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In December 2015, Carlos Torres, a trans man, died while in the custody of Bogotá’s Metropolitan Police. He was arrested while arguing with a taxi driver, who claimed Carlos had tried to rob him. According to witnesses, the police officers who arrived at the scene beat Carlos, threw him to the ground, and dragged him by the pants before taking him in a patrol car to the Permanent Justice Unit (UPJ), used to detain citizens accused of disturbing public peace. Although the vehicle left the scene at 9:15 pm, it didn’t reach the UPJ, 8 kilometers away, until 9:50 pm. Only 30 minutes later, at 10:20 pm, Carlos was taken without vital signs to San José Hospital. The police stated that Carlos committed suicide by hanging himself with the drawstring of his pants inside the cell. But family and friends say that his body showed signs of torture and sexual violence.
The alleged extrajudicial execution of Carlos Torres came six months after Colombia allowed trans people to correct the “sex” marker on their identity documents. Together, these events roused public discussion about abuses of authority against transmasculine people, particularly when asked to present their new documents.
This debate remains unresolved. Seven years later, in March 2023, police arbitrarily detained Ricardo, another trans man from Bogotá, whose last name is omitted here for security reasons. Inside the station, the officers forced Ricardo to undress and poured cold water on him while verbally assaulting him. Although he was released the following day and his case is now in the legal system, Ricardo reports having suffered injuries to the chest, where the officers directed their mistreatment, affecting his recent top surgery.
Despite happening several years apart, Carlos and Ricardo’s stories reveal a phenomenon that has received little academic or journalistic attention yet is a reiterative experience for trans men in Colombia: abuse of authority at the hands of state security forces. Despite legislative changes, this violence continues to threaten transmasculine lives.
Against this backdrop, quantitative data on police violence against trans men from different sources illuminates not only emblematic cases, but also indicators of prejudice and differential impacts in such cases. These data also show how mandatory military service and the Libreta Militar, a military card issued to Colombian men who complete their service, contributes to the profiling of trans men by state agents. In response, transmasc activists propose various strategies, from the use of self-protection practices to the development of a new regulatory framework, to enable trans men to live with peace and dignity.
Statistics Are Stories
Documenting violence against trans men in Colombia presents multiple challenges, both for governmental bodies and for LGBTQI+ organizations that historically have focused on cataloguing the victimization of trans women and gay men. These difficulties include the absence of differential fields to capture trans men in databases, inadequate identification of the gender identity of victims, and the state’s lack of awareness regarding violence against trans men.
Faced with this problem, this article surveys statistical information from different governmental and civil archives that offer quantitative data on police violence against trans men in Colombia over a period of nine years, beginning in 2015. This year was significant both for the introduction of Decree 1227, allowing trans people to correct their “sex” on identity documents, and for the death of Carlos Torres in police custody.
These quantitative findings are supported by as much qualitative information as possible— contrasting official sources with details gathered by LGBTQI+ organizations and the media—to characterize both the victims and the abuse of authority.
Although in general terms the quality of the data was low, this exploratory research has identified 80 incidents of abuse of authority against trans men in Colombia between 2015 and 2023. Among these incidents, there are 16 emblematic cases perpetrated on the basis of gender identity prejudice. The research also identified some common factors in the modus operandi of these events, which constitute discriminatory aggravating factors in the abuse of authority experienced by trans men.
First, 52.5 percent of the cases (42 incidents) occurred in Colombia’s capital cities. Bogotá recorded the largest number with 16 incidents of police violence against trans men, followed by Cartagena with five, Popayán with three, and Barranquilla, Bucaramanga, and Sincelejo with two each. There was also one incident each in the cities of Manizales, Medellín, Monteria, Pasto, San Andrés, Valledupar, and Villavicencio. All these capital cities are urban areas where state security forces are concentrated due to a large number of police academies, stations, and other facilities.
In addition, 76.3 percent of these cases occurred between 2020 and 2023 (61 incidents), with the highest number of victimizations recorded in 2021 (21 incidents).
Three events help explain this increase. First, 2019 marked the beginning of the national strike, a series of protests by various popular sectors against the government’s social, economic, and environmental policies. As the NGO Colombia Diversa put it, the strike was a “landmark in the processes of social mobilization in the recent history of the country.”
Later, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, preventive lockdown measures and mobility restrictions reduced the risk of police violence for most Colombians—but not for trans persons. There was an increase of eight cases in this period, up from five recorded incidents in 2019 to 13 in 2020. The reason, particularly in Bogotá, lay in the “Pico y Género” measure, under which women could only go out on even-numbered days and men on odd days. The measure resulted in multiple episodes of transphobic violence.
Finally, in 2021, alongside the reactivation of the economy and the lifting of Covid-related mobility restrictions, a new cycle of mobilizations took place known as the estallido social. In response to the government’s proposed tax reform, the protests brought many social sectors to the streets—and to fresh clashes with security forces. Of the 21 incidents of abuse of authority against trans men recorded in 2021, four took place in the context of protests in the cities of Bogotá, Popayán, and Sincelejo.
On the other hand, this research has found that 30 percent of cases of police violence against trans men involved irregular procedures (24 cases). These irregularities were characterized by authorities acting outside the law or in a selective, unjustified, and/or disproportionate manner, even if there was a legal basis for their actions.
This selective application of the law amounts to the profiling of trans people, a discriminatory practice wherein security forces use certain physical and behavioral characteristics—such as gender expression and identity, among others—and related stereotypes to justify their actions against individuals or groups. Consequences for trans people include being expelled from public spaces and subjected to selective, unjustified, and unnecessary controls.
Other modes of police violence against transmasc people identified in the investigation include authorities’ denial of assistance to the victims (two cases), arbitrary arrests (two cases), and alleged extrajudicial killing (one case). Regarding the failure of security forces to provide assistance, the experience of Adrián Almeida stands out. Adrían, whose case was documented by the Colombian Truth Commission, was threatened with a gun and physically attacked by two men in November 2017. Although the perpetrators were apprehended, the police refused to give Adrián his attackers’ identification numbers to file a criminal complaint, impacting his ability to report the incident and increasing institutional distrust.
The investigation also identified other related forms of violence carried out against trans men alongside the abuse of authority, ranging from injuries to physical and psychological torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment perpetrated by police officers.
A case of personal injury that stands out is that of Joan, a trans activist whose last name has been withheld at the victim’s request. In May 2017, Joan was brutally beaten by police while participating in a protest in Bogotá against the installation of a bus intended to spread transphobic messages from the far-right Spanish organization Hazte Oír. The case was reported to Bogotá’s Personería, a local human rights office, but there has been no further word about a disciplinary or criminal investigation.
Finally, although there was not enough information in the data to categorize trans men victimized by police violence in socioeconomic or ethnic-racial terms, the report Más que cifras from Colombia Diversa reveals the age range of LGBTQI+ victims of abuse of authority between 2015 and 2019. When it comes to trans men, 53.3 percent were adults between the ages of 26 and 59 and 20 percent were young people between the ages of 19 and 25. Although these are wide ranges, the fact that most victims were people of legal age, as opposed to adolescents or older adults, means they belonged to the cohort of men with the highest labor productivity; therefore, they should have already completed their military service.
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Translated from Spanish by NACLA.
Nikita Dupuis-Vargas Latorre is a comunicador social, journalist, and researcher at Colombia’s Truth Commission with a master’s degree in Research on Contemporary Social Problems. He has been an activist on transmasc issues for 15 years and is an anarcovegan, nerd, and comic and coffee addict.