A young Qom asked the Provincial Commission for Memory (CPM) to intervene in the absence of progress in the cases investigating the femicides of her mother and her 14-year-old sister that occurred in the Tigre district of Buenos Aires.
The victims are the adolescent Micaela Fernández, victim of trafficking and femicide in 2013; and her mother, Nancy Fernández, who was found murdered a year later, after denouncing a trafficking network in which police officers were involved.
Lisette Fernández, the daughter and sister of the victims, requested the active intervention of the Provincial Commission for Memory (CPM), an autarchic organization from Buenos Aires dedicated to the defense of human rights.
According to a statement from the Union of Original Peoples of Tigre and Escobar, the young Qom and her lawyer, a member of the Kolla People, Paula Mercedes Alvarado Mamani, met in La Plata with the CPM in a meeting they described as “very positive.” .
Among other aspects, they requested the intervention of the Buenos Aires agency in the two judicial files and to take steps to involve the Ministry of Women, Gender Policies and Sexual Diversity of the Province of Buenos Aires.
As detailed by Alvarado Mamani, the objective is to analyze the autopsy performed on Micaela Fernández in 2013, in order to locate elements that demonstrate violence.
“We asked for a new expertise to be able to show that it was not a suicide in any way, but that there are elements that make it a homicide,” explained the lawyer.
The lawyer also requested “different means of evidence, calls, links, testimonial statements from acquaintances at that time and that Lisette provide her testimony in the first person because she was never called.”
She argued that there were two femicides of indigenous women and stressed that both she and Lisette “have suffered this type of violence on our bodies.” She explained that “in addition to the specific search for justice for the cases of Micaela and Nancy, this is a contribution to stop this type of violence that is not foreign to any indigenous woman.”
In 2013, Micaela disappeared and her mother, Nancy, went to the sixth police station to file a complaint, but “they treated her crazy” and they did not take the complaint. Her youngest reappeared days later beaten, with cuts on her face and her hair brutally cut, and she said that she had been taken to a house where she was abused by several men.
Nancy, despite her daughter’s fear, went to the police station to file a complaint and again they ignored her. That night several policemen showed up at her house and took her into custody at the sixth police station.
“Fucking Indian, shut up,'” five police officers yelled at Nancy as they beat her.
In February 2013, Nancy was told by an acquaintance that her 14-year-old daughter had committed suicide by shooting herself at the home of a man known as Ashy Dante ‘Duck’.
The woman never believed the hypothesis of suicide and began to march together with neighbors and organizations, to the police station, denouncing and demanding justice.
On May 2, 2014, Nancy was found dead in her home, half-naked and with signs of suffocation.
