Marta Álvarez was subjected to almost a decade of abuse and humiliation because of her sexuality. The lesbian activist spent nine years in a Colombian prison and experienced a series of relentless homophobic attacks at the hands of the guards and officials. Álvarez spent years of her sentence trying to speak out about the inequality and eventually took her case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), where she argued she was being discriminated against for not receiving same-sex conjugal visits. Little over two decades after her case was first submitted to the commission, she became the first LGBT person to be given a public apology by the Colombian government.