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Cheerful and spontaneous is how Denisse defines Yajaira.
She tells it, takes a breath, is silent for a few seconds and holds the cry.
Yajaira Isabel Herrera was her neighbor and she was 24 years old when she found her body in a morgue in the city of Medellín, in the Colombian department of Antioquia.
The young woman, who was missing for four days, was shot in the back by her ex-partner.
Dennisse Partidas, 43, met Yajaira four years ago when she immigrated to Medellín from Barquisimeto, Venezuela.
He arrived in the capital of Antioquia with nothing because he sold what he had to start from scratch in Colombia with her 27, 17 and 13-year-old children.
Yajaira lived alone a couple of floors above hers.
Her two sons went to visit her periodically.
Since she was a native of the Caribbean coast, she did not have a close nucleus in the city apart from her children.
Over time, a friendship based on mutual support was born between Dennisse, her eldest daughter, and Yajaira.
She remembers in a special way an occasion in which Yajaira found out that her neighbors did not have food for the day: “She gave me little eggs and little rice.
A little meal for her to have while she was solving ”.
That network of care feels that it was what motivated her to go on a tireless search as soon as she learned of her disappearance.
Yajaira disappeared on July 8, 2022, a week after her birthday.
After spending days without news of her whereabouts, Denisse began a journey to find her.
She walked for more than an hour, went to hospitals and finally arrived at Legal Medicine.
Her worst feeling came true and she found her there.
She was the first to recognize her body and notify the family.
“The first thing I thought about was her children who were waiting for her.
I saw her as a daughter.
It was very hard for me, ”she recalls with a broken voice.
In the midst of uncertainty and no response from the competent entities, Denisse found Buscarlas Hasta Encontrarlas (BHE), a strategy of the feminist political movement Estamos Listas that, through different tools, accompanies and monitors the disappearance of girls and young people in Medellín and the surrounding municipalities.
In these years, their work has become more essential every day and BHE has become a key articulation for the families of the victims.
At the same time, they have witnessed the numerous obstacles that those who search for their missing friends, sisters, and mothers have to overcome.
As mentioned by Gihorama Aristizabal, one of the volunteers that integrates the initiative, one of the main challenges in these processes is to overcome the misinformation that in many cases also spreads from the same institutionality.
The activist explains that it is very common for entities to replicate the 72-hour myth that dictates that one must wait around three days to report a disappearance.
He even says that many times family members are not explained that there is an urgent search mechanism that is vital in these situations.
Aristizabal details that, although women are not murdered in all cases of disappearance, sexist violence materializes in other ways, such as sexual and psychological violence.
In fact, he points out that there are cases that cannot even be solved.
Remember the story of Leidy Andrea Restrepo Goez, who has been missing for six months, and that of Luz Leidy Vanegas, who disappeared on January 1, 2020. In neither case is there clear information about what happened to the women.
Faced with an increasingly tragic scenario, Aristizabal calls on the inoperative State: “Search for them until we find them exists to remind the institutions that they are not doing their job and that we have to denounce all the barriers that they put up for families.
They should put all the existing mechanisms at the service of the search”, claims Aristizabal, adding that it is urgent that, when investigating the phenomenon of disappearance, the gender component be taken into account in a particular way.
Precisely, a feminized fight,
After Yajaira's femicide, Denisse has had to process the duel of the crime and the anxiety that living in a city where women disappear and are killed daily implies.
“I feel like traumatized.
Now my daughter goes to school and I am very afraid that someone will put her in a car and never see her again.
Medellín is very violent for women,” she says.
The data supports her fear.
Only so far in 2023, in Medellín there have been 15 homicides of women, including a transgender woman.
In 2022, the number rose to 27 homicides, of which 14 of them were classified as femicides and, throughout the country, Legal Medicine registered 594 complaints of missing women.
Faced with the painful panorama, different women's movements and feminist NGOs have demanded urgent measures and efficient public policies that make it possible to face it structurally.
One of those voices has been that of Dora Saldarriaga, a councilor for the Estamos Listas movement and who promoted the declaration of a humanitarian crisis due to sexist violence in Medellín two years ago.
Through it, she urged Mayor Daniel Quintero to implement urgent actions, but the government response has been insufficient.
The councilor speaks of the need to launch initiatives such as monitoring protection measures on domestic violence and allocate a large budget to strengthen existing instruments such as the 123 women's hotline.
To the different types of violence suffered by women,
Added to this is the impossibility of real guarantees of justice.
In the case of the Yajaira femicide, six months have already passed and the process does not show substantial progress and the information that their loved ones receive is minimal.
To this is added the economic difficulties of the family that hinder their attendance at judicial proceedings, which has resulted in a possibility of freedom for the femicide.
And that has become a latent fear for Dennisse: “If they release him, I don't know what intentions he will come out with.
Especially since I was one of the first to say that he had something to do with it.
I sensed it."
To this is added the economic difficulties of the family that hinder their attendance at judicial proceedings, which has resulted in a possibility of freedom for the femicide.
And that has become a latent fear for Dennisse: “If they release him, I don't know what intentions he will come out with.
Especially since I was one of the first to say that he had something to do with it.
I sensed it."
To this is added the economic difficulties of the family that hinder their attendance at judicial proceedings, which has resulted in a possibility of freedom for the femicide.
And that has become a latent fear for Dennisse: “If they release him, I don't know what intentions he will come out with.
Especially since I was one of the first to say that he had something to do with it.
I sensed it."
Carmen, Yajaira's sister and who, together with Dennisse, has been in charge of the case, maintains that the femicide had a profound impact on her family.
“Two children were orphaned, my mother is very disoriented.
It was very painful and unexpected.
The only thing we ask is that justice be done, it is our greatest wish.
A pressing demand in a country like Colombia where impunity for crimes such as femicide is around 90%, according to UN Women.
Dennisse goes further and affirms that she will not be at peace until justice arrives for Yajaira.
“If I had the money, I would go to where the case is being handled and I would do everything so that the crime is clarified and we know the truth”, he indicates decisively.
For Denisse, achieving justice in Yajaira's case is a debt to her friend who taught her the power of union between women.
These are our recommended articles of the week:
And a suggestion to finish:
🎥
A movie:
Noise, by Natalia Beristain.
By Sally Palomino
Noise.
Julieta Egurrola in Noise.
Cr. Courtesy of Netflix ©2022Courtesy of Netflix ©2022 (Courtesy of Netflix ©2022)
I didn't expect it to be a movie to have a good time.
I knew that the story of a desperate mother looking for her daughter and her fight against an indolent state would touch on what hurts every time we hear that another woman has been disappeared, that another young man who left his home never returned, that There are families searching even under rocks, however they can, for their daughters or their brothers.
The filmmaker Natalia Beristain manages to shake the viewer with a character -Julia, the mother- who represents the pain and courage of hundreds of women in Latin America.
Noise portrays the reality of Mexico, but it could be Colombia, where the war between the State and the guerrillas has left more than 100,000 people missing, or a country in the Southern Cone, where dictatorships have disappeared thousands.
It is a heartbreaking film, but necessary.
A call to demand answers from governments and also to remind women that they are not alone.
Since its premiere on Netflix, on January 11, the film has accumulated more than 10 million hours viewed, according to the network director, and on Twitter, the hashtag #Let'sMakeMásNoise has brought together voices that tell stories like Julia's, the mother played by the wonderful Mexican actress Julieta Egurrola.
