Generally, the idea of sacrifice is associated with giving up something valuable. But this is not the only definition. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, sacrifice has numerous meanings, among which is that of being an offering to a deity as a sign of homage or expiation, a killing of animals or people, and a serious situation to which a person is subjected. person.
René Girard, one of the authors who theorized the most about sacrifice, considers that it is an institution prior to the emergence of the judicial system, and excluding the political implications of sacrifice, confines it to a past prior to the creation of the modern justice system. .
However, his valuable contributions are taken up by Zygmunt Bauman, because they serve to explain the role of violence in the birth and cohesion of a society. Sacrifice becomes a tool of violence recycled by troubled and unstable communities, as a defense weapon in the hands of the passions of its members.
When Bauman describes today’s society in liquid modernity, refers to our contemporary communities as prone to communitarian social pathologies, to “explosive” manifestations of sacrificial violence. He will say that explosive communities need violence to emerge and continue to exist, so that there are enemies to collectively threaten and persecute. While he thinks of nationalist-type demonstrations and community-led genocides, there are points of contact that are worth noting.
Sacrifice is an act of violence that gives meaning to the community, like a ceremony to renew the social contract, which ensures the existence of the group and its shared values. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to society, to reinforce the social fabric. The idea of deporting the abject beyond the limits of the community is achieved by confining the monsters to maintain the harmony of society.
Another aspect of the sacrifice that Girard points out is that the enemy does not die completely: he remains in latent risk and, with it, the permanent threat of altering the social order.
The media coverage of the judicial process against those accused of the crime of Fernando Báez Sosa, and in particular of the final hearings, made the case a spectacle of human sacrifice through the application of the penalty.
Public opinion passionately fought for an “exemplary” sentence, that is, one that serves to reinforce the values of the community. The reconstruction of the case focused on the particular violence of the aggressors – without referring too much to the racist component, and even less to its patriarchal aspect. Expendable subjects are similar enough to us to be taken to be members of our community, but construed as undeniably different to prevent identification.
Equating the perpetuity of confinement to justice, the manifestations of support for the victim’s family argued that this value could only be achieved by applying a life sentence to all members of the group equally. In the worst case, noticing the insufficiency of said punishment, there was no lack of expressions of demands for more severe sentences, incompatible with our national constitution, such as the death penalty.
For weeks, the desire of an entire community could be seen resting on the suffering of a group of people, who were denied the character of such and expelled to the category of monstrous beings.
The most recurrent qualifiers pointed out his ruthless character and supported the accusation by referring to events such as “sucking fingers with blood” or an alleged smile at the painful words of Fernando’s mother, which although it was not recorded by any camera, it was enough that a journalist believed to see it for it to be taken for certain.
Simultaneously, the expressions of pain, suffering or regret by the defendants and their families were quickly dismissed and considered cynical impostures that confirmed the inhumane condition of the accused. Lucas Crisafulli warns that the risks of taking refuge in the idea that murderers are monsters is that it prevents us from seeing that the biggest monstrosities were committed by people like us.
This “us” that supposedly does not house monsters but rather good people, who can only identify with the victim, who can only see Fernando’s in the eyes of their children, and who harbor the full conviction of being incapable of ever finding themselves in a defendant status.
The spectacle of the punishment occupied the main media with almost total coverage. Dissatisfaction with a lack of life sentence does not denounce the lack of reparation –which is difficult, if not impossible, when we talk about a homicide–, nor the lack of application of the law. Justice ceases to be a matter of law to transmute into a scenario of social purification. The public does not claim justice in terms of legality; on the contrary, he dispenses with it and turns away from it to claim death, the public sacrifice of monsters.
“Who has not ever wondered: ‘Am I a monster or is this being a person?’” Perhaps the greatest power of this question formulated by Clarice Lispector lies in the distortion of what is apparently evident: our human condition. If the monstrous thing is the lack of pity, if the monstrous thing is to wish the suffering of others… Isn’t there an undeniable monstrosity in turning the application of a sentence into a spectacle of human sacrifice? Are we monsters? Or could it be that this is being a person?
* Lawyer