Sandra Cabrera

Some of the women who had worked in the cabarets and whiskerías that fronted for brothels moved to private apartments operated by the same type of people who had operated the brothels. The motels that once rented to independent sex workers now turn them away in order to avoid problems with the city. In response, some of the women have organized casitas, where a group of women rent a house and set aside a part of the earnings from each client session to cover the rent. Basically, women who were previously working in brothels are still working in brothels, and women who were previously independent are still independent. Georgina Orellano, secretary general of AMMAR as of 2017, says of the new legal regime that "It took all the activity to a much darker and hidden place."

In 2017, a small public square in the area around the bus terminal where she had worked was named in her honor.

Orellano says that the new prohibitionist regime recognizes only victims and pimps, and criminalizes women who enter sex work voluntarily. The current municipal law on sex work in Rosario, passed in 2013, mentions assistance and support; Orellano says that the city department responsible for implementing the assistance has helped so few women that they can be counted on the fingers of the two hands. AMMAR's last survey found one hundred women working the streets in Rosario, and it is estimated that another six hundred are working indoors.

Walter Miranda, who had been removed as chief of the Public Morality unit following Cabrera's complaint because he had been providing protection to brothels that trafficked underage girls and foreign women, as well as extorting bribes from street-based sex workers, continued to advance through the ranks. By 2012 he had become head of Regional Unit II, which gave him control of all provincial police forces in the city of Rosario. The brothels in the area around the bus terminal that he had been protecting were still there. During an investigation of trafficking in humans, a phone tap of one of the brothel owners recorded the owner asking how to go about selling cocaine. The answer was that he should bribe Hugo Tognoli, the highest ranking police officer in the province of Santa Fe. Laura Cosido, a judge in the Federal Chamber of Rosario, stated that "There was never such an open relationship between narcos and police." AMMAR, Cabrera's union, complained that the drug and human trafficking networks were the same.

In 2012 the director Lucrecia Mastrangelo released a film titled, Sex, dignity and death: Sandra Cabrera, unpunished crime.

Finally, in 2010, after years of lobbying and activism by AMMAR Rosario, a different administration repealed the articles of the law that Cabrera had campaigned against. While she didn't live to see the victory, she was part of the fight, and it was a more fundamental restructuring of society's relationship with sex work than eliminating a police unit.

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.

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.

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.

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's work to stop the spread of AIDS and other STDs began in October, 2001.

Everyone else assumed it was the police. The police in Argentina have a history of killing reformers and killing sex workers. A few years earlier, investigators in Mar del Plata had uncovered a police conspiracy to use a fictional serial killer to cover up the murder of thirty two sex workers, killed because they wanted to leave their pimps, who were paying the police. The Santa Fe police killed the social activist Claudio Lepratti during the disturbances of 2001 when he tried to warn them off from firing at a school where children were eating lunch. At Cabrera's funeral procession, the AMMAR members shouted "We know, we know, that our colleague was killed by the police."

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.

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.

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

Sandra Cabrera (27 October 1970 – 27 January 2004) was an Argentine street-based sex worker, trade unionist, and campaigner for sex worker rights. She was killed in 2004 when her anti-corruption efforts started being successful and threatened police corruption networks and her defense of street workers' rights threatened brothel owners.

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.