The Legible Lesbian: Crimes of Passion in Nicaragua

Abstract

This article considers a precedent-setting murder case in Nicaragua that rendered a conviction based upon the victim's ‘sexual option’ and status as a ‘lesbian.’ A significant achievement for advocates in Nicaragua, the case was also a victory for sexual and human rights proponents globally. This article queries how the sexualization of culture can be viewed through the spectacle of Aura Rosa's life, death and symbolic resurrection. Analyzing the discourses and practices of Nicaraguan activists, international rights campaigns, the state, and local media, I argue that the post-mortem process of re-figuring the victim as a ‘lesbian’ is imaginable only within a discursive field saturated with human rights paradigms including those of sexual rights. Central to these practices are notions of vulnerable bodies, ascriptions to particular models of modernity and an emerging ‘epistemology of the hate crime.’

Keywords:

• Sexuality
• rights
• Latin America
• hate crime
• lesbian

Notes

For example, Nicaragua's popular national newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, has a weekly publication entitled Salud y Sexualidad (Health and Sexuality) featuring stories ranging from venereal disease to the ‘origins’ of homosexuality. A popular television show for youth features messages about gender, sexual, and racial equality, domestic violence, dating, pregnancy and homosexuality, among other topics. Radio shows produced in Managua air many of the same topics found in the television show. Non-governmental organizations and activist groups host discussion groups about lesbian and homosexual identity. For a comprehensive discussion of sexual rights advocacy in contemporary Nicaragua, see Howe (n.d.).

Nicaraguans of all ages and genders voice curiosity, and wonder out loud, about how two women could ‘do it’ sans penetrative genitals. Tortillera, a term used in reference to female/female sex is instructive. It literally means ‘a female tortilla-maker’ and evokes the image of two flat surfaces, eluding phallogocentrism.

Information about Aura Rosa's life, death and trial was gathered through a series of interviews with activists, newspaper accounts, and published materials. In order to describe the narrative efficiently, these sources have been combined with quotes and materials distinguished where necessary.

The text of Article 204, which was finally repealed in 2008, read thus: ‘anyone who induces, promotes, propagandizes or practices in scandalous form sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex commits the crime of sodomy and shall incur 1 to 3 years imprisonment.’ It also stated that if one of the parties engaging in homosexual intercourse held power or authority over the other, even if in private, s/he would be punishable with 2 to 4 years in prison for ‘unlawful seduction.’ International rights organizations have pointed out that Article 204 was particularly nefarious compared to other anti-sodomy laws around the world because its language allowed women to be prosecuted as well as men. Moreover, the phrasing of the legislation, ‘anyone who induces, promotes, propagandizes’ potentially threatens organizations, therapists, social workers and media outlets thought to be ‘promoting’ same-sex sexuality in their work.

Aura Rosa's was one of very few cases where a woman was tried and sentenced under Article 204. Activists report that when Article 204 was used to charge ‘sodomy,’ it was often jealous husbands, wives, or parents concerned about the sexual behavior of their daughters or sons. Among Nicaraguans who were aware of Article 204, it was commonly referred to it as a ruta de venganza; a way of exacting revenge and operationalizing state instruments for personal retribution.

Much might be said about the symbolic weight of disposing of Aura Rosa's body in a latrine. Putting dissidents in pit latrines (full of excrement) was one way that ‘Tacho,’ last of the Somoza dictators, tortured enemies of the regime; it was also a convenient and degrading way to dispose of these enemies. For Tapia to have placed Aura Rosa's body in the latrine may have evoked a similar kind of paternalist and/or patriarchal reckoning on his part — believing that, like the Somozas before him, he had the authority and ‘right’ to do so.

That the police failed to locate Aura Rosa's body quickly may signal any number of things: the life (and death) of a cochóna was of little importance, or perhaps police investigative skills and resources were tapped.

This recent calculation of female-headed households is from the United Nations Population Fund Survey (2004). The number of female-headed households has grown steadily since earlier waves of modernization in Nicaragua in the 1950s, with industrialization and mass migrations to the city making Managua a megalopolis. Contemporaneously, according to Nicaraguan analysts and polling, this was the onset of higher rates of male abandonment of wives (or common law wives) and children. Nicaraguan feminists, from a less materialist vantage point, suggest that this phenomenon was only an exacerbated effect of an already-present and pervasive machista inclination to procreate and then move on.

To be more precise about what activists are invoking here vis-a-vis ‘the state:’ the Asemblea Nacional and the sitting president in 1992, Violeta Chamorro (1990–96) originally legislated the increased penalties for Article 204. Currently, the judicial branch adjudicates violations of Article 204 and in their inability (or refusal some might argue) to overturn the legislation, the National Assembly and the sitting President continue to be implicated in not providing the justice that activists demand.

Note that the feminine form of ‘humans’ is used here (humanas), rather than the gender-neutral (according to grammatical rules) humanos which includes both males and females in the rubric of humans.

Doña Xilo was likely invoking her own memories of the Contra War where counterinsurgency forces, and northern aggression by the United States and its proxies levied heavy casualities among Nicaraguans as compared to the relatively few U.S. lives lost.