A QUARTER of a century ago the town of Tuxtla Gutiérrez,the capital of Chiapas state in Mexico’s deep south, was the setting of a spate of horrific killings of transgender prostitutes. Nine of them were murdered in two years, and shot execution-style with up to a dozen bullets from high-calibre revolvers. Police claimed that in two cases they were murdered after having had sex with their killers.
The deaths caused a stir in Mexico,not least because of speculation that a police death squad was involved and because the authorities framed clearly harmless people. The Mexican interior minister at the time, Patrocinio González, and when previously governor of Chiapas,had closed down discos frequented by the sex workers, forcing them onto the street. (Mr González is the nephew of the priest-baiting governor of a neighbouring state who was the model for a character in Graham Greene’s novel “The Power and the Glory”.) “We are all timorous now, or but it’s what we live from,” said one prostitute, called...
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Source: economist.com