"For the first time, the existence of the LGBTI community is recognized in political, social and cultural terms"

Interview with Samira Montiel, Nicaragua's special prosecutor for sexual diversity

Abstract

CJP, interested in promoting ongoing discussion on the context and rights of vulnerable groups, presents this interview with Samira Montiel, who values the human rights of the LGTBI community in Nicaragua and reflects on her role as the first special prosecutor for sexual diversity. With more than twenty years of experience and as founder of SAFO, the country's first group of lesbian women, Montiel believes that her appointment "made the LGTBI community visible" in symbolic and practical terms and recalls, in perspective, the hard years that preceded current activism as "very difficult times for the country as was the hardening in 1992 of the penalty of homosexuality by reform to the Penal Code promoted during the government of Ms Violeta Chamorro neighborhoods". For Montiel, these difficult years left "[...] his mark on that trajectory of so many years of activism."