Every night, when Brazil is asleep, she turns on the computer on the kitchen table. She waits, and waits, and waits until the screen lights up. The computer is old and tests anyone’s patience. But Regina Jardim, 64, a mother and retired teacher, is a determined woman who has been on a mission for 17 years and three months. Her routine always begins with a visit to Google. She types in three words and hits enter. Dead woman with hair… (woman killed by…) Intro… And there they are, the latest news on femicides.
With the scraps of information she finds, she composes a small profile of each Brazilian woman murdered for the mere fact of being a woman, at the hands of a husband, a boyfriend, a lover, an ex-partner… And she publishes it on the Internet. Profile by profile, patiently, she has built a monumental work over the last 17 years, Who Loves Freedom (Whoever loves sets free). The conviction that “these women cannot be forgotten,” as she explained one recent morning in the kitchen of her home in Cruzeiro, has driven her for almost two decades in this project that was born when her life and that of her family were blown up on the Corpus Christi weekend of 2007.
Looking at the memorial on Instagram or Facebook is impressive, it leaves anyone breathless. Yasmin Vitória, 17 years old. Gessica Marchesin, 25 years old. Elisandra de F. Dias Moreira, 42 years old. Raimunda da Silva Leite, 36 years old. Lacia Oliveira Guajajara, 53 years old… Each one framed in violet, most of them smiling. The former Portuguese teacher publicly records the name, age, profession, the data she manages to gather about their lives, the circumstances of the crime or the perpetrator. According to her own calculations, she has published around 20,000 reviews. Some include several victims: mother with children, sisters…
This retiree, who supplements her pension by correcting school essays and academic papers, documents each case with the meticulousness of a notary. Tonight she will turn on the computer in her charming kitchen – tastefully and cheerfully decorated in red and white – to publish the short biographies. Each one, with her photo and, if she doesn’t get one, with a flower. Without an official count of victims, it is the closest thing to a database of the trail of blood and emptiness left by gender violence in Brazil. Each night, alone again with the past and the present, with her patience and her thoughts.
This quixotic mission began on June 9, 2007, when the phone rang in the early hours of the morning at her home in Cruzeiro, a small town halfway between Rio and São Paulo. A family friend was calling. The eldest of her five children, Priscila Jardim, 29, had just been murdered in the parking lot of a nightclub by Alexandre Bittencourt de Oliveira e Souza, 27, with whom she had just broken up after three months of relationship. He emptied the magazine of a pistol.
“Priscila and I had an astral connection; she was an Aries and I was a Libra. A very good baby, who never gave me work. And then she was my partner, my friend, and sometimes my mother, you know? Because I separated when she was 11 years old,” Regina says. When Souza killed her, Priscila was emancipated, working as a receptionist at a company and preparing to enter university. She was going to study foreign trade.
The tragedy devastated the matriarch and the rest of the family. For days, Regina was knocked out, unable to get out of bed. When she gathered her strength, she found a lawyer – “I wanted it to be a woman” – and then went online. She needed to know more about what had happened to her daughter. Was this common? How many women died at the hands of their partners in Brazil? “I was perplexed. I saw so many cases.” Suddenly she understood that her precious Priscila was just one of many women. “And I said to myself: ‘I, who have, who had four daughters, who have nieces, a sister, who have worked with teenagers in a technical school for 15 years… Don’t I know about this serious problem in my country? This has to be told, this has to be known.” She is still committed to it, body and soul, to this day.
She hopes that each victim will be remembered beyond her closest friends. But, as a good teacher, there is also a pedagogical goal: to make her compatriots understand the dimension of sexist violence, how patriarchal domination kills and eats away at society. She wants to educate them about the dynamics of femicide, which since it was classified in 2015 until last year killed at least 10,655 Brazilian women, according to the Brazilian Forum for Public Security, an NGO that examines violence and where they have never heard of the arduous effort of this woman. In 2023, four Brazilian women were killed by femicides every day.
Regina recalls the vicissitudes while sharing with the visitor a delicious coffee brought by her son-in-law. Over the years, she has discovered patterns. “Most of the victims work [fuera de casa]because when a woman works she has the courage to say enough. These men know their routines, they kill them when they take their children to school or when they go to or come back from work. The most common thing is that, or inside the house. And when they have protection measures, they use the children. He cries, says he misses them and she opens the door. She believes that this man she loved, married, had a relationship with, can hit her, but she does not believe that he can kill her.” A conviction that the facts refute daily all over the planet.
