2023-09-24 06:37:01
Ana María Serrano was 18 years old and was beginning to study Medicine in Mexico.
Photo: Private Archive
Ximena Céspedes is Colombian, but has lived half of her life in Mexico. She migrated to that country for love and there she formed her family. She became a mother at the age of 28, when Daniela was born, and three years after her, Ana María arrived, who was just murdered at just 18 years old. She still finds it hard to believe that she died so young, with so many dreams ahead of her, and that the aggressor is allegedly her ex-boyfriend. In her family, people used to die of old age (there are those who have lived more than 100 years) and this is the first time they have come face to face with sexist violence in a world where, every hour, five women are murdered by their partners. or family members, according to the United Nations.
(Read here: The farewell letter from Ana María Serrano’s sister after her femicide)
Ana María was born in Mexico on 05/05/05. Laughing, her mother remembers that that day she was in the recovery room with another woman who had also given birth on 05/05/05 to a girl named Ana María. Years later, the Ana Marías met again at school using the same suitcase and became friends. “What an amazing coincidence!” Ximena tells El Espectador. Like almost all mothers, she believed that she would die first than her daughter, but she was murdered last September 12 in her house, while her parents were celebrating 23 years of marriage in Rome. A dream trip that had been postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
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(Read here: Case of Ana María Serrano: her cousin’s emotional farewell after her femicide)
Ana met her alleged attacker, Alán Gil Romero, at school and they had a romantic relationship for more than a year. Those close to her say that, when she wanted to end it, he began to harass her through messages, gifts and threats, in order to force her to return. The Mexican Prosecutor’s Office has the hypothesis that she was murdered for deciding to break that bond, a motive that would demonstrate the control that sexist men have historically believed they have over women’s lives and their decisions. For this reason, the case is being prosecuted as a femicide.
(Read here: Femicides in Mexico: Colombian women, murdered and revictimized)
The investigations indicate that Alán entered the house where Ana was alone and suffocated her. To try to cover up the crime, he would have sent some text messages saying that she was sad and thus trying to simulate a suicide. The victim was found dead after her mother asked a neighbor to check on her. A call from her had woken her up at 2:00 a.m. at the hotel in Rome where she was with her husband. She doesn’t know who called her, because she couldn’t answer and it was an unknown number, but, since she was awake, she wanted to contact her daughter and that’s when her premonition was activated.
When Ximena found out that her daughter was dead, she called her mother in Colombia and told her: They just killed Ana María, go to Mexico! The victim’s grandparents were responsible for notifying the rest of the family. One of the first calls they made was to Tatiana, the second of her three daughters and who, as soon as she saw her father calling her in the middle of the Colombia vs. Chile, she knew it was bad news. He is a football fan, so something was going on if he had interrupted his concentration on the game. The next day, everyone was in the Aztec country.
(Read here: The autopsy of Ana María Serrano confirms that she was murdered)
Since then, Ximena and Tatiana have gone through this tragedy together. They are three years apart, but they grew up almost like twins. They started going to parties together, had their first boyfriends at the same time, studied law and got pregnant at the same time. They even confuse them physically. They come from a family dominated by lawyers. His grandfather, José Enrique Arboleda Valencia, was a magistrate of the Supreme Court of Justice, minister and ambassador; and he was the cousin of Guillermo León Valencia, former president of Colombia.
Ximena is a lawyer by profession, but she has been dedicated to corporate communication for years. These days, she is working on her own public relations plan to talk about the femicide of her daughter and ask for justice so that she does not go unpunished. She wants to tell what happened, remember her daughter with love and ask her to rest, because her mother is going to persist until her feminicide is convicted. Just as other mothers of young people who died due to sexist violence have done: Laura Hidalgo, the mother of Valentina Trespalacios, a DJ murdered by her boyfriend in Bogotá; or Luz Divina Cabarcas, the mother of Gabriela Romero, victim of a serial feminicide in Atlántico.
(“He was threatening her”: Ana María Serrano’s mother about the alleged feminicide)
Ximena is living her grief at work, managing her own crisis and not that of a company, and this is how she has chosen to begin her own healing path. “Everyone carries out their grieving process in their own way. Just as my mother no longer wants to see anyone or be hugged, Ximena needs to tell it to heal,” considers Tatiana, who is married to the economist José Manuel Restrepo, former Minister of Finance of Colombia, and who was one of the first people to make public this feminicide, which became media, but it is not the only one nor is it an isolated event.
