Ana Orantes | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Ana Orantes Ruiz February 6, 1937 |
| Died | December 17, 1997 (aged 60) Cúllar Vega, Spain |
| Cause of death | Feminicide |
| Nationality | Spanish |
| Occupation | Housewife |
| Spouse | José Parejo Avivar |
| Children | 7 children
|
Ana Orantes Ruiz (Granada, February 6, 1937[1] - Cúllar Vega, Granada, December 17, 1997) was a Spanish woman victim of gender violence, who exposed in a television interview the violence to which she had been subjected by her ex-husband. Thirteen days after the testimony on television, she was murdered by her ex-partner,[2] which generated great repercussion within Spanish society and visibility of sexist violence, and as a consequence, the remodeling of the Penal Code.[3]Ana Orantes was the 59th victim of gender violence in 1997.[4]
Biography
Ana Orantes Ruiz was born in a humble home, located on Elvira Street in Granada , on February 6, 1937. She was the third of six children of the marriage formed by Manuel Orantes, a bricklayer by profession, and Rosario Ruiz, a dressmaker and clerk in a candy store. Due to the economic hardships of her family, Ana could not attend school and from the age of nine she already helped the family economy by working as a seamstress. [ 1 ]
She was nineteen years old when she met José Parejo Avivar, born in Alcazarquivir, in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco, on September 28, 1935, [ 5 ] at a Corpus Christi celebration in Granada. [ 6 ] Shortly after their first meeting, she agreed to start a romance with Parejo to make an old boyfriend jealous. [ 6 ] On the other hand, he wanted to be emancipated from his parents, something he would achieve if they married immediately. To this end, Parejo accelerated his marriage to Orantes, threatening to spread rumors about her if she refused. [ 7 ] After three months of courtship and despite the opposition of her parents, they married at the end of 1956. The newlyweds settled in his parents' home, where they would reside for three years. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] As a result of their union, eleven children were born, of which three died before adulthood. [ 7 ]
Three months after the marriage, she became pregnant with her firstborn, but then she was the victim of the first of the many attacks she would suffer during the next forty years of their life together. Her husband slapped her right after she told him that she had just come from her parents' house to pick up some sheets. Hearing her scream, her father-in-law José Parejo [ 5 ] ran into her room asking what had happened. She prayerfully responded that she did not know why Parejo had slapped her, so her husband's father defended her by hitting his son. However, her mother-in-law Encarnación Avivar, [ 8 ] after being informed of the incident by her husband, had a completely different opinion: "If he hits her or kisses her, it's not our business. ." [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Even her in-laws also ended up violating her as time went by. [ 7 ]
years of abuse
Ana Orantes lived four decades subjugated to an alcoholic and aggressive husband. He regularly subjected her to ill-treatment, such as grabbing her by the hair to throw her against a wall, kicking her in the stomach, punching, kicking, slapping, grabbing her by the neck to strangle her, yelling at her and verbally insulting her, or even sitting her in a chair. to be shaken with a stick until she is forced to agree,[7][9] being any reason "sufficient reason" for it - such as cooking food too hot or too cold.[6] Sometimes, after of mistreating her, he begged her through tears to forgive him, falsely promising that he would not hit her again.[7]
It wasn't just her who suffered. Her eight surviving children, three women and five men aged between nineteen and forty at the time of their mother's murder in 1997,[7] had grown up amid harassment, scorn and villainy, apart from being direct witnesses of the cruelties of his father. The father expelled many of them from the family home during their adolescence. [7] Ana, the second, rushed her wedding when she was only fourteen years old, with the aim of getting rid of her father and preventing him from raping her - something he was trying to do. since the youngest was eight years old, based on touching her thighs.[7] He would extend his inappropriate touching to his daughter Rosario and, decades later, to a granddaughter.[7][9] As soon as he could , the second daughter helped some of her brothers. She took Charo, at age twelve, and Jesús, at fourteen. José would marry at seventeen, Alberto, at eighteen, and Rafael, the one who waited the longest, at the age of twenty.[10] Ana Orantes could not attend the nuptials of two of her children because her husband did not allow her to. had allowed.[7] When the oppressor broke out in anger, his wife and children were often forced to flee home, although afterwards no one could take them in. Not even the relatives of the affected woman offered them shelter because, despite their initial warnings not to get involved with Parejo, they chose not to interfere in this situation.[7][11][12] The youngest of all the brothers, Francisco Javier, tried to jump from a window when he was seven years old.[10]
