The world united in shock last weekend when a gunman opened fire in an Orlando, Florida gay club, killing at least 49 and injuring 53 innocent victims in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
The homophobic terrorist attack on the LGBT+ community was so unfathomable that it seemed like something of an isolated incident to many.
Only it wasn’t. It turns out that there was another similar attack at a gay club in Xalapa, Veracruz in Mexico less than four weeks ago, which killed seven people and injured at least 12 more, Mic reports. It just went widely unreported in the media.
In this case, numerous armed men stormed the Mexican club, La Madame, on May 22, firing on the approximately 180 people gathered inside.
According to both TeleSur and Mexican daily newspaper Excelsior, the gunmen fled the scene immediately following the attack.
The injured victims then called for help and spread word of the shooting on social media. However, paramedics struggled to find hospitals to receive the victims, as the staff on duty claimed there weren’t enough of them to handle the scale of the emergency.
Speaking to Sinembargo, Luis Manuel Rivera Aguilar, the uncle of victim Luis Donaldo Rivera Calderon reportedly said:
They opened the doors violently and drew their guns. There were shouts. They had no mercy. Bullets ricocheted everywhere. The white tiles were stained red. Those who wanted to escape slipped in puddles of blood. It was a slaughterhouse.
The story has risen to further prominence following the attack in Orlando, and TeleSur argues that authorities have chosen to ignore the ‘homophobic aspect’ of the crime, blaming it instead on a ‘territorial fight over drug sales’, which goes some way to explaining why the story has flown under the radar.
Besides being yet another disappointing example of how much more coverage attacks receive when they happen in the likes of the U.S. and the UK, it’s also a haunting reminder that these sorts of horrific attacks on the LGBT+ community are by no means as rare or isolated as some might think.
This kind of hatred and senseless violence needs to stop.
