Patricia Nasutti, mother of 18-year-old Ursula Bahillo, at the funeral of her daughter, who was killed on Monday.Natacha Pisarenko / AP
The Argentinian Úrsula Bahillo endured the violence against her for seven months in silence, the police officer Matías Ezequiel Rodríguez.
Until one day he began to tell it.
To her friends, to her family and later to the police stations, where she reported him because she was afraid he would kill her.
On Monday night, Bahillo was stabbed to death in a rural area of the Buenos Aires province.
I was 18 years old.
Her femicide has reignited protests against the judicial system and the police, which often fail to protect victims.
Relatives of victims of femicide demand that the Government of Alberto Fernández take urgent measures to prevent more deaths and impunity for the aggressors.
"An aggressor cannot be protected by the same force that has to punish him," says Ada Rico, head of the NGO Casa del Encuentro, a pioneer in the production of statistics on femicides in Argentina.
Between 2010 and 2020, in Buenos Aires and its metropolitan region, 48 women were murdered by their partners or former police partners.
Rico warns that battered women find it very difficult to take the step of reporting and the difficulty increases if the accused is a police officer because his colleagues often cover up for him.
One of the times that Bahillo came to report him to the woman's police station, they did not take a statement because it was the weekend.
Rodríguez was given a psychiatric discharge.
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“I don't give more friend, I don't give more, I'm very sad.
He told me he's going to kill me, ”Bahillo told a friend of hers in November.
“I can't take it anymore, he almost broke my hand, I can't move my wrist.
I want to get out of here.
I am very afraid, it tore all my hair out, it beat me back, ”continues the message broadcast by local media this Wednesday.
The Justice denied the perimeter orders requested against Rodríguez.
Nor did he give Bahillo a panic button.
"Úrsula asked for help, Úrsula denounced, Úrsula should be alive," they point out from Amnesty International.
On Monday night, dozens of people gathered in the Buenos Aires town of Rojas to demand justice for the murdered young woman.
There were stones against the police station, cars burned and a harsh police repression.
A day later, relatives, friends and neighbors demonstrated again.
On Wednesday, while in Rojas a crowd accompanied the funeral procession, in Buenos Aires relatives of other victims of femicide raised their voices.
Next week the Ni Una Menos movement has called for a great mobilization.
“I come from the Prosecutor's Office.
I am tired of asking for justice in addition to the pain I have had for almost four years that I have not had my daughter.
I swore to my daughter that I was going to do justice, but we have judges who are inoperative and a State that is blind, deaf and very corruptible ”, denounced in Plaza de Mayo Marisa Rodríguez, mother of Luna Ortiz.
This 19-year-old was murdered in June 2017.
Beside him, Mónica Susana Ferreira nodded: "Unfortunately we are surrounded by corruption and justice is never done."
The police took 25 days to find the body of his daughter, Araceli Fulles.
She was buried under rubble, lime and concrete in a house just over a kilometer from hers.
“When I went to see her beautiful face, she was no more.
He only had his eyes and teeth ”, he described about the moment of recognition.
Almost four years after her murder, Ferreira denounces the police complicity to cover up some of the suspects and the distrust that the case of Úrsula Bahillo will cause in other women who are victims of violence.
“I will never take my daughter out of the cemetery again, but we have to do something for the women who are alive.
Now which woman is going to report?
If Úrsula filed 18 complaints and they killed her.
They will not report if they see that it does not work, "he warns.
