5 Femicide in rural Argentina in Selva Almada’s Chicas muertas

In addition to the National Registry of Femicides, the civil association La Casa del Encuentro has, since 2009, gathered its own unofficial statistics through the Adriana Marisel Zambrano Femicide Observatory. It reports a relatively higher incidence of cases: approximately 50 more cases per year than the numbers reported by the National Registry, although the growth curve is similar. According to the observatory, from 2008 to 2019, there were 3,251 femicides and trans femicides in Argentina. In 2019 alone, 299 women died for reasons associated with their gender. La Casa del Encuentro reports that in 12 years, 4,058 children were left without mothers due to femicide, of which 2,599 (more than 64%) were minors at the time of their mothers’ assassinations.3 La Casa Encuentro: http://www.lacasadelencuentro.org/femicidios03.html [accessed 2021].

We will return to this data later. Let us pause for a moment on the elements that perpetuate the phenomenon in the country. To begin with, the femicides are part of a process to dispossess women and girls of the control of their bodies and identities. Female annihilation thus starts prior to the murders and/or disappearances of the victims and continues after them through a set of mechanisms that often end up in the abandonment of the cases. Male power becomes institutional in that the police and the judicial system neglect the urgent need to address the issue and instead preserve corrupt mechanisms through which the investigations are abandoned and the victims are discredited. The femicides and the ways in which they are perceived by the community and the relevant State forces show evidence that State violence, misogyny, corruption, impunity and silence concerning the victims of criminal violence are in force in present-day Argentina.

The high incidence of femicidal violence in the country is thus sustained by political, legal and social dynamics associated with the predominant ideology in the region that underestimates the vulnerability of women and girls and silences their mistreatment, disappearances and murders. Therefore, we cannot approach femicidal violence in rural Argentina, the central theme of this chapter, without addressing the impunity over it, in particular the relevant authorities’ abandonment of most cases and sometimes the criminalisation of the victims and their families by society. The ultimate objective of this, as we will see, is to silence the facts and erase as far as possible the victims from the collective memory of the country.

Yet, the strong anti-femicidal activism in the country leads to the following questions: when there is no justice, how can violent deaths be explained to the community? If killings are left unresolved and their stories are hidden, do the memories of the assassinated die? What does the impunity over femicide represent in 21st-century Argentina?

Selva Almada tries to address these questions in Chicas muertas,4 Selva Almada, Chicas muertas (Buenos Aires: Literatura Random House, 2014). which lies somewhere between a chronicle, testimonial work and fiction. Almada, who was brought up in Entre Ríos province, was moved by the unresolved femicides of three young women from Chaco and Entre Ríos in the 1980s: Sarita Mundín (20 years old), María Luisa Quevedo (15 years old) and Andrea Danne (19 years old). Sarita Mundín never returned from a night out with a wealthy man with whom she had a troubled relationship. She was supporting her family through her work in the sex trade. María Luisa Quevedo was found strangled and sexually assaulted near a rubbish dump shortly after starting her new job as a maid. Andrea Danne was a middle-class student who was stabbed in the heart while she was sleeping in her bed, with her parents in the next room. The three victims of Chicas muertas were young, inexperienced and unprotected by their families and by the State. Their murders were never clarified, and their cases were neglected by the authorities.

Chicas muertas thus exemplifies how fictional narrative can be instrumental in raising awareness of an issue. Almada conducted interviews with relatives and others, consulted the records of the cases, checked the press, met with judges and visited a medium. In the absence of first-person testimonies of the dead women, Almada becomes the fourth one in that she narrates her childhood and adolescent memories during the 1980s and 1990s. She declares herself a survivor of the structural violence against girls and women in rural Argentina: ‘I am now 40 years old and, unlike her and the thousands of women murdered in our country since then, I’m still alive. Just a matter of luck’.5 Spanish original: ‘Ahora tengo cuarenta años y, a diferencia de ella y de las miles de mujeres asesinadas en nuestro país desde entonces, sigo viva. Sólo una cuestión de suerte’; Chicas muertas, p. 182. Her own experiences allow her to share with the reader her memories, doubts, fears, frustrations and desire to reverse the situation and make the cases of the dead girls known. In this way, Almada equates her life, illusions and fears with those of the dead women. She knows well the mentality of the area because she grew up in the same environment, to which she feels attracted due to its ‘narrative power, an overwhelmed violence, rarely contained, that fits very well in my prose’.6 Spanish original: ‘potencia narrativa, una violencia desbordada, pocas veces contenida, que cabe muy bien en mi prosa’; Alberto Gordo, ‘Selva Almada’, El Cultural, 23 June 2014; https://elcultural.com/Selva-Almada [accessed 20 November 2020]. Almada’s statement reveals both her fascination with and her rejection of a violent world in which there is little content and much silence.

Chicas muertas presents the unresolved femicides as crimes of the State in particular, in so far as the relevant State forces are not able to guarantee the safety of women or ensure justice for them. For example, Sarita Mundín and María Luisa Quevedo took responsibility for supporting their families and, by doing so, became victims of the structural poverty embedded in the growing social inequality in Argentina. In this line, Almada tells us that violence against women and femicides are perpetuated in rural Argentina through regulatory and exclusionary mechanisms and points at the relevant authorities and the repressive society as the main producers. These mechanisms include (1) the male chauvinism prevalent in the area and the social complacency over it; (2) the corruption and impunity over the crimes; and (3) the silence concerning the femicides and the victims.

With Chicas muertas, Almada does not aim to uncover the identities of the young women’s killers. In relation to this, her investigation is limited to vague interpretive proposals of the murders, based on unreliable arguments extracted from tarot sessions and rumours. When investigating the murders of girls in rural Argentina, Chicas muertas highlights the legal mechanisms (such as the impunity over the femicides and the silence concerning the victims) that have been inherited from past political times in the country.

Almada states that she is trying to fulfil a mission with Chicas muertas: ‘gather the girls’ bones, assemble them, give them a voice and then let them run freely wherever they need to go’.7 Spanish original: ‘juntar los huesos de las chicas, armarlas, darles voz y después dejarlas correr libremente hacia donde sea que tenga que ir’; Chicas muertas, p. 50. In investigating the past, Almada tries to add the humble victims of femicide to the collective memory of violence in 21st-century Argentina. Recovering the memories of the three girls is therefore a crucial issue in Chicas muertas, just as it is in Argentina in regard to the healing process from the political violence and the impunity over it during the Videla dictatorship (1976–83). In this way, Sarita, María Luisa, Andrea and the many other victims of femicide listed in the book operate as a narrative link between the past and the present in Argentina.

At first sight, Chicas muertas is an easy book to read. The style is direct and the protagonists and their families are ordinary people. These girls become victims of something quite common in the area: they are murdered by men. The book also tells us about other women who endure gender-based violence in full view of the community. This is precisely where the complexity of the novel lies: in highlighting the normalisation of gender-based violence and femicides in the area. The novel therefore allows several interpretations. This chapter focuses on two: (1) Chicas muertas follows the literary canon of testimony and memory on the political and State violence in 20th-century Argentina; and (2) Chicas muertas is a representation of the feminist activism that attempts to give visibility to the femicide phenomenon as a form of political violence.

First, I address the argument developed by feminist activism concerning femicide being a form of institutional violence that is characterised by a lack of interest and resources to palliate the situation of women, as well as the inability to clarify the cases investigated. I then look at the representation of femicide in Chicas muertas. Finally, I show evidence of the limited success in locating this novel within the corpus of Argentinean testimonial and memory literature.