The famous “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is part of a remote, almost mythical past.
At least, this is an assumption of every rule of law.
At least, that's what the sensible people proclaim.
However, when two bullets end the life of Uma Aguilera and so many other children, more than one of us wonders if the law of retaliation does not fully express what we all intuitively feel.
Until, after so many centuries of internalization of moral and moral norms, reason prevails over the visceral.
However, the doubt remains.
Because even though numerous legal frameworks reject the death penalty, legal language insists again and again on the proportionality between the crime and the punishment.
But what proportionality is alluded to when someone who kills violently, if captured, recites by heart the articles of the Penal Code and the international treaties that irrevocably protect them?
Legal language answers us: it is a symbolic proportionality, measured by the length of the sentence.
We accept it, of course, but the doubt still remains.
Because the truth is that, in our country, the death penalty is accepted and even promoted when a judge releases the next day someone who committed a theft with illegal or "toy" weapons (as if the victim could at that crucial moment distinguish One of another).
And it is promoted when, knowing that the criminal challenges himself and each new time seeks to prove if he “can” do more, the same criminal goes from theft to robbery.
And from robbery to murder.
It is promoted when, out of every hundred crimes, only three come to trial and the perpetrators of the remaining ninety-seven continue their criminal careers.
It was promoted when the Buenos Aires judge Violini, despite having confirmed that prisons were the safest spaces in terms of health, used the excuse of the pandemic to release thousands of prisoners.
The same ones whose families refused to receive and continued to commit crimes, going out to “work” at the cost of innocent lives.
It is promoted when even a murderer has the possibility of appealing to a higher court, again and again, until the sentence expires.
It is promoted when an attempt is made to impose a costly and ineffective jury trial system that puts the lives of ordinary citizens at risk.
Because in that jury trial, if the person who kills is found guilty, he or she can appeal the verdict.
But if the person who kills receives the grace of an acquittal verdict, the victim's relatives must resign themselves to accepting what is unacceptable: impunity.
It is promoted when the murderer, if captured, has a lawyer paid for by the citizens from the first to the last day of his sentence, while the relatives of the person who was taken from his life must beg for Justice.
And if you have a very modest home of your own, you lose the possibility of accessing one of the few Public Defenders of Victims.
With or without a defender, suddenly one must embark on a path for which no one is prepared, seeking Justice to be done, even symbolic justice.
And only then go through the grief.
A duel without time.
But also if, as the right-minded say, “everything is politics”, the death of an innocent girl is also political.
We read that a few days ago a new modality of the pompous "Social Health Program to prevent Recidivism in Buenos Aires prisons" was inaugurated, which aims for "
a subjective repositioning through therapeutic and listening and containment spaces, with educational and work stimuli , cultural, from the psychosocial approach that allows influencing the conditions and dynamics of people's interaction, as well as modifying harmful aspects of their environment, with the aim of improving their quality of life” (sic
).
In short: improve the quality of life of those “deprived of liberty”, some of whom even enjoy a swimming pool that relieves the summer heat, as seen on the networks.
Adding to the original doubt is another: Who improves the quality of life of Umma's parents and little sisters?
And if we think about the organizations at their service, does UNICEF, to name one of the many, take care of these girls, given that it does take care of “minors in conflict with criminal law”?
Regarding UNICEF, the death penalty is promoted when the Convention on the Rights of the Child is invoked to exonerate adolescents armed with swords from guilt and charge.
Because the last few decades have seen several generations of kids grow up who have naturalized that their parents don't work, that their grandparents don't work.
Because why go to school if it is much more profitable to be a soldier for drug traffickers, entering the cycle of getting high to kill and killing to get high.
The death penalty is promoted in the province of Buenos Aires not only by Violini.
It is also the case when, by action or omission, a Secretary of Security (who "didn't have a hair in sight," say the neighbors), a mayor who inherited the legacy abandoned by the one with the Marbella yacht, a governor, A Minister of Security and a Minister of Justice and Human Rights, far from being interested in the human rights of citizens, are concerned about the human rights of criminals.
Because he didn't touch them.
Because the lottery of life did not turn them upside down with the violent loss of a loved one.
By the way, these lines resonate only as a litany.
For all our dead.
For the past.
For those who will come.
Diana Cohen Agrest is a Doctor of Philosophy and essayist. She is president of the Civil Association of Justice Plants.