In 1994, hundreds of women were murdered in Latin America at the hands of their partners or ex-partners.
Before dying, some of them were also tortured and abused with violence and the most absolute cruelty.
A huge number of those bodies were dismembered and packed in suitcases or garbage bags and then discarded — as filth;
some ended up floating in the river, and others, today—30 years later—still have not appeared.
Nancy Mariana Mestre Vargas was one of those women and one of the first victims of that year in Colombia.
She was 18 years old and, like so many others, she treasured a stream of dreams and illusions of width perhaps only comparable to the magnitude of the daring and vulnerability typical of that age.
A young woman of eighteen is still a child who, in all her innocence and frenzy, aspires to become a woman sooner rather than later.
The last time her parents and brother saw her alive was during the first hours of the year after the New Year's Eve festivities.
At the door of her house, her father, Don Martín, said goodbye to her radiantly, watching her leave hand in hand with Jaime Saade Cormane, with whom the young woman had started a relationship months ago.
Nancy Mariana and Jaime would continue the New Year's celebrations at the house of some friends.
The girl, as her parents sweetly called her, had permission from her until three in the morning, at which time Jaime promised in front of her father to bring her back—and to take care of her.
Nancy Mariana never returned.
She died in the city of Barranquilla eight days later.
Her agony, however, evidenced intact in the human tissues found under her nails, must have begun sometime in the early morning of that January 1st.
What happened in that room where she was raped and murdered with a Llama revolver, 38 long, Scorpio type, leaving a wound on her temple, only those who were there know—more than two people, according to the coroner's report—and it can be gathered from the testimony, by show of hands, from an anonymous witness who years after that fateful day sent a letter to the father describing the horror witnessed while very close to the scene of the events.
What has also remained for history is the confused, vague and continuous noise of an oral testimony, silenced but contemporary, which, in addition to several male voices, said it heard the cry of a young woman who was shouting for her father shortly before feeling the shock. roar of the shot.
Clinging to life as much as she could, the young woman died at 5:15 p.m. on January 9, 1994, with the wounds, bruises and sores still latent on her body and in the astonished presence of her family, the grief of her friends and the pain of an entire city.
There was no trace of Saade Cormane.
1994 was also the year in which Latin America adopted the Convention of Belém do Pará, the first international legal instrument that defined and sought to criminalize all forms of violence against women.
Life is a paradox.
How to explain to parents that their daughter's death in such conditions was not in vain?
How can we try to force them to close the duel without reparation, justice and truth?
How can we assume that femicide rates in Latin America and the world will decrease until they are eradicated, if states and their rulers—complicit in their inaction and indifference—do not offer the minimum necessary protections to women and rigorously punish gender violence?
What future awaits a society indifferent to this reality?
In July 1996, Saade Cormane was sentenced in absentia to 27 years in prison.
He never appeared at trial.
He fled.
Why appear?
If he is not captured within a certain time, he would be released due to the prescription of the criminal action.
In other words, courtesy of time.
For more than two decades Saade Cormane managed to elude the authorities.
Nancy Mariana's father dedicated his life to searching for him and in 2015, clues were obtained about his whereabouts in Brazil, leading to his subsequent request for extradition by Colombia.
In January 2020, 26 years later and
just before
the statute of limitations was set, Saade Cormane was captured in an Interpol operation in Belo Horizonte.
This capture, however, was only a first step in the search for justice and the name of Nancy Mariana Mestre Vargas was close to becoming another number adding to the figures and statistics of unpunished femicides in Latin America.
She wasn't.
No woman should be.
Nancy Mariana, “
she was not only a Colombian victim, but she is part of hundreds and thousands who suffer the same fate every hour throughout the American continent
.”
Nancy Mariana is “
a universal victim
.”
Those words, spoken by one of the judges of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil in the case of
Martín Eduardo Mestre Yunez v.
Jaime Saade Cormane, STF, AR.
2,921
, reached the heart of the matter, being reproduced in minutes throughout the world.
I heard them myself.
I was there, in Brasilia, in the Plaza de los Tres Poderes, where I arrived on March 29, 2023 accompanied by Mr. Martin, Martín Eduardo, and the Brazilian lawyer Bruno Barreto A. de Teixeira, to seek Justice.
And we got it.
After a long legal battle initiated by the Mestre Vargas family, the Supreme Federal Court in a ruling without legal precedents in Brazil, reversed a previous decision of its Second Chamber that had denied Colombia's extradition request.
The trial focused on whether extradition was legally viable in the event that the crimes had prescribed in one of the countries according to the legal particularities of each country.
That is, if the time had passed to force Saade to serve his sentence.
When analyzing the figure of prescription, the judge must always take into account the international commitments assumed by the signatory states of the extradition treaty, in this case, the duty of due diligence to put an end to gender violence.
Brazil, here, did it that way.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has also declared “that States must design, adopt or modify existing protocols of action that include these specific obligations when investigating, prosecuting and punishing violence, as well as when assisting in victims.”
In 2006, the OAS, with the support of the Follow-up Mechanism of the Belém do Pará Convention, published the
Inter-American Model Law to Prevent, Punish and Eradicate Violent Deaths of Women and Girls
, in order to help incorporate the Belém do Pará Convention to the national legislation of the Member States, providing in its article 15 for the elimination of time limits for exercising criminal action;
Specifically, it is noted that feminicide and criminal action for its prosecution “
are imprescriptible
.”
The story of Nancy Mariana – which is the story of thousands of women – highlights that the prescription of criminal action in cases of gender violence can hinder access to justice for victims and their families, and allow perpetrators evade their responsibilities under the argument of not being able to be prosecuted for their crime because time has run in their favor.
As long as access to justice continues to be the privilege of a few and corruption continues to permeate judicial processing, impunity in cases of violence against women will continue to be systematic, superlative, and even more serious, accepted as natural and legitimate behavior.
As long as feminicide continues to be given the same – or lower – legal and procedural treatment as other crimes, and patriarchal and discriminatory sociocultural patterns continue to be accepted, allowing the expansion of stereotypes of subordination of women, the problem will remain unresolved.
As long as women are not protected and the weight of the law is imposed on those who mistreat them, the fear of being stigmatized and reporting them will continue to be rampant.
As long as legal tricks and intricacies are allowed to take away substantive rights as fundamental as the right to life, honor, and human dignity, justice cannot be guaranteed, and without justice the concept of the rule of law cannot be guaranteed. It is nothing more than a dead letter, whose only use – without merit – will be, if anything, to decorate proselytizing speeches.
The struggle of the Mestre Vargas family for almost three decades—in the face of a weak and shamefully indifferent state—could not be in vain.
The death of Nancy Mariana could not go unpunished.
Now we have to wait for the government authorities of both countries to act quickly so that Saade Cormane, now sixty years old, is soon extradited to Colombia, where he will have to remain behind bars for nearly twenty years.
Time is inherent to our existence as human beings.
It's what defines her.
Allowing time to run in favor of impunity is a contradiction, only conceivable in a Kafkaesque universe.
Intolerable, furthermore, when what is sought to be protected is the most precious asset: the life and integrity of a human being, of a Woman.
Abolishing the statute of limitations to exercise criminal action in these cases is, in addition to being fair, essential for the prevention and eradication of the most extreme form of gender violence: feminicide.
Not one more.
Margarita R. Sánchez
is a lawyer.
She trained at the Universidad del Norte (Colombia) and the American University (United States), she specializes in anti-corruption cases and is a partner at Miller & Chevalier (Washington).
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