“People are disappearing all the time in Latin America. Most of them are women who have been kidnapped and never reappeared. There are people who spend the rest of their lives looking for them. There are 14 murders of women every day in Mexico and one per year in Argentina.” day.” notes the author Dolores Reyes (Buenos Aires, 1978), with whom in 2019 his first movie ‘Cometierra’it happened surprise literature Latin American. The title character is a talented young woman: if he eats lands trodden by missing persons, he can guess where they are. Now he returns to his protagonist who sees the future. ‘Misery’ (Alfaguara) with his pregnant sister-in-law Strong condemnation of violence against women.
Reyes, a teacher, activist, and mother of seven, magical realismreading with pleasure in his youth and ‘don’t go’, enchanting you. In his novels, “However, “The police are not interested in you, they are full of obscurity and corruption,” he said. He speaks without interrupting in the interview in Barcelona. “The police despise mothers who go to report their daughter’s disappearance. They say they should be with their boyfriends, wait… They don’t do research, they don’t care about women. This condemns families to resorting to ways.” seers and healers. Among them many scammers and black magic “with dark rites,” he explains, who assures no one to read the future for him.
These are proliferating in places where people are “desperate” to find missing persons, he adds. It’s like a neighborhood where the Cometierra in the suburbs of Buenos Aires sees advertisements for prostitutes and fortune tellers, as well as walls filled with photos of them looking for them. He “sees the violence and exploitation of women” and feels the need to find them by eating dirt just as he learned that his father killed his mother. “There are areas like Flores and Liniers where there are mobs and women trafficking, she continues. There is a hidden sense of danger for women, especially when it gets dark. Nobody goes out after 9pm. It’s kamikaze to do it. They bribe the police. Everybody knows that, but there is impunity. I can say here, but when I speak in Argentina, anonymous trolls threaten me on the nets” books on every arm.
In Latin America, they often dispose of female corpses in communal graves and trash cans. They think they are worthless after using their bodies.
“Cases follow each other, judicial decisions make us laugh: If they succeed in arresting someone, they usually leave for lack of evidence. They find a body and they don’t even call it femicide. They say they died by suicide. Or some other reason System Judiciary system is rotten and patriarchal, like in Spain As in the case of La Manada, they say the Women exaggerate and eventually they all die, They despise the women’s lives. The author continues before detailing cases like that of a girl who demands protection every day because her ex-husband tries to strangle her. “The prosecutor only reported her for minor injuries. He was in jail for two days and when he got out he killed him.”. Or another woman who reported her partner, a police officer, nine times. “They issued a restraining order, but they did not take his gun away from him, they did not separate him from the police. Shot her while celebrating her birthday with some friends. and killed him.”
“Cometierra wants to find the missing so their mothers and fathers can bury them and mourn and say goodbye. The worst part is not knowing what happened to them. -To explain-. But in Latin America, corpses are often dumped in communal graves, garbage cans, or vacant lots. They don’t even have the minimum of humanity to give them back. This is the result of misogyny and hatred.: It shows that after using their bodies they think they are worthless and throw them away.”
Courage of the Plaza de Mayo Mothers
Reyes is grateful to the Plaza de Mayo Mothers. “Those who oppose the dictatorship on behalf of their children and some were kidnapped, tortured, and killed.” They taught him that “continuing the search is a form of struggle.” aid networks something woven against sexist violence among women, made worse by the pandemic. “They make us believe the big bad wolf is outside, but the violence is inside the house.”
It also draws parallels to the debate in Spain. Disappearance of the Civil War. “There are so many unidentified corpses in the mass graves… It is not enough to destroy the enemy, it is necessary to erase him from memory, to avoid mourning and burial. So that the wounds do not heal”.