Mexico’s first openly non-binary electoral magistrate and prominent LGBTQ activist Jesús Ociel Baena Saucedo was found dead at home this week, according to multiple news reports citing local officials.
The bodies of 39-year-old Baena Saucedo and their presumed partner were found Monday morning at their home in the central city of Aguascalientes, which is located about 300 miles northwest of Mexico City, the state prosecutor’s office confirmed toCNN,NBC News, andMexico News Daily.
Jesus Ociel Baena/Instagram
Mexico Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said in a press conference that it is unclear if “it was a homicide or an accident,” per NBC News.
Baena Saucedo made history in October 2022 when they were the first non-binary person to assume the role as magistrate for the Aguascalientes state electoral court, CNN reports. Earlier this year, they were also one of the first in the country to receive a gender-neutral passport, according to the outlet.
Jesus Ociel Baena Saucedo.Jesus Ociel Baena/Instagram
“I want to send the message that the LGBTQ population can access these spaces, that there is a possibility that we have people with enough of a profile that with their own merits can access these spaces where decisions are made,” Baena Saucedo told CNN last year.
Baena Saucedo was open about their identity and advocacy onsocial mediaand often posed in photos with a rainbow-colored fan.
“I am a nonbinary person, I am not interested in being seen as either a woman or a man. This is an identity. It is mine, for me, and nobody else” Baena Saucedo wrote in apost on X(formerly Twitter) in June.
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“They were a person who received many hate messages, and even threats of violence and death, and you can’t ignore that in these investigations,” Alejandro Brito, director of the LGBTQ rights group Letra S., told the AP.
“They, the magistrate, was breaking through the invisible barriers that closed in the nonbinary community.”
While same-sex marriage was made legal across all 32 states of Mexico in 2022, anti-LGBTQ violence is still prevelant. According to the AP, which cites the National Observatory of Hate Crimes Against LGBTI+ Persons in Mexico, the organization reported 305 violent hate crimes against “sexual minorities” from 2019 to 2022.
source: people.com
