that historically splits the language between two genders, male and female.
While Brito said Mexico has made significant steps in reducing levels of anti-LGBTQ+ violence in recent decades, his group registered a significant uptick in such violence in 2019, documenting at least 117 lesbian, gay and bisexual and transgender people killed in the country. Many were grisly killings, including brutal stabbings and public slayings.
Brito said he worried that the death of Baena could provoke further acts of violence against queer communities.
“If this was a crime motivated by prejudice, these kinds of crimes always have the intention of sending a message,” Brito said. “The message is an intimidation, it’s to say: ‘This is what could happen to you if you make your identities public.’”
