It is the dream of every neighbor of villa, complex of monoblocks or neighborhood of popular housing: buy the house next door, throw the wall, build and have twice as many square meters to design the property they want. Of course, very few succeed.
Cecilia Strzyzowski (28) and César Sena (19) had that plan. The idea had come from Marcela Acuña (46), César's mother. The houses of the Emerenciano Sena neighborhood, by César's father, were assigned for the couple, who aimed to move, build a pool and live in a house that, inside, would resemble a house in an upper-class neighborhood.
"Once I accompanied them to a shopping mall to look at kitchens. You don't know the cute things they were thinking of buying! Supposedly my daughter was happy," says Gloria Romero for Cecilia, who was last seen on June 2, when she and César entered the Sena family home. The project of the two houses in one was not the only one he had in what would be his last days.
Cecilia was the daughter of Gloria and Miguel (54). The couple met in 1993, in the grocery store in the España neighborhood (of Resistencia) that he attended. She worked as a car saleswoman, went to buy vegetables, talked to each other and got married within two months. Cecilia was the first daughter they had. Then, already estranged, they had a reunion and Gloria became pregnant with Angela.
Cecilia with her mother. Gloria married the girl's father within two months of meeting him.
Gloria remembers Cecilia's early years in her lawyers' office. Here he spends every afternoon of his last weeks. To reach it you have to ring a bell, pass a fence, climb two stairs, pass a door. "My husband was unfaithful to me. He had problems with addictions: he consumed alcohol and pills. One day he became violent; He hanged me and broke two fingers. He was obsessed with me," she says.
Cecilia witnessed the situation. "Not with my mom!" he yelled at his dad until he managed to calm him down. For a time Miguel threatened the Romero family. He said he would take his daughters to Paraguay. That's why Gloria decided it was best to escape to Buenos Aires. They rented an apartment in Lanús. Cecilia attended first and second grade in a school in the south of the Conurbano; his sister, garden and first.
Glory at last Sunday's march. On the handkerchief, an image of Cecilia dancing: dancing was one of her passions. Photo Juano Tesone / Special Envoy
They returned to Chaco and Gloria, so as not to be reunited with the father of her daughters, decided not to make legal claims or food judgment. With the help of an obstetrician mother, she set up a polyrubric: photocopies, warehouse, bookstore, soft drinks. Cecilia learned to attend, to sell; to be a merchant. Since she was little.
But life had prepared another mission for him that had nothing to do with his age. Gloria suffered a domestic accident and was bedridden at home. "He would change my diapers, inject me with syringes and above all encourage me. ' Mom you have to walk again,' he told me. She was always looking out for me. He swore to me that he was going to take care of me, that I didn't have to worry," says his mother, excited. By that time Miguel had stopped bothering them. He was obsessed with another woman, and did not approach or ask about his daughters again.
"Ceci told us that she loved to dance; that they had instilled it in her since she was a child," says a friend who prefers not to publish her identity. As proof of their relationship he shows the last chat they had. "Come and drink a juice," Cecilia asks. "I have new projects on the way," he wrote in what would be the last contact.
The dance thing had started when he was three years old. She went to classical dance and was told she couldn't do it because of a spinal problem. It was she herself who insisted. "Then take me to Arabic dance," he asked. He went far: he did up to the third year of the teaching staff. At last Sunday's march, her last teacher took the microphone. "She was the most cheerful of the group. It rubbed off on us. It was pure joy," he said, before participating in a choreography with his last companions.
Cecilia was called "Monkey". That's what her relatives called her. When he was 20 years old he made a pact with his sister. Angela, "la Chiqui", would study Medicine in Corrientes, would be received and then it would be Cecilia's turn. During Angela's years of study, she asked to work overtime at the call center where she works and even go some Saturdays and Sundays to help her pay the rent in Corrientes and the expenses of the race.
Tinder and the match with Sena
"Because I spent my time studying and working," Cecilia replied when her psychologist asked her why, at 25, she had not met a single boy. I had instructors in yoga, reiki, food, fitness. He had also started kinesiology. "He spent his life thinking about others. In me and her sister, actually," says Gloria, whom Cecilia asked how to meet men.
She told him that in his time you had to go dancing and wait for the slow ones. But I had no idea what it would be like today. A friend recommended that she download Tinder, the dating app. And there she met the man with whom she would have her first date. They saw each other for a month. Cecilia was disappointed. But at the same time he would be paired with who was his best friend. The relationship lasted about two years.
Single again returned to the application. This time he matched César Sena.
The first thing Cecilia de Sena received was a lie. In his Tinder profile he introduced himself as an architect, said he was 26 years old and his name was Alejandro. I was actually 17 and still in high school.
César and Cecilia matched on the dating app in mid-2021 and began an intense, impulsive, possessive relationship, which often seemed "ideal" from the outside. There were plenty of gifts, photos, messages, compliments, projects. But inside it hid a strong codependency on the part of both. Everyone who spoke to Clarín did not hesitate to describe it as "toxic."
Justice was a little more technical in its description: it maintained that it was "an unequal relationship of power and economic dependence in which Cecilia was subjected." It was in the request for prosecution of the seven accused for the femicide of the young woman. The team of Special Prosecutors (EFE) in charge of the investigation of the case believe that the Sena took advantage of that inequality to execute the plan that killed him.
