Vanesa Campos

Vanesa Campos was a trans sex worker and an undocumented migrant from Peru living in Paris.

In 2012, after Argentina passed a law allowing citizens to change their civil status upon a simple declaration, Karen and Vanesa Campos left for Buenos Aires.

However, Argentinean police has remained particularly cruel when dealing with trans people, pushing Vanesa to move to Europe.

She settled in Paris without legal immigration papers with the goal to earn enough money to buy a house for her isolated and widowed mother.

In September 2016, she began to work as a prostitute every night near the road of Pré Catelan, an area in the Bois de Boulogne occupied by a small community of trans people from Latin America, such a location kept them safe from the control and harassment of pimps.

Despite her derisory income, she managed to send little money every month to her mother, her brother, and two sisters.

According to one of her roommates, “she was never ashamed when she was asked what she was doing for a living.” Officially notified that she had to leave French territory, she could have however gotten her situation regularised on grounds of her health.

Yet, Vanessa used to be sporty and was involved with a few organisations and in particular with Acceptess-T.

According to Giovanna Rincon, the head of this organisation, Vanesa was eager to help the weak, never afraid to “go on the front line to defend her friends and work colleagues.” A friend describes her as “a huge loudmouth who wasn’t scared of anything.”

The murder of Vanesa Campos happened in a context of increasing criminality in the Bois de Boulogne.

She was 36 when she murdered at the Bois de Boulogne during the night of 16 to 17 August 2018.

Her murder occurred after she resisted a group of men armed with a gun stolen from a police officer.

This crime took place in a context of rising insecurity in the Bois de Boulogne, a situation which is the result of a new law aimed at reinforcing the "fight against the prostitution system” by penalizing prostitutes’ clients, thus forcing sex workers to retreat deeper into the woods where they are safe from police intervention but left at the mercy of mafia gangs.

Ten suspects, nine Egyptians and a Syrian, including at least two minors, were arrested between August 2018 and January 2019 in France and Germany.

The prosecutors seeks to charge nine men for the murder.

On January 30, 2022, two of them were sentenced to 22 years' imprisonment for organised murder, and the others were sentenced to three to six years' imprisonment.

Vanesa Campos grew up in Cayaltí, a small village in northern Peru.

She was forced to leave her home as her parents did not understand her gender identity.

She became friends with Karen who came to be her role model and taught her how to defend herself.

They both left their villages to go and live in the capital, Lima.

She started living with two friends in a one-bedroom apartment in the neighbourhood of porte de Clignancourt, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris.

Throughout the summer 2018, a gang of Egyptians were racketeering prostitutes and their clients, their attacks were daily.

Vanesa Campos tried to alert the police during one of their patrols, however, due to a lack of proof the officers did not respond to her complaints: “It is always the same.

They would ask for their identities, but we didn’t know them.

Even though we were very precise in our descriptions, they just wouldn’t listen.

After all, we were just a bunch of hookers.

Who cares about us?” Testimonies show, indeed, that police officers would mock and humiliate trans prostitutes and undocumented immigrants instead of helping them.

Those who were both undocumented and working as prostitutes never dared filing official complaints at the police station for fear that they would get deported.

Vanesa Campos then implemented the use of an alert signal for dangerous situation and handed out tear gas canisters to her fellow prostitutes.

She hired a bodyguard, himself an undocumented worker, who on August 14, 2018, managed to scare off one of the gangers; the latter, on the same night, broke into a police vehicle and stole a gun (other sources place the theft on August 9 ).

On August 16, 2018, about 11pm, the Egyptians came back in numbers and attacked The Bodyguard.

Vanesa Campos was then left alone to face them and screamed for help: “¡Chicas todas!” One of the assailants then shot her in the chest before shooting several times in the air.

They went at her fiercely and unrelentingly using utility knives, sticks, and a handgun, they then fled the scene in a car.

At 11.30pm, Vanesa Campos's colleagues found her lying in a pool of her own blood.

Paramedics, who arrived 30 minutes later, were unable to resuscitate her.

Her body was repatriated to Cayaltí.

Although her civil status had not been changed, upon a request of her mother, her tombstone does bear the name Vanesa.

A small memorial was set in the Bois de Boulogne to pay tribute to her memory.

The day after the murder, indifference was the general reaction.

Newspapers misgendered the victim by quoting a police report about the murder of a (male) “transvestite-prostitute,” which constituted a “second killing of Vanesa.” A police source declared in the Parisien that the victim was “wrong” in facing the aggressors of her client.