Argentina Charged 10 Police Officers in the Death of Trans Woman Sofia Fernández
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More than a year after Sofia Fernández died violently in police custody in a Buenos Aires jail, Argentinian prosecutors have filed charges against 10 police officers, accusing them of murdering Fernández and covering up the crime.
Fernández, 39, was originally arrested on April 8, 2023 after a neighbor called the police and claimed Fernández had broken into her home and tried to steal from her, according to the Argentine news channel TN. Fernández’s family said they were told conflicting stories about why Fernández was arrested, and reportedly were not allowed to visit or speak with her in jail. On April 11, police told them that Fernández had died “suddenly” — first blaming her death on cardiac arrest, then claiming she had killed herself in her cell.
However, a subsequent autopsy and investigation found evidence that Fernández had been murdered, and that at least 10 officers took part in the killing or helped cover it up. According to details from the autopsy shared with TN, Fernández was suffocated with a piece of mattress and her own underwear, causing her death by asphyxiation. Although initial reports asserted that Fernández had no self-defense injuries, the autopsy also showed that she had been beaten about the torso and face by at least three people until she was unconscious.
Fernández had reportedly been working toward a career as a nurse, and was in the process of changing her legal gender before she died. As TN reported, the manner of Fernández’s death was made even more tragic by an accident just one week prior, during which she choked on a chicken bone and required emergency medical attention. “All that time without breathing is horrible. Everything was horrible,” Fernández said in a recording after the incident.
Now, after over a year of protests from Argentinian LGBTQ+ activists, three police officers have been charged with homicide, and seven more are accused of falsifying documents as part of a coverup scheme, a lawyer for Fernández’s family confirmed this week.
“The forensic report revealed the gruesome nature of the crime,” Ignacio Fernández told the Los Angeles Blade. “The investigation also highlighted the alleged involvement of police officers in the crime, which triggered intense scrutiny of the conduct of law enforcement.” He also criticized the Buenos Aires Ministry of Women for its inaction in the case, and accused the lawyers assigned to the police defendants of hiding conflicts of interest.
“There are no words to express how one feels when their own sister is murdered,” Fernández’s sister Mabel Valdez told Agencia Presentes in April. “I hope justice moves quickly. Let everyone, regardless of who they were, pay without privileges for anyone.”
Despite a slate of legal reforms in recent years, violence against LGBTQ+ people in Argentina is still a major problem; three lesbians were killed in a firebombing attack of their Buenos Aires apartment earlier this month, part of an ongoing pattern of femicides in the country. Argentinian President Javier Milei declared war on “radical feminism” after his election last year, reversing major reforms and shutting down the country’s Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity altogether. Those actions, along with Milei’s attempts to restrict abortion, have sparked widespread protests from LGBTQ+ activists.
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