By Maria Verza -
The Associated Press
The saxophone means life to María Elena Ríos, but she came to hate it because it almost caused her death.
That is, at least, what the 29-year-old Mexican who survived an acid attack planned by her ex-partner believed for a while, who could not bear that music was her profession.
“I gradually reconciled (with the instrument), but I hated it because I saw it as the culprit.
My attacker was very annoyed that I was a musician because he said that musicians are lazy
, starving, that we only take drugs, drink and that surely when I went to my presentations I would have orgies”, recalls Ríos.
Later she understood that what he had not forgiven her for was her leaving him and regaining her freedom, which is why he wanted to "dissolve" her.
More than three years after the attack that occurred in southern Mexico, the perpetrators and their ex-partner are in jail, the latter accused of ordering the brutal attack, but another person involved is still on the run.
And while the process advances, Ríos is immersed in a media battle together with activists and survivors to achieve tougher laws against this type of aggression.
“They forced me to be the defender of my rights and of the compañeras who can get close,” she says.
María Elena Ríos holds her saxophone at the end of a rehearsal at the music faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City.
Ginnette Riquelme / AP
Now the saxophone is her "sword", she says, a way of feeling protected from
the harassment she still suffers from the circle of her attacker, an influential politician and businessman from the state of Oaxaca
, where the attack took place.
That is why she combines her music classes in Mexico City, where she is a refugee, with activism and hearings before the courts.
She always does so accompanied by bodyguards assigned to her by the federal government and also fear: that of her family and hers, which she tries to hide under a mask and clothing, often “acid green” with which she sends out a symbolic and silent cry. .
[Her ex-partner murdered her and threw her into the sea: the femicide of a Colombian immigrant that shakes a tourist city in Spain]
Acid attacks began to resonate internationally due to cases in Southeast Asia but have occurred in many parts of the world, including Latin America.
In Mexico, survivors began organizing shortly before the pandemic and only a few dozen have gone public with their cases, some after decades of silence.
The Carmen Sánchez Foundation, the first group that brought together several of them, indicated this month, citing data from the health authorities, that 105 women were attacked with chemical and corrosive substances in 2022, but only 28 reported it.
The "Malena" bill would classify acid attacks as a felony equivalent to attempted femicide.
They are currently treated as simple assault or bodily harm. Ginnette Riquelme / AP
Rios did it quickly.
His profession and above all the fact that his ex-partner, Juan Manuel Vera Carrizal, was a well-known Oaxacan businessman and former deputy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), motivated his case to be in the media.
Vera Carrizal has pleaded not guilty but has been in prison since 2020. The PRI expelled him from the party.
[This is how this Colombian woman returns the smiles to the victims of acid burns]
In a recent meeting with the AP news agency, the saxophonist explained that the threats and harassment against her and her family began before the attack, when he wanted to prevent her from breaking the relationship.
The intimidation continued to the present day.
“It's the only thing a survivor tries (to do), to survive on a daily basis.
They ask me, and what plans do you have for the future?
Well, none, because I don't know if he's going to kill me tomorrow
," she said.
In January a judge granted Vera Carrizal house arrest, but Ríos' public complaint caused the measure to be reversed.
Mexico approves a law against those who attack women with acid or corrosive substances
Nov 5, 202201:44
"If my case is such a media case and it continues to be corrupted, it terrifies me just thinking about how the process of other women is," the young woman lamented.
In recent weeks, a bill that bears her nickname, Malena, has begun to take shape to classify the crime as an attempted femicide.
Although it is a local initiative that would apply only in Mexico City, it has opened a debate so that
these attacks stop being considered as injuries throughout the country and become a crime in itself
that puts life at risk .
[Mexico approves a law against those who attack women with acid or corrosive substances]
Meanwhile, Ríos rehearses.
“When I start to assemble my saxophone I feel that I am taking shape”.
In his scores there are handwritten messages: "You can, you play beautifully", one of them reads.
Together with her family, music is possibly the only thing that unites the girl who, at the age of nine, had to choose between playing soccer or joining the band in a community in the arid mountains of southern Mexico, and the woman she cannot avoid. the tears when remembering how her skin cracked when the acid was thrown at her or the sadness in her parents' eyes when she opened her eyes again in the hospital after being hospitalized for five months.
The attack on María Elena Ríos was ordered by her ex-partner, Juan Manuel Vera Carrizal, a well-known Oaxacan businessman and former representative of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Ginnette Riquelme / AP
The artistic community has also reached out to her, including Alejandro Sanz, who played with her this month in the capital.
But the return to the stage after the attack was marked in his memory: it was last year at one of the most important festivals in Mexico, Vive Latino.
Ríos recalled that she felt “eternal” and that while she was jumping with her saxophone and her acid green dress she was tempted to throw herself into the public knowing that people would save her, as she did when she was isolated in the hospital and hundreds of women chanted for her one word: justice.