Jennifer Campos Calle was 13 years old and liked tae kwon do.
She lived in an exposed hollow brick house in the El Fortín neighborhood, Virrey del Pino,
La Matanzadeep
.
Five blocks from the nearest asphalt and 600 meters from the river that gives its name to the most populous district in the country.
His father, Franz Campos Rioja, 34 years old and Bolivian, had been selling construction materials in that place for a few years to neighbors, as humble as him.
He kept the money from the business in a shoe box.
As he had already been attacked three times, three brave bulldogs had joined the family.
They were not enough.
Last Thursday morning, four assailants arrived there.
They were traveling in a white Peugeot 208, stolen six days earlier, during which time
they committed nine break-ins with that same car
.
Obviously, without anyone stopping them.
The car in which Jennifer's murderers were traveling had been stolen 6 days before.
In that period they used it for 9 entrances.
They entered the house.
Two of the criminals fired pepper spray at the man and tied him up with zip ties.
They started hitting him with the butt of a gun.
They asked him for the money.
Jennifer apparently wanted to escape to get help.
A third thief, who had been left standing on the sidewalk, shot him.
“I found my daughter face down.
She was barely breathing, I thought it was the effect of the pepper spray.
I tried to contain her, I touched her back, her head, I told her: 'Calm down, calm down, she's over, she's over, she's finished, calm down.'
But she didn't react.
I managed to turn it over and saw a pool of blood.
Then I loaded her onto the motorcycle, a neighbor stood between her and me.
So I took her to the hospital at kilometer 32, where she died,” Franz later told the press.
The remains of dried blood were still visible on his forehead, the result of the blows of the thieves, who at the closing of this column had been identified, but not caught.
The loot was about 50,000 pesos.
Five days before, a few kilometers from there, in the same district of La Matanza, but in the 8 de Diciembre neighborhood, five people had been shot to death and another seven had been injured.
The massacre happened when an assembly of residents of usurped lands was shot by hitmen who were part of a mafia that speculated with those illegal lands.
The tragedy of González Catán and the murder of Jennifer are, in some way, the same news.
They reflect stories that only occasionally reach us all.
They show with unfiltered cruelty what that 47% of poverty in the GBA and half of the economy in black mean:
it is keeping $50,000 in a shoe box and having a son of a bitch kill your daughter for it
.
They talk about that other Argentine reality.
That of unlimited and unpunished violence.
That of perpetual decay.
That of state abandonment, embodied in false promises at election time and in shameful silences when bullets kill.
The surprising speeches from Davos and the comings and goings in Congress between the ruling party and the dialogue-oriented opponents do not reach there.
They don't know about unions that fix salaries of one million pesos for basic wages or about union organizations that suddenly come back to life and declare strikes.
They do not read the open letters of great cultural figures who worry about the fate of the state institutes of Cinema, Theater and Music.
Life there is hard and nothing more.