LGBT history in Chile
Oftentimes this history has been informed by the diverse forms of governments that have existed within Chile, including colonialism, military dictatorship, and democracy.
While sodomy was already criminalized in the Penal Code, the arrival of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo to power in 1927 deepened the policies of persecution against gay people.
that the government of Ibáñez made several arrest raids against gay people in Santiago, which have been subsequently sent to ships in Valparaíso to be executed by "fondeamiento".
Pisagua, a town surrounded by high mountains and the ocean, at the time suffered a mass exodus of its inhabitants, so that it became a perfect fit for the jailing of several people that were persecuted, practice that would later be continued by Gabriel González Videla[citation needed] and Augusto Pinochet against his political opponents.
In 1952, when Ibáñez del Campo returned to power, this time in open democratic elections, as president, he continued its repressive policies.
During his government he promulgated Law 11625 on Antisocial States and Security Measures (1954) (Ley 11625 sobre Estados Antisociales y Medidas de Seguridad), first proposed during the administration of his predecessor González Videla, a law establishing various security measures (such as healing internments[clarification needed], fines and imprisonment) against groups of "social dangerousness ", including vagrants, drug addicts and homosexuals, among others[citation needed].
However, this law would apparently had a marginal application, with little records[dubious – discuss] of some gay people moved to places like Chanco and Parral.
[6] This homophobia conducted by the leftist press can be considered as an effect of the idealization of the prototype of man during the years of the Popular Unity, corresponding to the hard worker.
In the late 1960s, urologist Antonio Salas Vieyra and Osvaldo Quijada created the Chilean Society of Anthropological Sexology to improve education on and explore the emerging field of gender.
In the first months of the Pinochet dictatorship, Torres was granted a court order to change her name and gender mark in the sex registry and on her official documents.
Nearly twenty-five homosexual and transgender individuals who often walked at night the Huérfanos and Ahumada streets in downtown Santiago gathered to protest abuses by police, which continually jailed them for "indecency and bad manners", beat them and shaved their heads.
Even the governor of the province of Santiago, Julio Stuardo, said he would use "the security forces and all the springs that the constitutional mandate gives" just to prevent a new demonstration scheduled this time in the capital's high-class neighbourhoods.
[12] Five other five transgender people were found to have changed their names before 1977, per publications in the Official Gazette,[13] but increasingly, Pinochet's regime escalated stigmatization and criminalization of the activities of the LGBT community.
In the late 1980s, in the city of Concepción, emerged the groups SER and Lesbianas en Acción (LEA), the first gay and lesbian organizations in southern Chile.
During the proclamation of Patricio Aylwin as Concertación candidate for the presidential election of 1989, Lemebel and Casas unfolded a large banner that said "Homosexuals for change."
The first gay organization, the "Movement for Homosexual Liberation" (MOVILH) was founded in June 1991, which would later become one of the main groups of LGBT activism in the country.
[23] In June 1999, the first March for Sexual Diversity was held in Santiago, demonstration for the rights of the LGBT community and the fight against homophobia.
