MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Large crowds march through Montevideo in support of diversity groups rights

The groups expressed themselves in favor of geneder-neutral identity for nin-binary people, among other demands

LGBTIQ+ demonstrators marched Friday through the streets of Montevideo insisting that “the world belongs to every being that inhabits the planet, not the handful of powerful people who feel they have the right to privatize and destroy it.”

The more than 15 organizations involved in the massive gathering demanded answers from a “State which is absent, and that sends the message of anti rights, of backsliding and more repression.”

The groups highlighted the installation of the popular pots, because there was hunger. They also defended collective self-management and social efforts to stand up for educational trajectories in childhood and adolescence, in addition to supporting the neediest.

“We march because the State is absent, it reduced housing programs and humanitarian aid does not arrive or does so too late,” the protesters said. “People living with HIV continue to be stigmatized and violated by the system and we cannot access medication,” they also vindicated.

The demonstrators also protested that “the comprehensive law for trans people is systematically breached,” and “mutualists refuse to carry out the procedures to which they are obliged and the MSP [Health Ministry] refuses to enforce them.”

The groups also called for spaces for people who consider themselves neither male nor female to be allowed to express their gender identity with total freedom and that a quota be established in all state job vacancies for trans, non-binary, Afro and disabled people.

The organizers also recalled that in 2011 and 2012 there were a series of murders against sex workers which remain unsolved to this date and demanded progress be achieved in the stalled causes for violations of human rights during the military dictatorship. The group flatly rejected the Law of Urgent Consideration (LUC) passed by the administration of President Luis Lacalle Pou which the opposition Frente Amplio (Broad Front) seeks to have repealed through a referendum.

“Faced with a new Diversity March this Friday 24 in Montevideo and those held during September in different parts of the country, the Frente Amplio declares: Its commitment to the celebration of diversity in its broadest conception and its rejection of all forms of discrimination based on people's gender identity or sexual orientation. It vindicates the advances in its governments with the approval of laws that recognized the rights and citizenship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people. Thus, in Uruguay there are equal rights through the laws of equal marriage, cohabitation, adoption, assisted and comprehensive reproduction for trans people, in addition to the approval of the right to gender identity and to change of name and sex in the identity document, among others. It reaffirms that it will continue working tirelessly to avoid setbacks and the need to advance in the expansion of rights for all. It is not enough not to go back, you must keep moving forward.”

The National Party's Diversity Secretariat said: “In the first place, we want to recognize the task of these social organizations not only in coordinating the march but, and above all, in the arduous struggle that they have led in the last 30 years in favor of the recognition of the rights of people in the LGBTIQ + community. We are aware that without organized civil society there would be no anti-discrimination law, domestic union, equal marriage or comprehensive law for trans people. But we are also aware that over the years part of the groups that make up social organizations have aligned themselves with the discourse, rhetoric and narrative of the Broad Front. On this we make a mea culpa; For different reasons it has been difficult for the militants of the National Party to enter the social groups and at present we feel [a] little [un]comfortable and usually not represented by them.”

Since 2015, Montevideo's City Council has a Diversity Secretariat to address the rights of these groups and thus the Uruguayn capital's commitment to the LGBTIQ+ population in its recognition, respect and in the celebration of human diversity.