Day against violence against women, the story for which we celebrate today

On November 25, 1960, a triple murder cost the lives of three sisters in what is now the Dominican Republic: a story to read to understand the importance of this day

On November 25, 1960, exactly sixty years ago, three young Dominican sisters named Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal they left the house to visit their husbands, who were in jail for political dissidents. They never came back.

The three women were 25, 36 and 34 when their fast-travel Jeep took a bridge in the Marapica area, outside Puerto Plata, in the north of the country. On that bridge, in the center of the road, armed men suddenly took up position, forcing the car to stop and they to get out. These men were the soldiers of the Sim, an acronym for Military Intelligence Service, and they responded to the orders of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. The three sisters were first separated from each other, then taken to a remote mountain place called La Cumbre, where it is today. his monument, and there they were brutally beaten, raped and finally strangled. The hitmen were ordered to simulate a car accident, so the lifeless bodies were put back into the car and it was destroyed to simulate an impact. It was November 25, 1960.

The three young women were killed for specific reasons. They were highly exposed political activists, initially organizing meetings and small committees to start an opposition front, and in response they were persecuted and tortured. Later, those meetings gave life to a real front of democratic resistance. Revolutionary Movement June 14, who, especially thanks to the commitment of Minerva Mirabal and Manolo Tavárez Justo, both lawyers and skilled in seeking consensus, managed to create an anti-dictatorship network throughout the country. It was one of the bloodiest regimes in Latin America, that of Rafael Trujillo, a former Dominican criminal who rose through the military hierarchy to the point of declaring himself a “generalissimo.”

Trujillo, who ruled the country for more than thirty years beginning in 1930, targeted the three sisters with a very well-organized plan: first, a court in Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, had sentenced the sisters and their companions to prison. by form of their activities “contrary to state securityThey then released the three women, leaving the men in jail. It seemed an act of mercy, but it was a trap, the intention was to divide the group and to be able to attack the three young women more freely, who called themselves within the resistance movement. “the butterflies“, That is to say”the butterflies”.

Trujillo was a character capable of ferocious political maneuvers: it was he who organized and financed (arming extreme right-wing groups) an attack for the elimination of Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt in June 1960. It was also Trujillo, in 1937, who planned and to carry out the genocide of the Haitians that today we know as Parsley Massacre, where thousands of people died in a few days (estimates range between 17,000 and 35,000 victims). A racist massacre of such magnitude that it redefined the ethnic composition of the island of Hispaniola. It was against a dictator capable of decisions similar to what the Mirabal sisters opposed.

The date of the murder of the sisters, November 25, was coincidence: the corporal of the National Police, Ciriaco de La Rosa, he had been tasked with organizing the ambush. To carry it out, four young soldiers were chosen, Alfonso Cruz Valerio, Emilio Estrada Malleta, Néstor Antonio Pérez Terrero and Ramón Emilio Rojas Lora. To get around in disguise, the four received a Volkswagen Beetle. They left for the first time on November 18, but returned without following the order because, they told their superiors, the women had their children with them. The same thing happened on November 22. On the 25th, however, the women traveled alone.

Twenty years after the death of the three Mirabal sisters, in 1981, in Bogotá, Colombia, a historic feminist conference was held, entitled First Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter. It was on that occasion that the date of November 25 was decided for the Day Against Male Violence Against Women that we celebrate today. The date commemorates the murder and rape of three women, three young political activists whose deaths symbolize hundreds of similar stories, and more generally the victims who every day, all over the world, suffer the consequences of gender-based violence, who chauvinist and macho male. Precisely because of that Colombian conference, the United Nations, during a general assembly held in December 1999, decided that on this date the International Day against Violence against Women would be celebrated.

Mom, as researchers write Lucía Fuster and Celina Penchansky, even before the 25th became a date on the feminist calendar, some progress had already been made from the legislative point of view: “the first instrument of international law dealing with the human rights of women it was the Convention on “elimination of all forms of discrimination against women”. The convention, known as Cedaw, and later approved in 1979 by the United Nations, establishes that violence against women is a form of discrimination that interferes with the ability of women to enjoy their rights and freedoms. And here is the point: this violence is systemic, it does not affect a single episode but the entire society. Episodes like that of the Mirabal sisters, however, serve to remember this violence.