Violence against women and feminicide are a latent problem in all countries on the planet. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) states that, every day in 2021, at least 12 women were murdered for reasons of gender in the region. Adolescents and young women between 15 and 29 years old, like Ana María, were the most affected. Mexico is no stranger to this reality. A note from El País states that, from 2018 to 2022, 17,776 women were murdered there, which is equivalent to more than 3,500 each year, 300 a month, 10 a day. 70% of Mexican women have experienced some type of violence throughout their lives.
The impunity rate for femicide crimes is 76%, according to the association Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity. And Ximena knows it. That is the concern that she has speaking in the media, “because one thing is that the aggressor is caught and another thing is that they condemn him. What we want is for her to stay in jail, she has to pay for what she did.”
Everyone remembers Ana María as “Nana”. Since she was a child she had a black and sarcastic humor, which she entertained at family gatherings. Her father, a Mexican, chemical engineer who prefers to stay out of the media spotlight, proposed that her daughters try many activities until they found one that they were passionate about. Nana stayed with Olympic gymnastics for a long time. She also loved animals, so much so that she abandoned the idea of being a veterinarian because she couldn’t stand to see them suffer. She and she finally went for Medicine, a career in which she only managed to study for a couple of months.
Nana didn’t like the sea, she was afraid of that immensity. During Holy Week she used to come to Colombia to participate, along with her aunt Tatiana and her cousins, in the Catholic missions in territories such as San José del Guaviare or Santa Rosa de Osos. On these tours, in which health care is provided to vulnerable communities, the young woman discovered her medical vocation and served as an ophthalmology or dentistry assistant.
“If I had called before, if I had not left her alone in the house, would she be alive?” Ximena asked herself with one of the emotions with which she began her mourning: guilt. “I taught my daughter about safety, how to take care of herself at the bar, that she should always look at her drink so that they wouldn’t spill something on her. But it never occurred to me to tell her that she should take care of the person who was next to her, since he was well known to us,” says Ana María’s mother, who has now decided to use her voice to warn about femicides.
It’s not your fault. More than 50% of homicides of women in the world in 2021, according to the United Nations, were committed by their intimate partners or other family members, while only 11% of all homicides of men are committed in the private sphere. That is, for them, home is a dangerous place and those closest to them are their potential aggressors. The behaviors are usually aimed at controlling their bodies, their autonomy or contact with other people.
However, femicides are preventable. The UN explains that they can and should be prevented by various actors who should join together in strategic alliances to, for example, strengthen criminal justice responses and data collection systems, and make programs to change culture and transform masculinities and prejudices. that society has built on the roles of women and men.
Last Friday, more than 400 people went to say goodbye to Ana María at her funeral. They did not allow her body to be cremated due to the judicial process, in which an autopsy already determined that she died violently and that it was not a suicide. Her friends, family, and college classmates gathered to talk about her life.
His cousin Julián recalled that his anecdotes were due to an incessant, but fascinating, competition, even for his grandmother’s attention. Her best friend, Montserrat Aguilar, mentioned Ana’s love for her sunflowers, spoke of them as “family” and a place where she could cry without being judged. “Whenever she came to school, she would see me and run to hug me. That gesture made a difference in my daily life.”
Her sister Daniela thought of the song “I learned from them,” which Ana repeated over and over again and talks about two stars, who are now tattooed on her skin to honor her. She also promised to take care of Guinevere, the pet that accompanied her. “Rest in peace, little one. We are going to take care of each other. I will light candles so you can find your way. We are going to be fine, even if it doesn’t seem like it right now,” Daniela wrote.
Her parents, Ximena and José, acknowledged that life will not be the same again and that they cannot find enough words to describe their pain, but they spoke to Ana’s friends, who are beginning to live. They asked them not to blame themselves or feel responsible for not having prevented the death of her daughter. Never normalize violence, which is not only physical, but also verbal or psychological. Raise your voice when something is not right. Believe in her instinct and seek help. Trust and talk more often with her parents. Express your feelings. Be empathetic and compassionate with others and with themselves. Believe in love and friendship. Fight for dreams. And be grateful for each experience, because it is a learning experience. And finally: “Live every moment of the day as Ana María always lived them. And let them shine. “She will always be with them.”
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