Cabrera was murdered for speaking against the police, accusing them of being involved in organized crime, sexually exploiting minors, and for her defense of street workers' rights threatened brothel owners.

At first I didn't take them seriously, but the following year, when a group of police beat up another coworker in the south area, we began to work with everything.During Argentina's economic crisis in 2001, Cabrera discovered the power of union association.

She complained publicly that the lack of cash had left the women on the street desperately poor, to the point of not knowing if they would have food for their families on Christmas.

Claudia Lucero, her close friend, sometime dancing partner, godmother of her daughter, and eventual successor as secretary general of the Rosario chapter of AMMAR, had to be won over.

[4] ... for much more than two years it was said during the night that they were going to find her dead, because they said she does not respect the codes...[9]During Sandra Cabrera's murder investigation, a source inside the investigation told a news reporter that Cabrera had been defending herself on three fronts: the violence and risk of working on the street, the assaults arranged by the brothel businesses she and her independent street colleagues were competing with, and the harassment and threats from the police whose graft networks she was disrupting.

By way of background, the journalist Carlos del Frade has described a meeting in 1991 between Rodolfo Enrique Riegé, Secretary of Public Security for the province of Santa Fe, and Atilio Bléfari, head of police in Rosario.

[10] As part of her campaign for sex worker rights, Cabrera fought for the elimination of the articles of the provincial Misdemeanor Code that criminalized prostitution.

[5] On March 4, 2003, Marcela Patricia Morelli, a street sex worker and member of AMMAR, filed a complaint against officers of the Ludueña neighborhood police station.

In the morning the station chief arrived and told them that he didn't want "male or female prostitutes" in his jurisdiction, and threatened more violent measures.

[12] The last complaint Cabrera helped file, four days before her murder, involved an officer who charged a woman fifty pesos a week for the privilege of working without trouble from the police.

In spite of punctual payments, the woman was arrested by the Public Morality police, who informed her that the officer she was paying was no longer working in that division.

It can be a matter of fear and pressure... Perhaps Sandra's companions were affected by issues of self-security, of their children or their family when it came to involving people who could somehow exercise some power over them...

The forensic analysts believe that he stood behind her, held her head with his left hand, forced the muzzle of the gun against her neck, and fired while standing with his knees slightly flexed.

[5] Diego Parvluczyk, former deputy chief of the Dangerous Drugs Division of the Federal Police was the only individual arrested for Cabrera's femicide but later acquitted for lack of evidence.

[1] The forensic report concluded: The possibility is raised of a killer who has chosen circumstances of time and place, has killed at the right moment of least resistance of the victim, has held the corpse so that it does not strike with suddenness when falling and has left without leaving evidence of his presence.

Her first encounter with AMMAR occurred when she complained to the media about being assaulted by pimps and bouncers,[6] i.e. by men associated with a bar that was a front for a brothel.

The two chiefs of the Public Morality unit who were removed after her complaint were being paid by brothel owners to drive off street sex workers.

[16] The Santa Fe police killed the social activist Claudio Lepratti during the disturbances of 2001 when he tried to warn them off from firing at a school where children were eating lunch.

Changes of administrations in Santa Fe had typically been accompanied by some sort of organized criminal action by the police, just to remind everybody of the rules of the game.

[4] Carlos del Frade relates that during Obeid's first administration as governor of Santa Fe, he removed a half dozen police officers who had been involved in state sponsored torture and terrorism.

According to the assistant secretary of the CTA (the union federation AMMAR belongs to), Maldonado ensured that proceeds from the payments extorted from sex workers and the money that pimps paid for protection were distributed to officers and politicians appropriately.

[3] One of the appeals judges discredited the testimony of over twenty street-based sex workers because they were women who "have an activity that can not be described as good morals," according to the journalist Carlos Del Frade.

He said that the move had been under consideration since the beginning of the new administration: ... because it is an obsolete unit that allows a certain degree of corruption, without passing judgment on the officers that served in it.But he acknowledged that he was making the announcement in the context of Cabrera's murder.

[16] As the Minister of Government put it with Victorian sensibility: We are looking for a balance between the claims of the defense of modesty and scandalous prostitution through a new bill.As the new secretary general of AMMAR's Rosario chapter, Claudia Lucero continued the campaign to repeal the articles.

[20] While she didn't live to see the victory, she was part of the fight, and it was a more fundamental restructuring of society's relationship with sex work than eliminating a police unit.

Walter Miranda, who had been removed as chief of the Public Morality unit following Cabrera's complaint because he had been providing protection to brothels that trafficked underage girls and foreign women, as well as extorting bribes from street-based sex workers, continued to advance through the ranks.

Driven into the street, they took refuge in a local bar where the women found them and again attacked, throwing and breaking tables and stealing the tape used to officially seal a closed business.

The owners of regulated brothels who once assaulted independent sex workers in the streets, or paid the police to do the same, now operate illegally in private apartments, driven underground by the prohibitionist movement that currently opposes AMMAR in the media and the legislatures.

The political projects of Cabrera and AMMAR's founders have been challenged by new social forces with different concepts of sex worker rights and agency.

[7]Nine days after Cabrera's murder, marches were held in Rosario, Buenos Aires, and Salta province, demanding justice and sex workers rights.