Death threats assail Brazil’s trailblazing trans candidates as they campaign

RIO DE JANEIRO — Benny Briolly beamed as she strode through the concrete favela alleyway in a snow-white dress, volunteers proudly waving campaign flags emblazoned with her face.

The city councilwoman and nearly 1,000 other transgender politicians are running Sunday in every one of Brazil’s 26 states, according to the nation’s electoral court, which is tracking them for the first time. The number of candidacies has tripled since the last local elections four years ago, when trans rights group Antra mapped them.

As trans people have set their sights on political office, many have been met with intimidation efforts bent on turning them away, including a candidate in Brazil’s biggest city who survived an assassination attempt last week.

More trans people — 100 — were murdered in Brazil last year than in any other country, according to Transgender Europe, a network of global non-profits that tracks the data. Those precise statistics are almost certainly driven by a combination of poor reporting elsewhere and Brazil’s active network of advocates, but experts agree that transphobia is ubiquitous.

On International Women’s Day last year, Nikolas Ferreira — the federal lawmaker who received more votes than any other — donned a blond wig in Congress’ lower house. He said it allowed him to speak as a woman and denounce trans people.

In 2022 Rio state lawmaker Rodrigo Amorim called Briolly “an aberration of nature” in the state’s legislature.

Such tactics rally voters by portraying trans people as a menace to be courageously fought, according to Ligia Fabris, a gender and law specialist and a visiting professor at Yale University.

Both Amorim and Ferreira were staunch allies of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Transgender politician Leonora Áquilla, a candidate for city council in Sao Paulo this year, said that Bolsonaro had inflamed transphobia and that she has had to stare down people shouting death threats to her face.

Bolsonaro lost his re-election bid to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022 but transphobia has far from retreated.

Since entering the public eye, Briolly has received over 700 death threats. Some have included the address of her home in Rio de Janeiro’s metro area and warnings that she would suffer the same fate as city councilwoman Marielle Franco, a champion for LGBTQ+ rights who was gunned down in 2018. That threat prompted the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to demand that Brazil provide Briolly protection.

She won’t be scared off her reelection bid even though some may want her dead.

“When we get into politics, our bodies become threats and we become constant targets,” Briolly told the Associated Press, with the city of Niteroi — across the bay from Rio — stretching out behind her. “Our bodies are revolutionary, are daring … they are bodies that emanate hope to all those who were left behind.”

Áquilla narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on Sept. 26. She was in northern Sao Paulo on her way to look into reports of transphobia when a motorcycle deliberately slammed into her car. When she got out, the driver revved his engine, and instinctively she ducked. The bullet from his gun missed her, and he fired more shots as she lay there, pretending to be dead. He escaped and Áquilla has ceased in-person campaigning.

“There have been so many threats they became banal; we never thought it would happen. I’m completely in shock. I’m taking a sedative, because I can’t control my nervousness, my anxiety,” she said in a video call. “Right on the eve of the election, the moment when I most need to be on the streets, they’re trying to silence me.”

Duda Salabert, who is running for mayor in Brazil’s sixth biggest city, Belo Horizonte, made history in 2022 when elected alongside another trans woman to Brazil’s lower house of Congress. Their victories were widely regarded as a breakthrough for trans representation, but Salabert said that during that campaign she received death threats daily.

“I had to walk with an armed escort … I had to vote with a bulletproof vest, according to police instructions, and I couldn’t go into large crowds because I risked being attacked,” she said.

This year, Salabert said she is seeking to become the first trans mayor of a major city in Latin America.

“It’s a joy, because we’re making history, but it’s sad because our candidacy highlights the entire history of exclusion, violence and alienation of the transvestite and transgender community from electoral processes in Brazil and Latin America,” she said in a video call.

Indianarae Siqueira, a trangender sex worker and longtime activist running to be a city councilor in Rio, says that increasingly seeing trans people occupy places of power has had a snowball effect.

“Those who managed to win and are there — I think this is a reference and gives incentive so that people want to enter (politics),” she said during an interview on the steps leading to Rio’s municipal assembly.

Back in the Niteroi favela, Briolly agreed that there’s an element of joy to playing an active role in politics, even amid the threats.

“For me, it’s pride — a latent, powerful pride — that grows more and more in my heart and in the heart of each and every person who believes that my body and my voice are just a reflection, an empowerment of the collective struggle,” she said. “When a Black trans woman moves, she moves the whole of society.”