One LGBTIQ+ Person Killed Every 32 Hours: Colombia's New Report, and a Government That Worries Advocates
Caribe Afirmativo documented 270 LGBTIQ+ murders in Colombia last year, up 64% from 2024. The report lands one month into a presidency that rights groups say is openly hostile to the community.
An LGBTIQ+ person was murdered in Colombia every 32 hours in 2025 — 270 homicides for the year, according to a report from Caribe Afirmativo, one of the country’s longest-running LGBTIQ+ rights organizations. That’s up 64% from the 165 recorded in 2024, part of a broader pattern the report, titled “A System That Is Failing: Prejudice, Violence, and Impunity Against LGBTQ+ People in Colombia,” describes as systematic rather than incidental.
Homicides were only part of what Caribe Afirmativo tracked. The organization documented 2,928 total cases of violence against LGBTIQ+ people last year — roughly one every six hours — including 1,531 cases of domestic violence, 1,184 threats, and 628 cases of sexual violence. The murders themselves, the report notes, frequently involved torture, dismemberment, or forced disappearance, and disproportionately occurred in private spaces like homes and hotels, often tied to informal or survival economies that leave LGBTIQ+ Colombians, particularly trans women, with few safe alternatives for housing or income.
Impunity compounds the violence. According to the report, 99.8% of threat cases never advanced past the initial investigation stage — meaning that for nearly every LGBTIQ+ Colombian who reports being threatened, no one is ever held accountable.
A report landing at a difficult political moment
Caribe Afirmativo’s findings cover 2025, but they’re circulating now against the backdrop of a new government that LGBTIQ+ advocates in Colombia are watching with open concern. Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as president on August 7, backed by Salvación Nacional and the Mira Party — parties rights organizations describe as openly hostile to the LGBTIQ+ community. His election is widely read, alongside recent shifts elsewhere in the region, as part of a rightward swing in Latin American politics after a decade in which Colombia had moved toward stronger LGBTIQ+ legal protections, including marriage equality in 2016 and a 2022 law criminalizing hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
De la Espriella has not, as of early September, announced specific rollbacks to those protections. But advocacy groups’ concern is less about a single policy reversal than about tone and enforcement: a government whose governing coalition includes parties hostile to LGBTIQ+ people arrives at exactly the moment violence against the community is accelerating and impunity is already the norm, not the exception. Whether that combination translates into weaker enforcement of existing hate-crime law, reduced funding for protection programs, or simply a more hostile public climate is the open question advocates are now tracking.
Pride in the shadow of the numbers
Colombia’s Pride march in Bogotá this past June was held under what participants described as a climate of “fear and resistance” — even before de la Espriella’s inauguration, organizers were bracing for the political shift a presidential runoff might bring. Attendees at that march were, in the words of one report on the day, “more resistant and more vigilant in defending rights than ever.”
That vigilance is likely to define the coming year. Colombia has real, hard-won legal protections on paper — marriage equality, adoption rights, and hate-crime statutes that many countries in the region still lack. Caribe Afirmativo’s report is, in effect, a warning that paper protections aren’t preventing a rising body count, and a test of whether a government less inclined to prioritize LGBTIQ+ safety will make enforcement of those protections better, worse, or simply beside the point.
Why this matters beyond Colombia
Colombia’s numbers are a stark data point in a broader regional pattern: Latin America and the Caribbean remain among the most lethal regions in the world for LGBTIQ+ people, particularly trans women, even in countries with comparatively progressive marriage and family law. Legal recognition and physical safety are not the same fight, and Colombia’s report is a reminder that winning one doesn’t guarantee the other — a lesson with obvious relevance well beyond Colombia’s borders.
Sources: Presentes Agency, “Colombia: Violence against LGBTQ+ people increased, with 270 LGBT people murdered in 2025”; Infobae; NPR, “Colombia’s political pendulum swings right as de la Espriella is sworn in”; ColombiaOne, “Colombia’s LGBTIQ+ Pride 2026: Between Fear and Resistance”.
