However, everything was muddied a few hours later, when 16 people were killed after a fire so voracious that the bodies could only be identified by the denture.
Police said it was damage to the property’s wiring that caused the fire, but many of the survivors reported that something else had happened that night.
Divine had been open for a couple of years and had never enjoyed much sympathy in the neighborhood.
The nightclub and the staff working there had been receiving threats for months.
Women who frequented the venue were harassed, especially by the insults they had to endure when they came in or out.
A group of survivors of the fire created a collective called Gay Action, which called for further investigation into what happened. It’s still in force today.
“It became a paranoia that marked an entire generation, a big question mark,” says Sebastian Ayala.
The case that raised the alarms
It’s unclear if Nicole knew about the Divine fire, but she did know the murder of María Pía Castro.
In fact, they had several things in common. Both were young women from the Fifth Region. Both had been educated by a single mother. They were both truckers.
The 2008 death of this 19-year-old girl from the small town of Olmue was a warning sign for lesbians in Chile.
The young woman, who was in football, was being constantly ill-treated by other boys her age. They beat her and yelled at her. Still she kept dressing the way she liked herself or telling her friends she was a lesbian.
“Telling your friends about your private life in a small community has its consequences. Besides it’s never a private conversation,” Vergara explains.
In February 2008, she was found dead. His body was burned so violently that it could only be identified by a DNA test. An analysis PosT Mortem showed that he had received heavy blows to the head.
The case was closed in 2017 without convicted persons.
Her body was dumped on a hillside a few miles from where eight years later Nicole’s body would be found.
First Mary Pia. Then Nicole. In none of the cases did they identify the killer.
All of this has caused a serious upheale between lesbians and feminists in the area, who report not feeling at all safe.
The picture would worsen a year after Nicole’s murder on March 7, 2017, when the body of another young woman was found in the Fifth Region.
This kind of news terrifies women more, as it somehow confirms that this area of Chile is indeed very dangerous for young lesbians.
Now, this crime was different.
The lifeless body of Susana Sanhuenza, 23, was found inside a bag inside the San Felipe municipal archive, where she worked for an animal advocacy organization.
When she was found, she’d been dead for a week.
WhatsApp messages, read during the trial, revealed that the girl had met with Cristian Muñoz, a fellow of the group he worked for.
Muñoz confessed that Susana suffered a seizure and that she had put her body in a garbage bag because she believed she was dead. She always denied that she had killed her and her family confirmed that she is receiving psychiatric treatment in a hospital while she awaits her verdict.
Susana’s family believes Muñoz killed her because she was in love with her, but because she was a lesbian, they couldn’t have a relationship.
Some argue that Susan’s death is not a homophobic crime. But Vergara disagrees.
“We, the lesbian community in the region, count Susan’s death as lesbophobia“He says.
“If it was a murder or if Susan a seizure, Cristian was chasing a woman who had told her several times that she did not want to be with him. Her inability to see that she was a lesbian and then, not alerting the police to what had happened, speaks of hatred of gay women. That’s misogyny and combined homophobia. Is lesbophobia“he argues.
Since Susan’s death, countless WhatsApp groups of lesbians have been created to protect themselves from threats.
Managers of three of these groups told the BBC that within a week there had been three to four alerts.
“We call the Fifth Region in Chile “red zone” by Maria, Nicole and Susana. There are a lot of attacks every day. Not as brutal or fatal as those, but enough for many of them—especially truckers—to end up in a hospital,” Vergara says.
“As lesbians we are always on red alert in this village (Quillota). Night and day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We feel threatened. And as soon as we set foot outside our house, we are in danger,” he adds.
When lesbians from other regions of the country visit them, especially those who come from Santiago (the capital), they feel their terror, Vergara says.
“That’s how you live here.”
Homophobia in Santiago
But in February of this year, a violent attack on a truck in Santiago showed that the violence caused by lesbophobia could also reach the country’s capital.
It was Valentine’s Day. Carolina Torres, his girlfriend Estefanía Opazo and another friend were back at the house after enjoying a football game.
Carolina’s favorite team, the University of Chile ( known as La U) had tied 0-0 with Melgar of Peru in the third phase of the Copa Libertadores. It had been a game to forget.
As they got home, Carolina didn’t want to grab his girlfriend by the hand so as not to offend anyone.
The secret language of lesbian love in countries where homosexuality is illegal
Suddenly, Torres felt a blow behind his head.
He fell unconscious on the floor and was in a coma for a week.
The blow fractured his skull, broke his nose and caused internal bleeding. Your hearing has also been affected.
Two men perpetrated the aggression. One of them used a piece of wood to stick Carolina several times on the head.
And he only stopped when Estefanía threw himself on top of his girlfriend’s body, as a shield.
A “targeted” attack
Torres’ mother, Mariela, says what happened has a reason to be.
Unlike Torres, which identifies as a truck and dresses accordingly, Opazo does not. She embraces lesbian female identity.
The attackers targeted Torres and not Opazo, Mariela notes, because she represents an “unacceptable” face of what it means to be a woman. For her, she was in the spotlight because of her trucking appearance, not her sexual orientation.
“I want to make it clear that they wanted to kill her. There’s no other way to look at this. The fact that she’s alive is a miracle,” Mariela writes.
Torres knows one of the suspects in the attack.
“Before he hit me, he had already threatened me. He said, “I’m going to kill you.” He threatened to shoot me.”
“He told me a lesbian, he insulted me. And he asked me, ‘Why do you dress like a guy?'” he says.
