The victim of Alexis Zárate speaks: "We are many and we are together. And we are not silent anymore"

Natalia Iocco

07/06/2020 - 8:56

• Clarín.com
• Police

Giuliana Peralta takes in the air as if hugging the oxygen that enters her mouth. Find courage, gather strength to speak and go on. She tells how she can, how she comes out, the path that led her to a new beginning. Now that he is 25 years old, he talks to Clarín so that "he can improve the treatment of Justice and society with the victims."

He speaks with the same courage that he had six years ago when he denounced Alexis Zárate, then an Independent footballer. “I know that not all of them are lucky to have been able to speak, to have a bra as important as the one I had. That is why I found myself with the duty to go all the way, for all of them, ”he maintains.

Giuliana is known to have been the victim of rape. That on March 16, 2014, she joined forces from where there was none and went, with her mother, to report her abuser: Alexis Zárate. Nicolás Pérez and his then partner, Martín Benítez, also players, sent messages and called her nonstop. The three sought to silence her .

“Starting today, I am going to try to take off this backpack so heavy that I carried all these years to continue with my life . They were very hard years, I put my body and my soul. Many times I was about to fall, but I am proud to have made it to the end, ”she says now from her home. She wants others to know what had to happen, to "know the process", to change it.

Alexis Zárate was a Temperley footballer when he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for the violation of Giuliana Peralta.

His story begins in March 2016. From those days he remembers with anguish the exposure and the mistreatment. “My case was made public without my consent because he and those involved were soccer players. I want it to be understood that those of us who go through a violation do not want to tell it . In my case, I told my mother hours later because she saw me with my face completely disfigured from crying and, thanks to the fact that she forced me to tell what had happened to me, I was able to do it, ”she says.

With her family she went to the Avellaneda police station 1 "hours after being raped." What followed was the judicial maze that victims must go through with pain on the surface.

"Despite having received messages from Martín Benítez and Nicolás Pérez that please do not report, I wanted to do the same so that no other girl happens what I went through in that department," he rebuilds.

Giuliana Peralta, along with her lawyer Raquel Hermida Leyenda (left), during the trial where former soccer player Alexis Zárate was sentenced. Photo Alfredo Martínez.

Then came the skills and the revictimization: “They took me to do a swab with a man . A man. After being raped having to go through a male doctor, naked. I also went to the hospital and clinics for protocol studies. I started therapy, I had to get a lawyer, "he recalls with anguish.

He also says that he went through three psychological and three psychiatric exams because defense attorneys sought to discredit his account by asking for annulments. Due to procedural errors or lack of expertise of the investigators, six times she had to undergo interviews with professionals who made her relate what she had suffered, answer questions and take tests that corroborated that she had been the victim of sexual abuse.

Outside the judicial offices he also found himself mistreated: “I had to endure having my case in the news, someone talking about me, saying they wanted fame or that they were looking for money. That they disbelieve me or leave the place to doubt. I had to see my photos, I do not understand why they always chose just the one with the bikini or the one with the skirt ”, he explained with the same anguish.

The arrest of Alexis Zárate, last Friday.

Giuliana had to close her social networks and "isolate herself in a bubble" of contention with her friends and family. She says that her lawyer, Raquel Hermida Leyenda, "took her case out of the drawer in which it was literally kept." He claims that there were "many internal arrangements" to silence her .

It is that for 2014 Benítez and Zárate were still playing in Independiente as if nothing had happened. His football careers were not interrupted at that time despite the complaint. The impact on television channels, newspapers and magazines did not have its counterpart on the court or in Independiente.

At least until 2016, when the Avellaneda club yielded the pass from Zárate to Temperley, where he played until the day he was sentenced.

The Oral Court No. 1 of Lomas de Zamora found him guilty of the crime of "aggravated sexual abuse" and sentenced him to six and a half years in prison. A sentence that began to be served this Friday, after the Buenos Aires Supreme Court rejected the appeals filed by the defense and confirmed the sentence.

The trial was in August 2017 and lasted a week. " It was the worst week of my entire life, " says Giuliana, who saw her abuser go free despite the sentence.

The afternoon that Zárate was convicted of the courts of Lomas de Zamora he had to play a game with the Temperley shirt. There was so much anger that it generated that he had been summoned, the escraches that were preparing in the stands, that they had to suspend him.

Giuliana Peralta, in the trial for the sexual abuse of which she was a victim. Photo Alfredo Martínez.

"During the trial they tried to defame me at all times," recalls Giuliana, who also wanted to witness him. "I saw each testimony, my soul was destroyed a little more with each thing I heard," he adds.

After the conviction, the defense appealed to the House of Cassation and at that hearing Giuliana learned that Alexis Zárate had traveled to Latvia to test himself at FK Liepāja, of the First Division of that country. The club accepted him as a player and wanted to sign him. The judge, despite the conviction, authorized it.

When they found out, she and her lawyer filed an appeal for her to return to the country and so it was that - on the advice of the Justice - Zárate withdrew from the activity.

Alexis Zárate, with the shirt of Independiente.

This Friday, when they asked for his arrest, Giuliana was working in a relative's pasta factory. Now the former footballer spends his nights in the dungeons of the 2nd Avellaneda police station until the Buenos Aires Penitentiary Service (SPB) grants a place in a prison.

“I found out about the arrest when I came home from work, driving, alone. I started crying as much as I did that morning trying to get home . I managed to get there and my family came to contain me as they did all these years ”.

So for Giuliana a duel begins that took six years of struggle and effort. Pérez and Benítez managed to evade the criminal action for their participation in the events. 

Before Clarín's consultation , Hermida Leyenda explained that it remains to define what will happen to the civil case "against these three players and also against the Independent club for their actions during the complaint." For the moment, Giuliana has not decided if she wants to continue with the civil action.

“Once and for all we have to end all kinds of violence against us. Crazy, we didn't come into this world to be subdued, silenced, beaten, raped, or killed. The entire society must change, Justice must change and protect us. They have to give us the tools so that reporting is not such an unpleasant process for victims. We are many and we are together. And we don't shut up anymore . ”

In the last ten years in Argentina there is an average of one femicide every 30 hours. According to statistics from the Supreme Court's Office of Domestic Violence, in 2018 alone there were 278. The majority of murders occur in the houses of the victims and are committed by couples or ex.

Where to callLine 144

Care for women in situations of violence.

Attention to Victims of Family Violence.

EMJ