Paula Andrea Restrepo, 18, kidnapped and murdered in Los Andes, Antioquia.social networks
This is the web version of Americanas, the EL PAÍS América newsletter that deals with news and ideas with a gender perspective.
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Women in Colombia do not live in peace.
On public transport, at the school gate, anywhere, they are at risk.
The week that ends the news evidenced the magnitude of a problem that still does not have the attention it deserves.
Women in Colombia are attacked every day.
Lina María Quintero was kidnapped and sexually abused.
The police found her impaled and with two blades in her mouth.
It happened in Villavicencio, the news was barely known in Bogotá.
Lina María is a Business Administration student and sells arepas on the street.
"I was going to buy coal to sell the arepas the next day, some guys approached me in my car, they made me drive to a dark place on a long highway, there they assaulted me and sexually abused me," said the woman. to the magazine
Semana
, from the clinic where he receives medical attention.
The story of Paula Andrea Restrepo, on the other hand, cannot be told by her.
Her neighbors from Los Andes, Antioquia, do it.
The 18-year-old girl was kidnapped on her way out of school.
Her family and her friends started looking for her when it got dark and she did not come to her house.
She was found the morning of the next day on the side of a road tied hand and foot with stab wounds all over her body, signs of torture and sexual violence.
“The body of the young woman presented injuries to the neck and head caused by a weapon and a blunt object.
The victim died of strangulation, ”the Prosecutor's Office detailed.
In ten days, four femicides were registered in Antioquia alone.
The case of Brazilian journalist Danielle Silveira, beaten by her ex-partner, Colombian journalist Juan Fernando Barona, was recorded in a video revealed this week by the NGO Jacarandas.
In the footage, Barona is seen beating her and then dragging her along with another man.
The video of Silveira almost passed out and defenseless, was released a few days after the story of Hilary Castro, a 17-year-old girl, abused by a man who threatened her with a knife on public transport.
Castro, tired of the fact that no authority attended to her complaint, recorded herself in a video for networks and recounted what happened to her.
In a few hours, and thanks to the fact that the video went viral, the police captured the person responsible, but before being sent to prison he died in police custody.
According to a survey of the program
I move safely
, of the Mayor's Office of Bogotá, three out of four women consider that the night in Bogotá is dangerous, 61.3% describe the feeling regarding security in Transmilenio (the only transport system) as "unpleasant" and 27.2% as "worrying".
More than 70% have experienced or witnessed sexual harassment on or around the bus system.
In Bogotá alone, this year 5,743 sexual crimes have been registered.
Until the beginning of September, the Colombian femicide observatory reported 445 cases of women murdered because of their gender throughout the country.
Women in Colombia are taking to the streets to protest as the last way out of the impunity that surrounds gender violence.
Last week they blocked the streets of northern Bogotá because they urgently need to be heard.
Some recommended articles of the week:
And to finish... a series/essay:
By Almudena Barragan.
I want to recommend the series
El fin del amor
,
of the same name as the essay that gave rise to it, written by Tamara Tenenbaum.
Well, actually the title of the book is:
The End of Love: Wanting and Fucking in the 21st Century.
The new dramatic comedy that has just been released hits the screens through Amazon Prime Video and fictionalizes the successful essay by the Argentine philosopher.
Jacques Lacan said that love is “the illusion of making two one”.
He also said that love arises when the other occupies an essential place in one's own fault;
and that "to love is to give what you do not have to someone who is not" and Tenenbaum uses these premises to develop an entire essay that questions current love relationships -monogamous and heterosexual- to talk about love, sex and freedom in this chaotic time that we have had to live.
The journalist and philosopher, raised within the strict norms of Orthodox Judaism as a child, embarks as an adult on a personal journey in which she will dissect her own family relationships, tradition and the questioning of her own thinking.
She is accompanied by her friends, her clan.
A very varied group that puts an entire generation in front of the mirror.
I won't give you any spoilers, but guess what...?
Nor does the end of romantic love bring greater clarity about human relationships.
After all, love is still just as complex and liquid as it was in the days of Jacques Lacan.