Researcher Susana Vargas, in her study in Mexico City on April 24, 2021.Cristina De Middel / Magnum Photos
How is a serial murderer built in Mexico? Is Mataviejitas a dangerous murderer? Or is she just another victim of that archetypal construction? That was the question that haunted the professor and researcher Susana Vargas as she followed from the United States one of the cases that shook Mexico for more than a decade. From the late nineties to 2006, the mysterious violent death of older adults and the possibility that a single person was behind the macabre murders terrorized a country that was already dawning in those years with brutal crimes, such as Los Zetas or Los Zetas. narcosatanics. Neither the dismembered, nor the massacres,not even the mass murders of working women in Ciudad Juárez in those years had achieved such a mobilization of the authorities as the operations that were undertaken between 2005 and 2006 to hunt down the person they believed at the time to be behind the strangulation of these older women. The arrest of Juana Barraza, 49 years old at the time, nicknamed
The Mataviejitas
, removed the foundations of a culture that, according to Vargas, was key to the construction of the public enemy of Mexico.
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Serial killer and in love
Behind La Mataviejitas was Juana Barraza.
A burly woman, 1.75 meters tall, who had dedicated her entire life to wrestling and commerce.
A woman who the criminologists of the time defined after her arrest with an "innate tendency to serious violence", with a "cold and calculating gaze".
Little is known about the real Barraza, besides having three children, the character made the front pages of newspapers for years.
The photos of her masked as
The Lady of Silence
, her nickname in the
ring
, showing biceps and holding a belt that covered his abdomen, they were the definitive confirmation that a male body like that had been capable of the worst atrocities: strangling dozens of ladies in cold blood, using a stethoscope. Barraza recognizes only one of the 16 crimes he was charged with.
He has been in prison since 2006 with the highest sentence that has been awarded to a criminal in the history of Mexico: 759 years. And she is the only serial killer ever designated as such before her capture in Mexico. "This type of violence was something that Mexicans observed in movies, in the United States, an unknown phenomenon for us ...", the then Mexico City prosecutor, Renato Sales Heredia, pointed out. And these statements surprised Vargas: "Why are serial killers more terrifying than the leaders of the drug cartels?"
For Vargas, the worst crime Barraza could commit in Mexico was murdering older women. Considered in the collective imagination as the mothers of the country. The most vulnerable, "desexualized", with an exclusively maternal vocation: the Virgin of Guadalupe herself. And her executioner, a woman who represents the anti-female archetype, abandoned by her mother, sold to the highest bidder since she was little, a man who cared for her like his daughter. "La Mataviejitas has a history very similar to that of Malintzin [la Malinche]," says Vargas. The black legend of Malinche represents the betrayal in Mexico, the polyglot woman who was sold as a slave to Hernán Cortés and who became his translator and adviser, accused of provoking the great massacres of the conquerors. The first public enemy of Mexico,since before the country was formed.
Vargas questions in the book
La Mataviejitas
(published in English,
The Little Old Lady Killer
) the bases of a criminology that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century to certify Barraza as a full-fledged serial killer. "She does not feel remorse," some of those who reviewed her after the capture came to say of her, in addition to analyzing her gaze in different situations as irrefutable proof of her criminality. The arrest of La Mataviejitas was the spectacle of those years and Vargas explains how the entire Mexican morality also operated behind the construction of that character.
When they began investigating the crimes as a case of serial violence, the authorities were looking for a "brilliant" man. The serial killer stereotype was associated with extremely intelligent men, according to criminology manuals. After the witnesses assured that they had seen someone in women's clothing, they did not even contemplate the possibility that it was a murderer, but a transvestite murderer. It was not until Barraza's arrest, shortly after committing the only crime that she recognizes, that of a woman in her 80s in her apartment, strangled in the same way, with a stethoscope, that the authorities recognized a new criminal profile: that of a woman who was no longer "brilliant", but poor and illiterate.
Vargas insists, however, that his work is not about defending a criminal.
Its objective was to understand what aspects of traditional culture, such as the concept of what a woman should be, also by the victims, influenced the demonization of a murderer for whom a country was mobilized, while the The rest of the narco crimes went unpunished.
“It is interesting how La Mataviejitas did not exist without her disguise, as the only way in which a woman can exist.
This even exempts her from responsibility, ”says Vargas.
Susana Vargas with the cover of the book "Killer". Cristina De Middel / Magnum Photos
In February 2017, Vargas met with Barraza at the Santa Marta prison in Mexico City. He was surprised not to see the cold gaze on the imposing woman he had read so much about. "He even smiled with his eyes," he says. He told him something he did not expect. "He told me that his main activity in the prison consisted of walking old women, can you believe it?", Laughs the researcher. It wasn't a joke. Mexico's public enemy, La Mataviejitas, was no longer smiling or joking. "Do you know what they tell me?" Who do you think you are? You don't send me ””, he relates in the part of the book about that encounter. And she highlighted how after more than a decade in prison and the monster she represented for the country, there was only something that tormented her about what they thought of her: "I can be whatever they want, but above all I am a good mother."
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