The couple's youngest son was not the only member of the family who attempted suicide to escape the repressions of the head of the family. For a time, Parejo, who had worked in a workshop with his father and later as a bricklayer,[13] lost his job and it was his wife who was in charge of financially supporting the family by opening a grocery store to the public. [14][7] One day, while the woman was away from home running said establishment, her husband took advantage of her absence to try to sexually abuse her daughter Ana, who was less than fourteen years old. In a desperate attempt to avoid it, she unsuccessfully tried to take her own life by swallowing a bottle of pills.[7] Similarly, Ana Orantes experienced some suicidal attempts, such as massively swallowing tablets, lying in bed for weeks without wanting to eat or jumping into a pool knowing that he did not know how to swim.[15]
One of Parejo's objectives was to isolate her socially. With this pretext, they repeatedly moved to sparsely inhabited places that they abandoned as soon as they began to become considerably populated, having resided in Granada neighborhoods such as Albaicín or Fargue, and finally in the municipality of Cúllar Vega.[16] Faithfully following that premise , vetoed her from continuing her studies in adult education classes or from attending her brothers' weddings.[7]
Her spouse's unfounded jealousy was another motivation for beating her. In an attack, which occurred one August in the early 1970s, Ana urgently took her third child, aged eight, to the doctor because she had found him seriously ill. Later, she headed to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription medications; There, a neighbor of hers alerted her to having seen an irritated José Parejo on the street—apparently looking for her. When mother and son finally returned to the family home in the afternoon, her furious husband did not believe the explanation she gave him about her absence, so he violently attacked her in front of all her children. According to him, his wife had been having sexual encounters with other men.[7] On another occasion, on the way home after having been at a Corpus Christi fair in Granada, Parejo, furious because she had danced with one of his cousins, He attacked her with his fists—in the middle of the street—until she was unconscious.[7]
Due to the social conventions of that time, during the first years of their marriage, Ana did not report her ordeal to the police.[6] Nor could she request a divorce, since it would not be legal until 1981.[17] When he visited his mother, Rosario Ruiz, secretly from his antagonist - because he had forbidden it to both her and the rest of his family -,[7] and she asked him the reason for the bruises that made his face ugly, The abused woman responded with banal evasions to hide the truth from her.[7] Around 1972, Orantes decided to file a complaint against her husband, doing so up to fifteen times.[15] "Those are normal fights in the family," would be the typical response that the victim heard from the Civil Guard.[6] Likewise, she would try to separate from her husband on several occasions throughout the 80s.[1]
In the end, Orantes achieved the nuptial dissolution of her consort in the summer of 1996,[5] although the court ruling forced her to continue living with the man in the same property, located on Serval Street in the district of El Ventorrillo, in Cúllar Vega, Granada.[18] The chalet was divided to compose it into two independent units; her upper floor would be awarded to her, hers to her two non-emancipated children plus a granddaughter, and her lower floor to her ex-husband. The entrance to the residence had a common space for both parties in the form of a patio.[6] The lawyer who intervened in the divorce process would later reveal that it was Orantes who agreed to share the marital home with her harasser. Among the reasons would be fear, since Parejo had threatened to set it on fire, the inability of Ana Orantes to meet the payment demanded by Parejo to get her half of the property, and, according to her lawyer, out of pity. [9 ]
Some time later, Parejo met another woman and was temporarily absent from there. But, from time to time, he returned to his lower floor and continued the harassment, threats and humiliation against his family.[6] Orantes and his son wanted to buy him the apartment he was occupying, but the negotiations failed.[19] Stormy neighborhood would motivate the justice of the peace of Cúllar Vega to intercede between them to remove some cages with domestic animals that were bothering Parejo, since they had been installed by his son near the windows of the lower level, where his father was staying. [20] Thus, a little more than a year passed in which, according to the neighbors, the fights and arguments between them had been recurrent, despite the complaints that the woman and son filed against the abuser and that they almost always won. .[twenty-one]
television interview
Desperate to see that her life had practically not improved since the breakup of her marriage with José Parejo, on Thursday, December 4, 1997, Ana Orantes attended the television show De tarde en tarde, broadcast on Canal Sur and presented by Irma Soriano, to give learn about his personal martyrdom before the cameras of Andalusian public television. A reality that many abused women suffered in silence but that very few had dared to confess. She was accompanied by her youngest daughter, Raquel Orantes, sitting in the stands of invited spectators.
