For this interview, she calls herself Andrea Ene, a name under which she conjures up six years of abuse, an assassination attempt and the threat of not seeing her son again.
He never wanted her to work outside, but she did it in 2019 as a manager at a restaurant.
A few months later the pandemic arrived and returned her to the hell of the house multiplied by the liquor shots and the constant beatings.
“He didn't like anything he did, he didn't give me money for groceries, just 200 pesos [about 10 euros] a week to feed four people;
The time we spent locked up by the covid he was stressed, he blamed me that he was the one who supported us, that he did not have to do it with my eldest son because he was not his.
And he went out to drink with his friends.
I no longer have friends because he took care of running the few he knew. "
The Zoom remains without an image so that no one can see it and sometimes it cuts out: it is not the signal, Andrea cries in silence and you can hardly hear how she sucks her misfortune.
The story of this 34-year-old woman shudders.
She came to Mexico from Colombia with a man who became a violent stranger.
When the Government decreed the cessation of non-essential activities, Andrea lost her job and did not confine herself at home, but in her room, where she tried to protect her life and that of her children.
Until the yelling, the insults and the humiliations stopped.
The National Shelter Network, an organization that provides temporary homes to these women, has increased its rescues by 300% during the pandemic compared to the previous year.
In the last two months of 2020, a woman asked them for help every two hours.
They have assisted 15,692 victims, 39% more than in 2019. Andrea Ene lives with her young son, the result of her relationship with the aggressor, in one of those shelters in central Mexico.
He sent the oldest to Colombia.
Confinement has turned these women's homes into a cage that they shared with the beast.
One of those days of unbearable noise, Andrea went out to the street and asked the police for help.
She was already in the car when the husband caught up with them: "Boss, put her down," he told them, "she's Colombian, you know, prostitute, I've already paid for her and she's not finished."
She told them that they lived together.
"But the police didn't want any problems and they took me out of the car."
With the beating came a certainty: "You cannot report me here, they already know how you Colombians are, let it be clear to you," he told me. "
Report does not provide the key to get out of the cage.
Rather, it is a bureaucratic maze strewn with humiliations.
The legal route is eternal and distressing.
Around 90% of femicides go unpunished.
If killing is free, reporting is of little use.
The last time Andrea escaped to do so, it took her a full day and three visits to different offices.
It was his friends who took pity on Andrea.
It seems that something is changing in a country where men kill more than 3,000 women each year.
About 10 a day.
One night he left Andrea and her oldest son outside to sleep in the open.
He made the decision.
He was never coming back.
But wherever she went, the aggressor's fury caught up with her.
Until the National Shelter Network gave him shelter, psychological help and empowerment.
"In my life I allow violence from anyone again."
And cries in the darkness of the Zoom.
—Eps