LGBTQ Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean: No Longer a Left-Right Issue
Times are strange for LGBTQ rights in Latin America and the Caribbean. Left-wing presidents across the region, from Pedro Castillo of Peru to Luis Arce of Bolivia, have dismissed the topic, even as conservative President Sebastián Piñera oversaw the successful passage of a marriage equality bill in Chile last December.
The politics of LGBTQ rights no longer fit into a left-right framework if they ever did. To understand why some LGBTQ movements in the region have stalled while others have succeeded—and to advocate for future change—we must look beyond party ideology.
Analysts have observed leaders both supporting and opposing LGBTQ rights. Last June in Americas Quarterly, Paul Angelo and Will Freeman wrote of a "new socially conservative left" among the region's leaders. One such leader is Pedro Castillo of Peru, who told supporters at a rally that "we have to repudiate this attitude; we have to throw this trash out," referring to gender identity.
Unlike Angelo and Freeman describe the socially conservative left, the "New millennium left that Anders Beal describes in Global Americans is progressive on both social and economic issues. Chilean President-elect Gabriel Boric typifies this group—a social democrat who has firmly rejected his leftist authoritarian counterparts' support and places Identify problems on par with material concerns.
On LGBTQ rights, both the socially conservative left and the new millennial left emerge from a long tradition in Latin America and the Caribbean. As Javier Corrales explains in The Politics of LGBTQ Rights Expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean, leftist movements were often as virulent in their homophobia as those on the right. In Cuba, the regime of Fidel Castro imprisoned gay men in internment camps during the years following the revolution, considering their demands for political rights to be "bourgeois decadence." More recently, campaigners have faced state repression from leaders such as Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, who shuttered the offices of Fundación Xochiquetzal, the country's oldest LGBTQ rights group, last year amid his crackdown on political opponents.
At the same time, progressives such as Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and José "Pepe" Mujica of Uruguay were responsible for many of the region's strides toward social equality in the mid-2000s and early 2010s.
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