During the approximately thirty-five minutes that her statement lasted on the set, Orantes summarized the physical and psychological attacks that both she and her children had suffered perpetrated by her ex-husband. He detailed his intentions of pederasty towards two of his three daughters, his unjust prohibitions, the degrading behavior coming from his late mother-in-law, and the two violent episodes already mentioned against him, where he demonstrated the tyranny and desire for domination of who would be his killer. She complained that two of her children did not agree with her decision to divorce Parejo. The only thing in her favor that she mentioned was that he had been a hard-working man. Orantes would refer in her turn to speak:
[...] I had eleven children, I had nowhere to go [...], because I couldn't go with my parents or anyone. I had to put up with it, to put up with him giving me beatings after beatings, beatings after beatings! One day yes, another day no, and the day in between. That he told me everything he wanted [...]. I was terrified of him, I was afraid of him, I was terrified of him [...],
Her story was widely commented on by the neighbors, her ex-husband's new girlfriend broke up her relationship with him and all of this unleashed the man's anger. According to several witnesses who testified before the Civil Guard, he swore revenge. According to the version of a neighbor who spoke about this matter with the aggressor, of everything Orantes narrated, what most outraged Parejo was that she said that she had supported the family financially, selling food in a grocery store, while he was unemployed.
Later, residents of the Granada town assured that the victim feared for his life in recent days after appearing on television.
murder
On the morning of Wednesday, December 17, 1997, thirteen days after the televised interview was broadcast, Ana Orantes left with her in-laws to do some shopping. She arrived back at her chalet around 2:00 p.m. [16]
For his part, José Parejo traveled to Santa Fe to receive the communication that he had been denounced again, then he played the lottery, bought tobacco and went to his ground floor of the chalet. There he began to clean a rototiller, whose tank he filled with gasoline. To do this, he used a plastic container that, once used, still held about 1.5 liters of leftover gasoline. The same one that he would throw at Orantes shortly after.[5]
Between 1:45 p.m. and 2:35 p.m., Parejo, from his lower floor of the building, monitored Orantes' arrival there, walking through the communal garden to go up to his upper floor, and thus unload the shopping bags he was carrying. . With the woman's back to her - thus preventing any defensive reaction - he approached her stealthily, from a distance of between 3 and 8 meters, to throw the flammable fuel contained in the same container that he had previously used. When sprayed, it spilled on Ana Orantes' back, wetting her clothes. Next, Parejo brought a lit lighter to her, starting a rapid combustion that caused her ex-wife to fall to the ground, already engulfed in flames, losing consciousness and collapsing in a left lateral position. After ensuring the death of his victim, the man fled the scene of the crime while the woman was still burning in the arson.[5]
Her granddaughter, about twelve years old, who was returning from school shortly after, was the one who found her grandmother's body burning, she immediately alerted the neighbors and they called the police.[16] When the Civil Guard arrived and put out the fire regarding Ana Orantes, nothing could be done to save her.[18] The police authority activated a search and capture protocol to arrest the murderer, who had fled, although he had initially gone to the Guard barracks Civil in Las Gabias, finding it closed. Two and a half hours later he surrendered and was transferred to the barracks. [8]
Ana Orantes succumbed to very serious sixth-degree burns on her spine, fifth-degree burns on her head, neck and right back, fourth-degree burns on her chest and abdomen, and second-degree burns on her hip and lower limbs, causing her to go into shock. neurogenic and cerebral ischemia that ended his life in a few seconds.[5] He was sixty years old.
judgment
On December 9, 1998, twelve months after the murder, the first session of the judicial process against José Parejo was held in the Provincial Court of Granada. Before it began, women's associations and feminist groups demonstrated to demand justice and repudiate domestic abuse. The accused acknowledged responsibility for the events, although he asserted that the trigger for his actions was due to Orantes having rebuked him, when both of them coincided in the common access where they lived. He also stated that she tried to help her while she was being burned by the fire that he had set for her. Such allegations about the insult and subsequent assistance would be dismissed by the prosecutor and indictment two days later.[23]
In the second court hearing, held on December 10, the jury watched on a television monitor the audiovisual recording of the victim's testimony that had been televised a year ago. Three of the sons testified against his father, confirming that they had witnessed his atrocious beatings and humiliation of his mother, as well as the attacks that they themselves received, plus his incestuous assaults with his daughters. In the presentation of the justice of the peace of Cúllar Vega, Gerardo Moreno Calero, who had mediated between the ex-couple with the disputes of recent times, said that Orantes' television intervention, where he had publicly denounced him for all his misdeeds, was the which is why he killed her as an act of revenge, since the uxoricide himself had informed Moreno, the day before the tragedy, that he was furious about her accusations on television.[24][9][25 ]
