17-year-old Itaberli Lozano was found dead, burned in a field in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
Lozano’s body was found on January 7th close to Cravinhos burned and buried in a cane field. After some tests, it was found Lozano’s body was discovered a week after his murder. Investigations have since come up with a murder suspect whom is in fact Lozano’s own mother.
Tatiana Lorzano Pereira is a 32-year-old supermarket manager who confessed to stabbing her 17-year-old son to death. She first claimed the reason for this was because the boy was bringing strange men home and using drugs. This was later denied by Dario Rosa, the teen’s uncle, who said to G1 that Lozano was, “hard-working and educated.” Rosa also said that Tatiana’s defense were accusations and lies as this was the first time he’d ever heard of Itaberli using drugs.
It was then later revealed that Tatiana was lying for some time now. At the start of Itaberli’s disappearance she went around telling people that the boy had run away to live with extended family after a fight on December 27th. It was only 9 days later, and 2 days after the body was found, that she filed a missing persons report.
The lies and story changing continue however as time went on. The mother’s first confession stated after the fight on the 27th, Itaberli returned on the 29th and threatened her, her husband, and their 3-year-old son. Tatiana then reacted in a sort of self-defense by stabbing Itaberli in his neck.
She claimed that she then woke up her husband and together they hid the body by burying it. This was then followed by the claim that the boy had been killed by three men without her involvement.
The stories were even further rattled when it was revealed that the boy had reported his mother to the authorities in December. He also posted on Facebook on December 26th that his mother had hired several boys to beat him up. This then led to two teens, one 18-years-old and the other 19-years-old, to getting arrested.
They confessed that the mother did in fact hire them to attack her son, but claimed that they did not murder the boy. Blasting News reported that Tatiana then finally admitted that she hired the boys to “teach him a lesson.” Once the two boys attacked Itaberli and then refused to kill him Tatiana finished the deed. She realized that Itaberli was on the brink of death, and so she stabbed him to end his suffering.
In the end, the only way that Itaberli Lozano’s body was identified was by a bracelet that appeared in several of his social media photos. SigaMais reports that both Tatiana Lorzano Pereira and her husband were arrested and will be held for 30 days while charged for murder and concealment of a corpse.
This is yet another case of anti-gay violence that sweeps the country of Brazil and which has earned it the infamous title of the world’s deadliest place for LGBT people. According to Grupo Gay da Bahia, a gay or transgender person is killed almost every day in the country. In fact, around 1,600 people have died from such attacks in the past five years.
This is almost in stark contrast to the public image that Brazil holds. Many think of Brazil as this open space where expressions of sexuality are accepted, especially during events such as Carnival and São Paulo’s pride parade, the biggest one in the world. Even the Brazilian government appears to be in support of LGBT rights as the Brazilian judiciary legalized same-sex marriage back in 2013.
Experts who spoke to New York Times suggest that, “Liberal government policies may have gotten too far ahead of traditional social mores. The anti-gay violence, they contend, can be traced to Brazil’s culture of machismo and a brand of evangelical Christianity, exported from the United States, that is outspoken in its opposition to homosexuality.”
In this time of violence and turmoil, there are those who are creating tools to report these incidents and shine a light on crimes like the one committed against Itaberli Lozano. One such person is Antonio Kvalo who created temlocal.com.br in hopes of cataloguing instances of anti-gay violence.
As people shine a light on these violent acts, hopefully social change will come and make it so others don’t have to face the same cruel fate that Itaberli Lozano did.
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By: Devin Randall