The couple formally began dating on December 24, 2021, a few months after meeting through the app. According to a friend of Cecilia, from the beginning César's lies were present. First in minor details. I promised to go see her on the days she performed and danced, but then she never showed up. Cecilia was pained by this. When they were together for six months she discovered that he also had another relationship, which had started three months earlier.
The other factor that vitiated everything was the influence of the Sena family, the piquetero movement with more weight in the streets of Chaco. Bodyguards, mutual distrust, fear. César was propped up by Emerenciano Sena and Marcela Acuña, his parents, to become the political heir of the movement. He was a protégé, a bit of a "mama's boy." He always had Cecilia and Marcela's conversations fixed on his WhatsApp because "he wanted to control what his women are up to."
Cecilia felt that she was in the middle of the two of them, as she told a confidant who appears in the case and contributed several revealing chats. She wanted her boyfriend to have a life outside of politics, a career. Marcela never accepted it. He never wanted her.
Cecilia and Caesar's relationship was one of ups and downs. One day they were right and the next bad, a week of stability and another of fights. They did everything together: they shared a gym, they went out to eat, they dedicated Instagram posts to each other about "My life, my King, my everything". When they distanced themselves, he wrote her very long WhatsApp messages telling her that he could not live without her.
They didn't take off at all. Caesar said that he was gripped by despair and anxiety if he was away from her, that he could not sleep if he did not have her. It was controlling and absorbing. Cecilia's mother, Gloria, says he took her away from friends and family. With his daughter he spoke by video call many times so that there is no record of the talks, which he could then access.
He tells of the time he asked his son-in-law to go to the neighborhood store to buy a soda and that he could not go without taking Cecilia. "That's very toxic," she told her daughter. She retorted him not to get involved in their relationship.
Sometimes she even sent Gustavo Obregón, her driver, to "take care of her" or take her from one place to another. She didn't like him because she didn't trust him. Today he is charged with helping Caesar dispose of the body.
A marriage that lasted four days
In July the couple got engaged and on September 16, 2022 they married civilly. They also wanted to do it by church in December, when it would be one year since their courtship. Even wedding planner had seen. Gloria had been warned only a couple of days before the civilian, enough to knit her dress. The Sena did not go. They say they were not notified and found out from the photos on Facebook.
The concrete thing is that Marcela began to operate from that moment to achieve the divorce. And he got it just four days later, on September 20, when the couple went with two lawyers from the Sena to the civil registry to separate. There they made it clear that "there were causes that made life impossible for both in common", that "there are no assets to be divided" and that "there is no result of economic compensation or compensation of any kind".
According to Cesar's testimony before the Justice, Marcela agreed with Cecilia a payment of cash, a house to be delivered in the Emerenciano neighborhood and money that was going to be used to open a cafeteria in Resistencia. But Cecilia said otherwise. On October 7, he told his confidant by message that he "could not forgive Caesar for selling the divorce." "I don't care about money, he put a price on our love," he wrote.
It was in a series of messages in which he confessed his anguish at feeling the hatred that his mother-in-law had for him. "She thinks I'm part of a cult and that Caesar lies because of me and doesn't know half of the lies I put up with," he downloads.
César Sena and Cecilia Strzyzowski. They had a "toxic" relationship.
Despite the divorce the couple continued. Cecilia was discharged as an employee of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology of Chaco, although she went to work at the Health Center of the Emerenciano Sena neighborhood. It was just once and he was ordered to do home office.
They went to live together at Cecilia's grandmother's house, in the 500 Viviendas neighborhood, while they waited for the house in the Emerenciano that they had been promised to come out. By that time Caesar was left without a driver. "Let them handle themselves," Acuña made explicit to Obregón.
In any case, they started the project to open the Gato Negro cafeteria with the money of Marcela, who paid the rent of a business in the central Yrigoyen Avenue. The place worked from November to February barely.
Cecilia was punctured by that truncated project. His mom started urging him to do something else. As they still had paid the rent of the premises, the idea of setting up a gym arose. He brought a couple of machines and mats.
But on May 3 there was a key scene. Cecilia had a fight with Cesar on top of his truck and, when she wanted to get out, he took a judo shot and put her back upstairs. She was shocked. It was the first time he physically assaulted her.
That afternoon he wrote to his confidant and it was unloaded. He said he "ruined everything" with Caesar, and that he "didn't know what to do." That afternoon a bandage fell off. "I feel like I wasted almost two years of my life. That everything was spinning around him. I didn't realize that I depend so much until today. If he leaves, I'm left with nothing, everything, even my work depends on him. Not just my emotional life," she said.
"But if I stay, if he stays, today can happen again. And I'm afraid it will happen again. Today I saw my life in front of my eyes," Cecilia said.
A couple of weeks after that incident, the promise of the trip to Ushuaia to take a job proposed by Acuña appeared. Cecilia regained her enthusiasm and began to think that a new life was possible, far from the influence of the Sena. It was all just another lie. It would be the last.
Chaco. Special envoys
ACE
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