On December 11, the last day of the oral hearing, the defendant expressed his desire to be executed. The accusations requested a sentence of twenty-two years, including the aggravating circumstance of cruelty. In contrast, his defense argued for his acquittal or, at most, a three-year incarceration for homicide completed under a temporary mental disorder. The trial ended ready for verdict.[21]
On Tuesday, December 15, 1998, Judge Eduardo Rodríguez Cano of the Granada Provincial Court sentenced José Parejo Avivar to a sentence of seventeen years in prison, plus payment of compensation of 30 million pesetas (180,000 euros in the current) in favor of their children. Likewise, when he regained his freedom after completing his sentence, the resolution obliged him to complete a two-year banishment from the town where his descendants lived. The ruling admitted his confession of the crime before the police authorities shortly after committing it as a mitigating factor. The perpetrator was notified of his conviction in his penitentiary center, through his lawyers, given that Parejo refused to appear for the reading of the popular jury, which had taken 24 hours to deliberate.[19][20]
At the beginning of 2004, the convicted man requested provisional release from the Albolote prison, where he was serving his sentence, but it was denied in March of the same year to prevent the probable social alarm that it would cause.[26] On November 15, That year,[27] almost seven years after the homicide, José Parejo died, at the age of sixty-nine, at the Ruiz de Alda Hospital in Granada after a myocardial infarction suffered in the aforementioned prison.[28] His His mortal remains were cremated.[27] None of his eight children, three of whom had altered their surnames to appear only with their mother, appeared at their father's funeral. However, one of them, Alberto, had visited him during his prison stay.[10
repercussion
The murder of Ana Orantes changed society's perception of violence against women. As a result, Spanish legislation was modified to try to put an end to the violence. Although Álvarez Cascos, as Vice President of the Government, called the matter "an isolated case the work of an eccentric",[29] the Popular Party Government approved a few months later an Action Plan Against Domestic Violence. Within its framework, the Penal Code and the law of criminal procedure are modified in order to include the crime of “mental violence exercised on a habitual basis” and a “new precautionary measure that allows physical distancing between the aggressor and the victim” (Law 14/1999).[30]
After a long process of diagnosing the causes of this violence, the Spanish Parliament, during the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, unanimously approved the Organic Law on Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence—Organic Law 1/2004—. [31][32][note 1]
memories
In the Granada town of Cúllar Vega, where Orantes was murdered, a monument in the form of a monolith was erected in memory of Ana Orantes and Encarnación Rubio, both fatal victims of sexist violence. Every year, on November 25, the municipal institutional event for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women is celebrated next to this monolith, with a reading of the manifesto approved in the plenary session, and the intervention of associations and different sectors. of the educational community of Cúllar Vega.
The journalist and feminist Nuria Varela published a book in 2012 titled The Ignored Voice. Ana Orantes and the end of impunity with the desire to "pay tribute to a woman who lost her life for the truth and who, thanks to her bravery, managed to shake the conscience of a country, modify its laws, break the silence and introduce public debate and the political agenda which until then was an issue limited to the private sphere."[33]
In December 2017, when the twentieth anniversary of the murder was celebrated, her daughter Raquel Orantes, an honorary member of the Platform of Women Artists against Gender Violence,[34] honored her mother's memory by releasing a letter that was addressed symbolically to the deceased. In the letter, in addition to missing her and lamenting her fate, she highlighted the significance of her case in the collective battle against sexist violence.[11]
The town councils of Cúllar Vega and La Zubia—both in the metropolitan area of Granada—named their streets after Ana Orantes. In December 2018, the Seville city council also approved dedicating a street to him in the city. [35] In March 2019, the plenary session of the town of Gilena, Seville, did the same. [36]
inaccuracies in the news media
Some media outlets often claim, relatively frequently, that Ana Orantes was the first Spanish woman who visited a television program to openly denounce the mistreatment inflicted at the hands of her ex-husband.[37][12][38] [39][40] However, prior to Orantes, some women in Spain had already turned to television for that same purpose.[41] Even Orantes herself, during her televised confession, would say "I have been forty years like this lady,"[7]—alluding to another guest, sitting next to her, who had revealed a drama similar to hers on the set before her. Although it is true that her murder became the first known, in Spanish territory, as a result of a television accusation of marital abuse.
Another misinformation, which is sometimes repeated in certain media, deals with the description of the modus operandi in which José Parejo murdered his ex-wife. On occasions, it has been alleged that he hit her, causing her to lose consciousness, dragged her to tie her to a chair, doused her with gasoline, and finally burned her alive. All this in the presence of a son of about fourteen years old.[18][42][43] However, in the guilty verdict handed down in the criminal's trial, only the spilling of the flammable fuel was determined as proven facts. on the victim's back and his subsequent charring while still alive.[5]No son was present during the execution of the crime, it was a granddaughter who discovered the crime already committed.[16]
References
https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Orantes