“Love and jealousy killed her” announced the front page of Chilean tabloid newspaper La Cuarta last month. Above the headline, smaller writing reads: “The story of Andrea Aguirre, the Colombian woman quartered in a crime of passion.”
Photo (c) @CummunidadMujer 2016
The case of Yuliana Andrea Aguirre Acevedo is as shocking as it is commonplace in a society with an alarming rate of femicides, which, in Chilean legal terminology, refers to the murder of a woman by her spouse or partner.
Yuliana and her boyfriend Edwin Mauricio Vásquez Ortiz had moved to Santiago from Colombia months earlier, in search of adventure and better career prospects. On 6 March this year, her dismembered remains were found on the banks of the Mapocho river. According to reports, Vásquez had strangled his girlfriend whilst they were having an argument and had then looked to dispose of her body.
The anger expressed by the parts of the Chilean population over the crime was compounded by the way that it had been reported in the newspaper. “Love doesn’t kill. Machismo kills,” tweeted the anti-street harassment campaign group OCAC.
Photo (c) Wikipedia Public Commons
Indeed, notions of love and passion seem to be out of place in the reporting of such a serious crime. That they should be mentioned at all sheds light on the mythology of “crimes of passion” which features prominently in a traditionally macho culture like that of Chile.
The idea behind “crimes of passion” is that, provoked by strong feelings such as rage or jealousy, an aggressor flies into a fit of fury and attacks, often ultimately killing, their partner or lover. Whatever elements of Shakespearean romance accompany this notion, they cannot hide the fact that using vocabulary like “passion” is a crude way of justifying this violence which is so often directed at women. Cooking dinner or buying roses is passionate; domestic violence is not.
More worrying still is that violence against women is not being adequately punished and members of the Chilean legal system still appear to believe that the idea of a “crime of passion” can justify all kinds of aggression.
A case in point came a month after Yuliana’s body was discovered by the side of the Mapocho river; an appeals court ruled to uphold the sentence which spared jail for Marco Olmos Barraza, a Chilean man who beat his wife Karol Pizarro, almost to death, with heavy duty shears last year. A police officer who arrived on the scene asserted that, had he not have fired a warning shot, the woman would surely now be dead. Indeed, Pizarro was left with a fractured skull among other serious injuries, and yet for this attempted murder, Olmos has received no punishment apart from being denied access to his ex-wife and the possession of firearms.
The reason that Olmos was only sentenced to five year’s parole and no jail time? The tribunal considered that, having just found out that his wife was allegedly having an affair, Olmos was influenced by: “stimuli so powerful that they naturally caused a moment of blind rage.” They didn’t come outright and say it, but the tribunal might as well have stated that they were letting him off because they considered it to be a “crime of passion”.
Photo (c) Paulo Filgueiras, UN 2012
The ruling sparked protests, both physical and on social media. Even the President Michelle Bachelet added her voice saying that: “there is no excuse which explains violence against women,” and that the ruling: “sends a complicated message […] that if someone is unfaithful to you, you have the right to kill them.”
It is also exactly the message that the country doesn’t need right now, at a time when femicides are reaching epidemic levels. So far this year 15 women have been killed at the hands of their husbands or partners in Chile; a figure that looks on track to match the 45 women killed last year in 2015.
And the situation is not exclusive to Chile. The UN recently reported that femicide rates are on the rise across the Latin American region. The same report found that these crimes are going largely unpunished with a startling 98% of perpetrators never brought to justice. What’s more, 14 out of the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world are found in Latin America.
Photo (c) Martin Zabala/Xinhua Press/Corbis, The Guardian 2015
The situation has given rise to the #NiUnaMenos (not one less) movement. With its roots in Argentina in 2015, the slogan has become a rallying cry for those across the region who are demanding that not one more woman be killed by her partner.
But how has it all come to this? In a still all-too-machista culture, women are being held responsible for the actions of their partners who, encouraged by inadequate legal sentences, are free to act with relative impunity. Action needs to be taken, and quickly, to safeguard the lives of the 30 or so more women this year who are expected to be the victims of femicides in Chile.
Not least, a fundamental shift in mentalities is long overdue to stop women being regarded as the rightful property of men. A good place to start would be to confine the idea of a “crime of passion” to the history books once and for all.