Shortly after Torres’ interview with the BBC, brothers Miguel and Reinaldo Cortés Arancibia were arrested on charges of attempted murder.
Members of lesbian collectives in Santiago told the BBC that the arrest was somewhat unexpected because even if they had videos of the attack and Carolina knew one of them, usually these kinds of violent actions remain.
Torres has to take 10 types of medications every day for the injuries he has left from the attack. It changed his life, he says.
She has nightmares and feels unable to leave the house where she lives with her parents.
“I liked to go for a walk. I like to play sports. And now There’s nothing I can do,” he says.
“I have to be locked up all day here at my house. And I don’t like it because I talk differently now.” His wounds make it difficult for him to speak.
The attack on Torres, on a busy street in Chile’s capital, was the first reported in the capital since the 1984 assassination of Monica Briones.
But as in the Fifth Region, feminist groups say there are other less serious attacks on truckers without appalaring the public’s attention.
Torres’ mother says her case is the tip of an iceberg.
“If people don’t pay attention to this and don’t do something about it, it’s going to get worse,” he laments.
A drawing by Nicole Saavedra hangs on the wall of the Lesbian Association Breaking the Silence. It is painted on a violet background, the universal color of lesbian solidarity.
Erika Montecinos looks at another sign on the wall. It is of the happiest times, the first lesbian march in the Gay Pride of Santiago 2001.
Santiago is openly gay. It is most notable in the Bellavista district, where nightclubs and bars have classic rainbow flags in their windows and same-sex couples walk hand in hand.
Nicole Saavedra’s friends say she had a good time at night when she visited the capital. But outside this neighborhood, the atmosphere is very different, says Erika.
She runs her organization in a hidden place where the windows have bars. A large tree in the garden prevents passers-by from seeing the rainbow flag inside.
The irony of an organization with such a defiant name that it has to hide from the public does not go unnoticed by its director, but other LGBT organizations have been subjected to intimidation and threats, she says.
While the Fifth Region is a focus of “lesbian violence,” he says, the problem exists across the country.
In a survey of 850 lesbian and bisexual women conducted by Lesbians Breaking the Silence last year, 75% said they had suffered street harassment.
After the attack on Carolina Torres, more than 100 reports of violence or intimidation were received in the WhatsApp issue on the so-called Violet Line in a month.
The crime of femicide
She didn’t report them to the police, she says, because the people who called said it wasn’t worth it, that they were convinced that no action would be taken.
Under Chile’s femicide law, victims’ families are assigned research lawyers to help gather evidence from criminal proceedings, but the murder of a lesbian does not count as such.
“Femicide is murder, a woman based on sex and committed by a man,” says Silvana del Valle, a law professor at the Santiago-based University Academy of Christian Humanism.
“But to qualify as an act of femicide, the killer should have had a marital relationship at that time or earlier with the victim,” he explains.
“Lesbian women, of course, don’t have romantic relationships with men and even if the murder is motivated by a sex issue or because they’re a ‘lesbian woman’, it doesn’t count (as femicide).”
Del Valle argues that neither prosecutors nor police receive much pressure to resolve these cases, because there are no national protests and in most cases, including those of Nicole, Maria and Susana, these women come from poor families.
This worries Nicole Saavedra’s relatives.
His killer, or murderers, are still free.
Among the community there is silence about his murder, says his cousin Maria Bahamondes.
Nicole’s friends seem to be afraid and don’t even talk to the family anymore.
And then there’s the police.
“I feel like we’ve been treated badly,” Maria adds.
Police and justice work
“I often felt like they were laughing at us. They met with us, but they didn’t even know Nicole’s name. They gave us the same reports they had given us months before. We were going to meet them and they’d cancel our meeting. They didn’t do anything.”
In a statement to the BBC, the prosecutor’s office in the Fifth Region, representing the police, rejected the accusation that the police had a passive attitude to or responsible for lesbian violence.
“All parts of society have failed when a crime is committed. But blaming a single factor, such as the Prosecutor of the Fifth Region, undermines the problem, simplifies it, and ultimately avoids a solution,” the statement states.
“Only when everyone understands the role they play in the lack of acceptance of other people with different sexual orientations can we address the possible solution to these crimes.”
The statement insists that police had committed to investigate Nicole’s murder and that the Chilean Public Prosecution Service office was setting up a team to study the problem of violence against LGBT people.
“I didn’t know lesbians call it “red zone,” but now that you mention it, it aligns with the last events that happened in Valparaiso,” says Daniel Morales, mayor of Limache, where the bodies of María Pía Castro and Nicole Saavedra were found.
He adds that his office was working with the police to add more closed-circuit cameras and drones as a prevention.
But that is no great comfort to Mary, who sees that her cousin’s murder remains unsolved.
“I can’t deal with that anymore,” he says. “This story has to come to an end. We need to find out who did this. Otherwise, there is no justice. If we don’t find the people who are guilty of this, there’s no justice for Nicole.”
Maria Bahamondes, Karen Vergara and three other women were arrested Saturday night for occupying the prosecutor’s office in Quillota and locking herself inside after a demonstration for the third anniversary of Nicole Saavedra’s death.
The three women demanded a meeting with the prosecutor in charge of the investigation, whom they accuse of failing to make the necessary efforts to resolve the case.
Local media cited Quillota’s attorney general as saying that the investigation into Nicole’s death was “conducting in an ordinary manner.”
After pressure from the Chilean Institute for Human Rights, all three were released.
