According to the Associated Press, Charlot Jeudy, the leader of a prominent LGBTQ organization in Haiti, was found dead on Monday, according to friends.
Geraldine Clair Museau, a member of the group known as Kouraj, which means “courage,” in English, told The Associated Press that Jeudy’s body was found at his home in the capital of Port-au-Prince. It wasn’t immediately clear how he died, and police didn’t return calls for comment.
According to this tweet and a few other tweets from people in Haiti, they are reporting, he may have been killed.
Charlot Jeudy, militant LGBTI le plus mobilisΓ© d'HaΓ―ti, a Γ©tΓ© tuΓ© hier. Les circonstances de ce meurtre sont encore floues mais c'est une terrible nouvelle pour la communautΓ© et plus largement pour les dΓ©fenseurs des droits humains dans le pays. #Haiti #LGBTQI ?οΈβ?
— AmΓ©lie Baron (@Ameliebaron) November 25, 2019
Jeudy has spoken out against homophobia and was forced to cancel a festival celebrating the Afro-Caribbean LGBTQ community in 2016 because of numerous threats of violence.
In a statement on his group’s website, Jeudy had vowed to keep fighting discrimination.
“Faced with such permanent and brutal stigmatization, violence, and insults, many of us — if not the totality — have lost hope to see our own dignity respected. … That is what I want to fight,” he wrote.
Haiti’s LGBTQ community remains mostly underground because of social stigma, although there are no laws criminalizing homosexual relations as there are in several English-speaking Caribbean islands.
A 2015 human rights report on Haiti by the U.S. State Department said “local attitudes remained hostile to outward” LGBTQ identification and expression, especially in the capital.
