August 08 2025, 08:15 
“Sara was attacked with unimaginable cruelty. What’s just as painful is the silence of those who stood by.”
Those chilling words were uttered in April by the mayor of Bello in the Antioquia region of Colombia, where 32-year-old Sara Millerey González was reportedly
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The next day, she died of cardiac
Video of her attempted drowning, caught on camera by those bystanders who were warned not to intervene, shocked the nation.
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“What happened in Bello is fascism,” Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro posted to X. “Fascism is the violent erasure of human difference — be it political, religious, ethnic, or sexual.”
“There are Nazis in Colombia,” he said.
Six weeks later, Millerey González’s friend Nawar Jimenez met the same fate in Bello, another among nearly 50 queer and trans people killed in Colombia this year, according to rights group Caribe Afirmativo.
The deaths are part of an ongoing and organized “social cleansing” campaign by the remnants of the Farq, the rebel group disbanded in 2016 that gripped Colombia in terror for decades. As they vie for power now in different regions of the country, ridding them of “undesirables” has become a tool for exerting their influence and asserting control.
In Caquetá, a sparsely populated department in southern Colombia and a rebel stronghold, flyers began appearing on the streets and circulating through WhatsApp last year, warning of “social cleansing” of “fa***ts, lesbians and men and women who destroy homes,” all of whom would be considered legitimate military targets.
On paper, the Colombian government is progressive when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights, with laws granting marriage equality and adoption, and the right to change gender identity on official documents.
A special task force appointed by the president apprehended a suspect in Millerey González’s case weeks after she died, and lawmakers named a bill after her that’s designed to push prosecutors to better investigate anti-LGBTQ crimes, CNN reports.
Despite those gestures, the government remains largely powerless to stop the killings, a situation one UN expert described in May as Colombia’s “persistent gap between constitutional aspirations and lived realities.”
Another friend of Millerey González’s in Bello, who asked to use a pseudonym in an interview with El País, illustrated the relentless and escalating nature of the “social cleansing” campaign, and the terror it instilled among the groups the government purports to protect.
Ginna pointed to how Millerey González’s attackers acted in broad daylight, when victims are usually “set traps that take them to remote places” or bundled into cars. Two years ago, several gay men were lured to hotel rooms through the Grindr app and killed. Ginna recalled another friend of Millerey González, stabbed to death one night in the street while she was sleeping. Their friends La Juana and La Tita were murdered in their homes, and La Javi was killed in a hair dressing salon. Eight years ago, Susana Fonnegra was murdered in a park at dawn.
“Sara was not only murdered, but they wanted to show everyone what they did,” Ginna said. “They wanted to make sure everyone saw the cruelty.”
Dozens attended Millerey González’s funeral mass on April 8. While some City Hall officials used Millerey González’s deadname in their communications about her, the priest who led the mass called her Sara.
She felt like a woman, he said, “like any other woman. What harm did she do?”
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