According to the Silueta
Silueta X recorded 16 cases in 2019, while in 2018 it recorded two. Most of the victims of 2019 are trans women.
“As the year went by, we realized that the statistics were terrible,” said Diane Rodríguez, director of the NGO, in an interview with the news agency Reuters. “It’s hard to see images of someone happy on social media and then suddenly they’re gone.”
According to Rodríguez, the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ecuador – a country with a Catholic and conservative majority – in 2019 could be the reason why so many deaths occurred.
In the same year, the Ecuadorian Supreme Court recognized a lesbian couple as mothers for the first time, while in 2016 a bill was approved that allows trans people to change the name on their identity card without undergoing surgery first.
In 1998, Rodriguez told Reuters, homosexuality was decriminalized in Ecuador and the number of murders of LGBT people increased.
