THE HEARTS OFVENEZUELA
“HELLO, PAPI, I AM IN BRAZIL.”
A text message I received sitting in my home office after nearly a month of silence signified Victor Arellano’s nine-month battle had just been won. Arellano escaped Venezuela with a bullet in his spine, fleeing across violent and treacherous terrains, to have a chance of survival in a place providing no guarantees of a better life.
Early last year, when the pandemic first began its lethal assault upon the world, Arellano, a handsome 30-year-old gay man, was walking home from a friend’s at dusk. He was shot point-blank in the face and was left with a bullet lodged between the joints of his cervical spine that missed his spinal cord by only millimeters.
“What do you mean, three men?” I asked Victor in broken Spanish at the time.
“Three men started beating me and calling me a faggot,” he replies. “I tried to fight them off, but I just couldn’t. Then everything went black.”
In the police report from the night of Arellano’s attempted murder, two witnesses reported hearing gunshots and seeing three men running out of Arellano’s home with his motorcycle and several other personal possessions. Arellano says local police, with little funding and few resources, told him they are unable to follow up and are unlikely to do so in the future.
Murder is a common occurrence in Venezuela. In fact, 16,500 homicides were reported in 2019, and its murder rate was the highest in Latin America — 60.3 violent deaths per 100,000 people, according to the U.S. State Department. But in the Hernandez Tachira Parish, a quiet evangelical community where Arellano lived and was shot, violence is not a common part of the local narrative. Quiteria Franco, a spokesperson for Unión Afirmativa, an organization fighting for LGBTQ+ equality in Venezuela, believes Arellano was “targeted based on his sexuality.”
Venezuela once led the charge for LGBTQ+ acceptance in Latin America. The nation formally banned discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012, although protections had existed in some form since 1996. In May 2016, the National Assembly unanimously approved a resolution establishing May 17 as the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. But it was suspended a month later by Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which had been stacked by Hugo Chávez, president from 1999 until his
