Trial begins on “Higui”, the woman who killed a man to defend herself against a gang rape

On October 16, 2016, Eva Analia De Jesús (47) was walking through Lomas de Mariló, a neighborhood in the Buenos Aires town of Bella Vista, where she had gone to visit her sister for Mother's Day, when a group of 10 men from the neighborhood who used to harass her because of her sexual orientation attacked her.

“Higui” - who bears that nickname because she is an archer and has curls like the Colombian René Higuita - tells that her attackers beat her, broke her clothes and tried to abuse her. “I'm going to make you feel like a woman, you're a lesbian,” she recalls how Cristian Rubén Esposito told her, the moment she pulled a knife and stuck it in her chest, before becoming unconscious. She woke up, she says, when a group of troops pointed a flashlight at her, handcuffed her and held her for the murder.

This Tuesday, “Higui” will begin to be tried in the first of four hearings of the oral trial against her for the simple homicide of Espósito, one of the protagonists of a corrective group rape attempt that was never investigated as such, despite the fact that she was found vanished at the scene of the facts, with trauma to different parts of the body, broken pants and underwear.

After spending eight months in prison and thanks to a strong campaign and mobilization of various social organizations, the San Martín Chamber of Appeals granted him extraordinary release from prison and Higui was released in June 2017.

That situation could be reversed if the judges of the Oral Criminal Court No. 7 of San Martín find her guilty at the end of the oral proceedings, which in addition to today's hearing, the trial will have another three days on March 16, 17 and 22, during which 30 witnesses are expected to testify, none in her favor.

In an interview this weekend with Radio AM750, Higui said that he “never wanted to hurt anyone”. “I want to live in peace. I defended my body. I never hurt anyone, I was always a respectful girl,” she said. He also said that he has no permanent job, that he lives only by collecting cardboard or cutting grass and that he resumed his studies in elementary school.

“I'm bad, I don't fall asleep. I'm up until 4 in the morning and wake up at 7 in the morning. I get a knot in my belly, when I want to vomit, I have nightmares. It's been five years and before I came up with this,” he said. “I'm at home with my doggies, with my niece, with my kittens. And I try not to think about the bad. I think all the girls are there, I feel the love and support of the girls and that gives me strength”.

“There are a lot of people who are activating this case because they identify with the situation,” Gabriela Conder, who is leading the team of lawyers who will try to prove their innocence and account for their vulnerable situation, told the agency. “Higui is a very poor girl from the Buenos Aires region, who does not have a water tank or sewers in her house, she lives in a place where when it rains she floods to such an extent that it is impossible to enter or leave,” said the lawyer.

Conder said that during her childhood Higui “was raped by the different partners of her mother”, and her status as a lesbian with a trans sister in prostitution meant that they were already abused as adults in the Mariló neighborhood, where the events took place and where they once got to “give her three punches in the back while they ran her” .

This is what “Higui” herself referred to: “My life was always to defend my mother from the blows, to defend my sister from the blows, my sister also from the blows. And that was my whole life, ever since I got notion, since I was a girl. My stepfather raped me. My life after the last five years is an apprenticeship, I feel that I am more mature. I know my rights, I know that I have the right to be well and to be happy, because I am not a person who is bothering, on the contrary, I always go around helping the people I need, the kids in the neighborhood. I'm not hurting anyone.”

As the harassment escalated to the point that he had suffered a fire in his house and found his dog murdered, a while earlier Higui had decided to leave the place but would return from time to time to visit another of his sisters. “If you analyze the facts as the penal system usually does, isolated from the context, you come to unjust solutions as we think can happen in this case,” said another of Higui's lawyers, Claudia Spatocco, in relation to the legitimate defense institute.

“Higui is charged with homicide for having tried to defend herself against a 'corrective' group rape, which is the typical rape that lesbians are subjected to in order to get rid of our 'lesbianity',” said journalist and lesbian activist Adriana Carrasco, who participates in the campaign for the acquittal of Higui.

Carrasco also emphasized the prejudices towards Higui for being a “male lesbian, black and poor” and the reaction of the policeman who, when she tried to tell what had happened, replied, ''Who is going to want to rape you, fat girl?” , even though she was beaten and her clothes were torn.

With the slogans “I would defend myself too” and “Self-defense is not a crime”, sectors of the LGBT+ movement and feminist organizations mobilized this morning out of court to demand his acquittal.

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