Sandra Cabrera (27 October 1970 – 27 January 2004) was an Argentine street-based sex worker, trade unionist, and campaigner for sex workers' rights. She was murdered in 2004 in Rosario, Argentina by the police. Cabrera was murdered for speaking against the police, accusing them of being involved in organized crime, sexually exploiting minors, and for her defense of street workers' rights threatened brothel owners.RedTraSex. “A #SandraCabrera La Mato La Policia, Su #Femicidio Sigue Impuno,” January 27, 2022. http://www.redtrasex.org/A-SandraCabrera-la-mato-la-policia .
Life Cabrera was born in San Juan, Argentina
in 1970. She moved to Rosario in 1994, leaving two children with her mother. People who met her remember her eyes, dark enough to seem black, a wealth of black hair, and her direct gaze, sometimes interpreted as inquisitive,
sometimes as defiant.
At the time of her murder, she had been planning to travel to another city with a friend to attend a rock festival.
Her first contact with AMMAR (Association of Women Prostitutes of Argentina) occurred in 2000, but she didn't begin working with the union until 2001.
During Argentina's economic crisis in 2001, Cabrera discovered the power of union association. She complained publicly that the lack of cash had left the women on the street desperately poor, to the point of not knowing if they would have food for their families on Christmas. The Ministry of Social Advancement gave the union sacks of food that Cabrera distributed, working from 8 in the morning to 10 at night.
Cabrera seems to have been a devoted mother to the daughter she called "Maca". She encouraged her education and ensured that she learned computer skills. She took her to the theater. At the time of the murder, Macarena was away at a scouting camp in Mendoza.
Cabrera's work to stop the spread of AIDS and other STDs began in October, 2001.
Lacking resources for its own place, AMMAR's Rosario chapter maintained an office with the Government Workers Association, where the AMMAR women were known affectionately as "the Sanjua gang", after Cabrera's place of origin. Cabrera reportedly had a love/hate relationship with AMMAR's national leadership. Her interactions with Elena Reynaga, Secretary General of the union at the time, have been described as "explosive". Reynaga acknowledged that no one she worked with fought her as Cabrera did,
but she also acknowledged Cabrera's effectiveness:
Organizing gave her a position in a social network that she couldn't get any other way.
And in Rosario, she found that recognition.
She was the consummate union organizer. For two years before her murder, she used her motorcycle to take her every place in Rosario where her colleagues were working the street, listening to their complaints and planning how to use the union to protect them. After she died this was how many people remembered her; on her bike, distributing condoms, asking about people's problems. She learned how to make statements to the news media that the media would pick up and publish, spreading her message.
Perhaps Cabrera's hardest task was just persuading her colleagues that a union was possible. Claudia Lucero, her close friend, sometime dancing partner, godmother of her daughter, and eventual successor as secretary general of the Rosario chapter of AMMAR, had to be won over.
Other street workers had other reasons for not joining. Stella Maris Longoni found it easier just to pay her police extortionist fifty pesos a week and be left in peace, until the day she paid and the police arrested her anyway. Released from jail, with police warnings not to join the union still ringing in her ears, she went straight to Cabrera and AMMAR.
Lead up to murder
During Sandra Cabrera's murder investigation, a source inside the investigation told a news reporter that Cabrera had been defending herself on three fronts: the violence and risk of working on the street, the assaults arranged by the brothel businesses she and her independent street colleagues were competing with, and the harassment and threats from the police whose graft networks she was disrupting. The corrupt connection between the brothel owners and the police meant that Cabrera's struggle to protect street workers was necessarily a struggle against corruption.
By way of background, the journalist Carlos del Frade has described a meeting in 1991 between Rodolfo Enrique Riegé, Secretary of Public Security for the province of Santa Fe, and Atilio Bléfari, head of police in Rosario. Riegé informed Bléfari that if he didn't increase the graft revenues that he was paying to Riegé, Riegé would relieve him of command and force him to retire. The resulting struggle for control of the city of Rosario was not a struggle between justice and corruption, but a struggle between a corrupt police officer and his even more corrupt superior. The document that del Frade cites as a source goes on to list the sources of extralegal income the police were collecting, which included theft of goods during transport, bank robbery, car theft, gambling, exploitation of juveniles in nightclubs and discos, and medical quackery, among other things. Category number two was income from the Public Morality units of the police, and included
Since the nightclubs and discos were fronts for brothels, this can be summarized as drugs and prostitution.
As part of her campaign for sex worker rights, Cabrera fought for the elimination of the articles of the provincial Misdemeanor Code that criminalized prostitution. Different officers in Rosario's Public Morality unit were able to use the Code to play different sides. Some officers were paid by the brothel owners to enforce the Code against the street workers who were competing with the brothels. Other officers collected bribes from street workers for not enforcing the Code.