“My former students say that I had a very feminist attitude in the classroom,” she says, even though she was not a militant in any way. She has certainly broken the mold. Raised to be a good wife and mother, she learned to sew and cook early on and got married when she was still a teenager, at 16 years old. Nothing very extraordinary among Brazilians of her generation. She built a family and, outside the home, a professional career. After 11 years of marriage, with four daughters and a son, she divorced a husband whom she considers a good father, but who contributed little else to the home.
By day, Regina is a retired grandmother who lives with two dogs, has just finished law school and looks after one of her four grandchildren. By night, she surfs the Internet like a detective. The local press, the media aimed at a more popular audience, are her best source. The serious press in São Paulo pays little attention to the trickle of crimes, which are already underreported.
Regina always cites the source and makes a huge effort to obtain a photo of each victim. “I look here and there. Now it is a little more difficult because before everyone was on Facebook,” she says. Some mothers write to her to have the photos of their daughters removed, others to send her a portrait to replace the flower.
She compiles information daily in carefully curated posts that she shares with her 16,000 followers. Who loves freedom on Instagram and the 24,000 from Facebook. A modest audience for a 17-year effort in one of the most Internet-addicted countries on the planet. Each Brazilian surfs the web for about nine hours a day.
At first, she was alone. “For five years I had virtually no views,” she says of her early days on Orkut, a social network that reigned supreme in Brazil. Despite the lack of interest, she did not give up. It is wise to never underestimate a mother’s pain. Of her five children, three are still alive. The youngest, Lailah, committed suicide a year and eight months after her sister was murdered.
The trial for Priscila’s murder, which was broadcast on the radio, was held in Cruzeiro (population 80,000). Her mother fought to have the accused’s lawyer removed from the case due to a conflict of interest; he was the husband of the police station that was in charge of the investigation. Regina, who knew the murderer because he had been a student of hers, describes him as an arrogant daddy’s boy who drove without a license and who was given a gun at the age of 18. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison, a sentence extended to 18 years after an appeal. Now free, married and with children, the murderer lives a hermit’s life in a neighbouring town. His parents went bankrupt and the discotheque never became a good business again.
Regina is an exhausted, soft-spoken woman who gets straight to the point. She loves literature and sewing. She is still so deeply traumatised that, she explains, she is still undergoing psychiatric treatment. “I have often had to hear that I have to forget, that I have to move on. I can’t!” She suffers because even her family doesn’t like her continuing with the memorial. “It’s been about five or six years since my children have brought it up, it’s as if it didn’t exist.”
Preserve Who Loves Freedom It took several moves on the Internet. Shortly before Orkut was shut down in 2014, she moved the memorial to Facebook. And since 2020, she has been posting the profiles on Instagram in parallel. Since Regina initially came across very explicit photos on Orkut blogs, she decided to show them alive and well.
Little by little, a small group of women began to follow her. The interest was translated into likes. And she has been creating a community from the kitchen of her house, illuminated by a soft light that filters through the large window from the small patio. Thanks to this network, she can offer those who need it the free services of a psychologist and a lawyer.
Brisa Batista, a 42-year-old feminist fighter hardened in the battle against racism and misogyny, has a special place in that small community of support. When she discovered Who Loves Freedom On Facebook, this sociologist from São Paulo was fascinated by the reviews that Regina had already dedicated more than a decade to. “I contacted her to tell her that this was important, that she was providing a public service. I wanted to strengthen her work because I understood that she was extremely alone.” The activist regrets that Brazilian society, and even the feminist movement, “receive these murders as natural events.”
This was the case in Spain until the end of the 20th century. Only with the barbaric murder of Ana Orantes in 1997 did they gain real public and political relevance. In 2001, EL PAÍS, on the initiative of the Society and Documentation sections, created its own count of victims of gender violence, given that the editorial staff was increasingly asking for the data and that the official statistics were slow and very deficient: they left out victims of ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends. Over time, the Government asked the newspaper for the database and, based on it, created the official spanish register which started in 2003 and contains 1,278 women. Documentation continues to update the internal count.
In Cruzeiro’s kitchen, IT has been another challenge. Brisa suggested to Regina, and she accepted, that in order to increase the impact of the memorial she should also publish it on Instagram. They also managed to buy a new laptop with donations. All that’s left is to migrate the content. This will greatly speed up the task of uploading each review to the Internet.
Aware of the enormous value of this database, the two friends are working, together with a volunteer specialist in information technology, to transfer the thousands of profiles to a page web where they are well kept and safe from the whims of the big tech companies. They are always short of time, but they will do whatever it takes to prevent the memory of Priscila, Yasmin, Gessica, Elisandra, Raimunda, Lacia…, of those thousands of murdered, from disappearing irremediably, because they are the stark testimony of a secular phenomenon that progress cannot bury.
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