Below is my translation of an article that appeared in the German online LGBT magazine "Queer.de" on 28.10.13. (The original article in German, with links to related articles in German, can be read here.)
No improvement in his condition.
Chile: young gay man in a coma after a homophobic attack.
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A blatant hate crime rocks the country - while it already anxiously awaits the verdict in another homophobic hate-crime case.
Once again a hate crime makes the headlines in
Chile: on Sunday 20th October a 21-year-old was so badly beaten up
in San
Francisco de Mostazal that he has since been in a coma. His prognosis is
not optimistic.
Wladimir
Sepúlveda was walking arm-in-arm with three friends through the town centre after visiting the beach, when a group of four men and two
women asked him if he had a cigarette lighter. Then the group started to deliver insults,
saying, "We will massacre you queers."
Following a brief scuffle, Wladimir initially managed to flee, but was caught up by the attackers and punched to the ground. Then he was repeatedly kicked in the head. By the time his friends reached him, he was already unconscious.
Shortcomings of the emergency services.
Despite an urgent call to
the emergency services, it took an ambulance thirty minutes to arrive,
and even then it had only one attendant. His friends had to put
Wladimir, who was seriously injured, onto a stretcher. At the Accident
and Emergency Department, a doctor diagnosed only minor injuries. It was
only when he was taken to another hospital that he received immediate
treatment.
Chile's
Minister for Health has in the meantime visited the young man in
hospital and has promised that there would be an investigation into
these events. As the injuries were initially diagnosed as minor, the
attackers were not arrested immediately: this did not happen until four
days later.
The
young man's condition has not improved since his admission to hospital.
The Minister for Health has announced that, because of his serious head
injuries and bleeding in the brain, it is not expected that he will
improve. The LGBT organisation Movilh, which represents Wladimir's
family, has criticised the police and the health service.
Verdict awaited in the Zamudio case.
This
attack is a reminder of another violent attack, which has outraged Chile
in the same way as did the murder of Matthew Shepard in the USA. At the
beginning of March 2012, 24-year-old Daniel Zamudio was so badly
tortured by neo-Nazis that he had to be put into an artifical coma. At
the end of the month he succumbed to his injuries.
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The
murder of Zamudio, whose torments included having a Swastika carved into
his chest, led to an outpouring of sympathy among the population. This
also happened in the political domain: in summer 2012 an
anti-discrimination law was passed that had been on ice for a long time.
This law introduces harsher punishments for hate crimes.
But
this law was too late for the trial of the four men accused of Zamudio's murder. On 17th October, a court found them guilty of
first-degree murder. The sentence is being announced this coming Monday;
the state prosecution service is demanding life imprisonment for one of
the convicted men, and jail sentences of between eight and fifteen
years for the other three.
Translated by Gary Powell. Published with permission from Queer.de.