Another complication was her romantic involvement with an officer of the Federal police, Diego Parvlucyk. She acted as an informant and he gave her drugs that had been seized during police operations, which she sold. Initially her connection with the Federal police seemed to give her some protection from the provincial police, or at least a feeling of protection, but the relationship with Parvlucyk became more difficult and he was later arrested for her murder, although released and never tried. For many of Argentina's sex workers, this relationship didn't seem unusual.
From 1999 to 2002, there is record of ten formal complaints made by Cabrera against the police. Most of them involve harassment or threats against her or a colleague.
On March 4, 2003, Marcela Patricia Morelli, a street sex worker and member of AMMAR, filed a complaint against officers of the Ludueña neighborhood police station. She and two trans sex workers had been detained by the officers in what she felt was an excessive manner and with "a humiliating treatment". One of the trans sex workers was released after two hours, but Morelli and the other remained for more than six hours. The police removed money and clothing from the other trans sex worker, humiliated the person, and left the person lying on the floor, naked. In the morning the station chief arrived and told them that he didn't want "male or female prostitutes" in his jurisdiction, and threatened more violent measures. He threatened to drag Morelli by her hair if he saw her again.
As leader of AMMAR's Rosario chapter, Cabrera made the following statements.
On September 10, 2003, Cabrera organized a formal complaint against the chief and deputy chief of the Public Morality unit of the police, accusing them of harassing sex workers at the stops near the Rosario Bus Terminal in order to protect brothels in the area from competition from independent street workers. An investigation turned up evidence that they were providing protection for a brothel whose women included underage girls and women trafficked from the Dominican Republic. The complaint also accused police officers of forcing street-based sex workers to pay bribes in order to work. The chief and deputy chief were removed, and the new head of the Public Morality section was a woman, nominally chosen to ensure that the corrupt practices ended, but perhaps in reality chosen to take the pressure off without actually changing anything. Not quite five months later, when Cabrera was murdered, the disgraced ex-chief of Public Morality had been reassigned as head of the Zavalla police station.
Following the complaint, some of the bars the two police chiefs had been protecting closed, and a few others stopped making payments to the police. One of the sex workers who joined Cabrera in the complaint testified during the murder investigation that Cabrera had expressed fear that the police would retaliate.
On October 9, someone called the headquarters of the Government Workers Association, where AMMAR kept an office, and said "Tell Sandra that the girl will die before tomorrow." The girl was Cabrera's eight-year-old daughter, Macarena. From then until shortly before Cabrera's murder, the police Personal Security unit kept a nightly guard on her home.
A few days later, an anonymous complaint filed in the juvenile courts claimed that "Sandra sent the girl to beg and did not go to school." A social worker investigated and confirmed that Macarena had, in fact, been going to school.
On October 17 a sex worker was assaulted by a cyclist who struck her strongly in the head with a chain. The women went to the police and together they searched the area, but her assailant was never found.
At some point, while the police guard was temporarily away from Cabrera's home, someone got in and beat her. At another point, two men got into her home, put a gun to the head of her dog, and told her to stop fucking with them.
The last complaint Cabrera helped file, four days before her murder, involved an officer who charged a woman fifty pesos a week for the privilege of working without trouble from the police. In spite of punctual payments, the woman was arrested by the Public Morality police, who informed her that the officer she was paying was no longer working in that division. When she announced that she was going to join AMMAR, the Morality police threatened her with daily arrests. Cabrera went with her to file an extortion complaint and was with her when she spoke to the news media. Cabrera told a reporter that she was afraid that someone from the Public Morality unit would come back for her.
During her murder investigation, the investigating judge found evidence of fifteen death threats against her.
Murder
Evidence Testimony indicates that Sandra Cabrera was standing at her usual corner with a colleague at around 4:30 on the morning of 27 January 2004. She was approached by a client and walked toward him, away from her colleague. The colleague never saw the man's face and didn't recognize him. From behind, he appeared to be tall and thin, in light shorts. Cabrera and the client left together to go to her home.
She was found dead from a shot in the back of the neck. The investigation determined that the muzzle of the gun had been pushed against her neck and the gun was partially supported by her skull when it was fired.
Her body was two blocks from the Omnibus Terminal, one block from the stop where she worked.
There were no scuff marks on her sandals or clothes, indicating that she had not been dragged, but had been killed where she was found. The bullet that killed her has been sometimes reported to be a 9 mm, but news reports at the time of the investigation said the investigators found a .32 caliber slug. (Various police departments in Argentina have issued 9 mm handguns to their officers (Bersa Thunder 9), but the .32 caliber bullet is considered too small for police work.)
Her pants were pulled down below her hips but her underpants were in their normal position. A condom wrapper was found next to her body.