What if John had killed Lorena?

This week, about the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the magnificent Podcast Radio AmbulantWorld, Lorena Gallo - Lorena Bobbitt, Lorena de Bucay, our Lorena–, intertwining her with that of her mother and, as she usually happens with the stories of our parents, with her own.

Arévalo makes a trip to the past and distance, to Virginia, United States, where in 1993 a young woman of Ecuadorian origin, victim of violence, castrated her husband and became famous throughout the planet, but for the wrong reasons.

In the episode we listen to Lorena herself to tell her story: of the crazy love she felt for that marine named John, who led her to ignore everyone and marry him, to the years of abuse, rape, vexations and humiliation that he livedby his side until that night of 1993.

Why do you do this to me again and again?

We listened to Lorena Gallo's soft voice remembering the night in which her then husband, drunk, broke her underwear and raped her as her custom was.What we all know later: the knife, lift from the sheet, the pit.

And also the rest: the teasing in Prime Time, the chocolates in the form of a penis and the shirts with double -meaning messages that were sold outside the court, the ridiculization of the daily violence that Lorena had suffered to end up doing what he did.

The world managed to turn a survivor into a laugh and nobody said the essential: if John had killed Lorena today nobody would remember her, it would be another number in the list of passion crimes, ridiculous euphemism with which the femicides were cataloged until quite recently.

Arévalo tells, appointment, collect.He comes and comes, past and present, distance and closeness, and, after telling us the story of Lorena, he invites us to move to her house, to her intimacy, to listen to her mother to tell her own.

It should not have been easy.For those who dedicate ourselves to fighting machismo, the violence that our parents have exerted against our own mothers is a sword that we will always have pierced in the heart, a duel that does not end.

But also the reason.The force majeure.

At the most exciting moment of the chronicle, twinned as the survivors who are, the distances between Lorena and the journalist's mother are broken thanks to the phone.They declare mutual admiration, embrace in words, they are appreciated.

For many women, such as Arévalo's mother, Lorena, that emigrant girl who just wanted to be happy, was and is a symbol of horror and also of salvation.

The reflection that Lorena leaves, my mother and I is that what Lorena Gallo did almost thirty years ago has served for thousands and thousands of women to move away from men who want to destroy them and to give a name and a place to violenceWithin the homes, a crime that, as this case demonstrated, until the 1990s gave rise to humor and not fright.