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"My house is empty when I get up. I look at his bed and it's empty. I know he will never come back for what they did to him. I want justice for my son," Graciela Sosa said Tuesday before thousands of people summoned in front of the Argentine Congress. A month ago, his son, Fernando Báez Sosa , 18, was killed by a group of rugby players in Villa Gesell, a seaside resort on the Argentine coast. He was beaten until he was killed in front of a disco and then left as if nothing had happened, until hours later they were arrested by the police. Eight of them are now charged with double aggravated homicide.
"Perpetual, perpetual, perpetual" and "Murderers, murderers, murderers!" Shouted the protesters gathered in Buenos Aires to accompany the parents of the murdered teenager. "Justice for Fernando", was read on the A4 sheets that were raised and also on the image projected behind the stage where Fernando's parents, the young woman who was his girlfriend and his schoolmates, went up. A photograph reminded the young man between a flag of Paraguay, the country of his parents, and one of Argentina, where he was born and raised.
"My life is not easy," Graciela Sosa repeated several times, with a voice and arms raised. "I want justice. I want them to pay for what they did to him. He was my life, my love, I called him my baby. They don't know what I miss him," he added before collapsing in a chair and receiving a huge ovation from the protesters. .
Argentina has not talked about anything else since January 18. The economic crisis and the worries of the negotiations with the IMF for foreign debt barely make a dent in the channels and news sites 24 hours, where the crime of Villa Gesell accounts for most of the time and space. The initial details were those of any fight between two groups that intersect with shoves and insults in a disco. The guards expelled them from the place and one of the groups wanted to continue the fight in the street. When one of the young men was left alone, the ten rugbiers (as they are called in Argentina) pounced on him in the back and beat him on the head until he was killed.
The beating occurred on the main street of a city that receives almost two million tourists every summer and was recorded in dozens of home videos and in the security cameras of the shops. For weeks, the Argentines saw how Fernando Báez Sosa received blows when he was already passed out. Then how the aggressors, between 18 and 21, cleaned the blood from their hands when they passed by the police; how they hugged each other smiling and congratulated themselves on the beating; how one of them approached the place to notify his friends by telephone that the young man had "expired"; how minutes later they got together to eat a hamburger a few meters from where Fernando had been killed.
Days later, the messages exchanged by the killers for WhatsApp, empty of remorse, rehearsing alibis, alien to the traces they had left all over the places arrived. And later, the details of the ten young people in the Dolores prison (in the province of Buenos Aires), “children well” in a special cell without contact with other prisoners willing to do justice on their own, and the food they rejected for disgusting and the visits of his parents with bags full of the supermarket. And viewers and readers were even more incensed when they learned the story of a detainee number 11, accused by the other ten of being the material author of the crime when Villa Gesell had not even stepped on.
Rugby in the spotlight
The crime also opened a national debate around the culture of rugby in Argentina, which is associated with the upper classes and, at its youngest stage, is known as violent and quarrelsome. The stories of rugby players who attack other young people, always in numerical inferiority and generally poorer ones, are recurring in battles where it is not possible to lose. The victim of this pack complied with the norm: he was the son of a building manager (janitor) who started his law degree in March. The detainees also: belong to wealthy families of Zárate, a rich port municipality near the city of Buenos Aires; many live in closed neighborhoods with private security and some are even children of senior municipal government officials.
The Nautical Club Arsenal de Zárate, where some of the detainees played, hurried a statement in which it assured that violence is not among the values that it promulgates, and old glories of the sport that agreed with the message came out. Even rugby teams formed by convicts said that thanks to that sport they had found meaning in their lives in jail. Whoever wins the cultural battle, the fate of the ten detainees seems cast. Everyone faces a mountain of evidence against him, that the accusation has taken care of leaking the press drop by drop, and everything indicates that it only remains to wait for justice to determine the responsibility of each in the beating.
"It feels, feels, Fernando is present," the people chanted on Tuesday in front of the Argentine Congress, where they also asked for all the victims of violence. "My nephew was also killed. I'm here for Fernando, but also for him," said Lorenza, a Paraguayan who traveled by bus from the Lugano neighborhood in the south of the city, along with dozens of other countrymen. Fernando's mother "was a maid, the father was in charge of the building. They sacrificed their lives for their son and they killed him like a dog. He cannot go unpunished," the woman said.
