Cnn
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Carolina Aló was 17 years old at night when her father, Edgardo, saw her for the last time. In their last conversation, he pleaded with Carolina to leave his boyfriend because he treated him.
Almost 30 years later, Edgardo remembers the following night as if it were today.
“I went to get her from school because I had received a call that made me suspect. When I haven’t seen her go or find her at home, I went directly to her boyfriend, ”he recalls to CNN.
As he arrived, his daughter was already dead. She had been stabbed 113 times by her boyfriend Fabián Tablado a week before her 18th birthday.
This cold Monday of 1996 was the beginning of a long combat of Edgardo to obtain justice for his daughter – the one that would extend over decades and culminate in his testimony playing a central role in a wider campaign to revise the Criminal Code of Argentina to recognize femicide as an aggravating of aggravation as an aggravating of aggravation as an aggravating of aggravation as an aggravating of aggravation. factor in cases of homicide.
This campaign – led by women’s movements and human rights organizations – finally succeeded when the Government of Argentina changed the code in 2012, but now, more than a decade, many activists As Edgardo wonder if their fight was in vain.
On January 24, the Minister of Argentina of Justice Mariano Cúneo Lebarona warned that the government of President Javier Milei would seek to eliminate the femicide of the penal code on the grounds that it was a distortion of the concept of equality .
“This administration defends equality before the law, as consecrated in our national constitution. No life is worth only one, ”he wrote.
Critics say that this decision is just the last of Milei’s right -wing government to suppress women’s rights. This occurs after the president has spoken out against the concept of femicide and what he called “radical feminism” at the Davos World Economic Forum.
“We have even come to the point of normalizing the fact that in many so-called civilized countries, if you kill a woman, this is called femicide. And that leads to a more serious punishment than if you kill a man simply based on the sex of the victim – legally making a woman’s life is worth more than that of a man, “Milei told the forum.
Sources at the Ministry of Justice have told CNN that Cúneo Lebarona is already working on changes proposed to the law that he planned to take at the Congress.
But activists warn that such a reform miscondumed the nature of the femicide and will put Argentine women in danger.
“The violent death of women for gender reasons is often perpetrated by people in their inner circle, generally current or old partners, or even by foreigners, but in a context that includes contempt for the victim, humiliation And sexual assault, ”said Natalia Gherardi, a gender-specialized lawyer and co-director of the network of health professionals and law professionals.
“In general, men are more likely to be victims of murder, but the difference is that women are more likely to be murdered by people in their circle of trust. If we do not understand that the form, the path, the place, the aggressor of this extreme violence is different, there is no way to have adequate policies to protect these women, “said Gherardi.
According to the Ombudsman’s Office of the Nation, from January 1 to November 15, 2024, there were 252 femicides in Argentina. Two -thirds of the victims were murdered at home, while 84% were killed by someone with whom they had a previous relationship.
“ I had to go out and fight ”
At the time of the murder of Caroline in the 1990s, the sorrows for men who killed women in the context of gender violence varied between eight and 25 years in prison – and these could be reduced by attenuating attenuating factors such as good conduct in prison.
For Edgardo, the 24 -year -old sentence inflicted on the killer of his daughter was too indulgent; In his opinion, he did not reflect all the horror of his murder. The more than 100 wounds per stabs inflicted on her daughter were made with at least three different knives. However, his death was classified at the time as “a simple homicide”, according to pain.
Femicidal experts say that it is exactly these kinds of details that the bachelor is distinct from other homicides, who may or may not imply a woman.
Like Mariela Belski, executive director of Amnesty International Argentina, said: “A femicide is always a homicide, that is to say the death of one person in the hands of another. However, the murder of a woman is not necessarily a femicide. To be considered a femicide, there must be special violence, a specific context. Fecids are rooted in a system that strengthens discrimination against women’s lives. At the same time, they reproduce the stereotypes of masculinity associated with physical strength and power to control women. »»
In the case of Edgardo, he was also shaken by the knowledge that his daughter’s murderer asked to be released early and his fears of what could happen to other women. (Indeed, while in prison, Tablado was found guilty of threatening another of his partners, and added two more years and six months to his sentence).
Edgardo therefore started knocking on the doors, spending years meeting lawyers, lawyers and presidents, joining a wider movement by activists to change the law.
“I had to go out and fight because the law did not protected me. The judges did not protect me, ”recalls Edgardo.
After years of thrust, Edgardo and his militant colleagues were rewarded with a bit bitten victory in 2012, when the change in the penal code recognized femicide and increased maximum sentence to life imprisonment.
Now, more than a decade later, under the government of Milei, this hardened victory is threatened.
One of the first signs came in August 2024, when the government of Milei weakened a support program which provides subsidies to victims of violence based on sex so that they do not have to stay where where They are abused – which for many is in their family home.
The government’s decision has reduced the duration of the support by six to three months and introduced a requirement that candidates produce a police report confirming their situation. But critics point out that many victims of domestic violence are too afraid of going to the police in the first place.
Like Belski, from Amnesty International, said it: “It is extremely worrying that the specificity of this type of crime and the obligations of the Argentine state from preventing, punishing and eradicating violence against women, which have constitutional roots, are not understood. ”
Meanwhile, 28 years and eight months later, Fabián Tablado is now free, having served his sorrows.
The courts awarded him an electronic ankle bracelet and a ban order to protect his ex -partner and Edgardo Aló – an order he has raped in the past.
Edgardo says he lives with an anti-panic button in his pocket.
For him, life was suspended in 1996. Each Christmas, he says, he keeps a drink on the family table for his beloved daughter.
