· The femicide of Morena Verna, Brenda del Castillo and Lara Gutiérrez interrupted the “normality” this week. The cause is investigated by the prosecutor Adrian Arribas as a femicide, aggravated by premeditation and alevosía.
· I begin with something that Myriam Bregman said, lawyer, reference of the leftist front and now a candidate for national deputy: “No case is recognized as femicide: it always begins with the suspicion that the victim ‘something will have done’.”
Suspicions
· By definition, suspicion is about women (even when they are the victims).
· In 2014, Clarín titled the news about the femicide of Melina Romero “Boliches fan, which abandoned high school.”
· The holder, in addition to placing in the background the crime against his life, sowed suspicion about Melina and not on his murderers (which were unpunished). With Brenda, Lara and Morena the same thing happens: “They voluntarily climbed into a truck”, “went to a party”, “prostituted”, “they mixed with drug traffickers.”
· The conclusions are: They are guilty of their death and how to avoid femicide is the behavior of women.
· The stigma of prostitution is always added to the actual cocktail, which aggravates the accusation about women (the context of sexual abuse is also added because one of the victims was 15 years old). Prostitution was always in debate in the feminist movement but it is never an argument for criminalizing and much less justification or mitigating femicide.
Is it a femicide?
· On this point an unusual debate was opened between representatives of different states at the provincial, local or national level.
· Officials measure in each statement if they say femicide or narco crime and believe that electoral scales incline, attenuate the crime or increase the responsibility of the other.
· They forget that the feminist slogan is the State is responsible and not such or that government. The indicated responsibility is state.
· What these sommeliers of victims and crimes do not know is that femicide and drug trafficking cross their paths from the beginning.
· The term exists in English since the nineteenth century but was installed in the 1970s when feminism begins to discuss the private character of sexist violence and was consolidated as a concept in the 1990s.
· The Mexican anthropologist Marcela Lagarde studying the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, crossed by drug trafficking and the war against the narco, says it is impossible to analyze the murders of women as particular homicides and begin to use the word femicide to talk about everything that led to those murders. Today the word femicide is used in almost everyone.
· Another anthropologist, Rita Segato, explains in “The War Against Women” the vital role of patriarchal violence for the overall domination in society (and not just a subject of women).
· And when he talks about femicides, he explains the concept of the “pedagogy of cruelty”, whose objective is to promote and get used to the “show of the prey of life until waste, until only remains left.” I invite you to think about this every time you see images or listen to stories of the bodies of the murdered women.
· Another text by Rita Segato, “Scripture in the body of women killed in Ciudad Juárez” addresses how the women’s body is reduced to objects to send messages or execute revenge in drug trafficking contexts.
· And on drug trafficking, its organization is built on the inequalities and violence of capitalist and patriarchal societies. The journalist Cecilia González explains that women are always “the workers of the narco”, occupy the lowest ranks and explain a large part of the female prison population (most poor women are prejuded to minor crimes related to drugs such as transfer -Mulas- and retail sale).
Not one less
· When they found the bodies of Brenda, Lara and Morena there were marches in many cities of the country.
· In Argentina, femicides are not a novelty, there is one every 36 hours (a portion connected with narcocriminality), according to the figures of feminist associations (the State decided that it is not even interested in knowing).
· Patriarchal violence is reproduced in a context of social and economic crisis and public policies (with marginal budgets) aimed at addressing gender violence.
· For its marginal place in the budgets, its elimination does not save anything and sends a message above all: the life of women, especially poor, has no value. And that contempt is confirmed in the state refusal to search when families denounce and in speeches to erase the violence that end with their lives.
· Morena Verdi, Brenda del Castillo and Lara Gutiérrez. It is a practice of feminism to name the dead in the demonstrations, not to victimize us, but because the street is the only place where the names that the powerful want to erase are still writing.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
