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Nesly Lizet Consuegra Monterroso was 27 years old and had started her career as a rapper for 10 years. freestyle in Guatemala. She belonged to various collectives in which, according to what her friends have said, she wove networks to bring women closer to and professionalize in the freestyle of rap and hip-hop.. He disappeared on December 2, 2022, and three days later his body was found inside a barrel in a car without license plates abandoned in the capital of the country with signs of extreme violence. Despite the fact that in Guatemala at least one woman is murdered every day, and femicide represents 22% of all violent deaths of women, it is still difficult for cases like Nesly’s to remain in the public eye and cause a stir in society. .
Nesly Consuegra, neshie, as his relatives affectionately called him, had opened a bar in the center of the capital. The night she disappeared, she had left her place and was no longer located, until her body was found in another sector of the city with clear signs of extreme violence. The cause of her death, according to the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (Inacif), was a head trauma, after a strong blow to the head. During a demonstration to demand justice for this case, Gabriela Bolten, rapper and singer, has recalled in the feminist media Rue that Neshie’s case is not isolated: “It is a case that responds to the structural violence of impunity that we are experiencing in this country.” In that same medium, the group to which she belonged, Colectiva Urbana, published a small profile of Nesly where her activism and her desire to connect with other women to gain spaces inside and outside of music stand out: “She played soccer, she was protective of animal rights and dedicated his time to taking care of puppies in veterinarians where he worked for a few years. Our sister and colleague was loving, helpful, someone who had time to listen, a committed and passionate person. We remember her with love and demand justice.”
For Pía Flores, a Guatemalan journalist who closely follows issues of gender violence in the Central American country, Nesly’s case gained notoriety because the environment to which she belonged allowed her to be “a little more visible” and to talk more about her. The local hip-hop and rap scene came out a few days after her murder to demonstrate and demand justice. But Flores assures that there are still many prejudices at all levels of society that prevent this type of violence from occupying an important place in the public debate: “It is still very difficult for people to analyze these cases from a gender perspective. The important thing is that she be respected in her process, in the process of investigating her femicide, that those prejudices that despise her for being a woman, for being visible, for having a bar are not applied to her. That’s what always happens, isn’t it? She had a bar and she went out at that time and then, well, we all know that at that time you risk being killed. It’s not normal, as much as people want to insist on normalizing it.”
Last June, a report from the humanitarian organization Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM) showed that in the last 14 years there have been 10,660 femicides in Guatemala. And he indicated that femicide violence “increases rapidly” since the Law Against Feminicide and Other Forms of Violence Against Women was approved. Since its approval in 2008, the legal mechanisms to respond to this problem “have fallen short,” the document says.
Pia Flores observes that, at an institutional and social level, there is still resistance to how to deal with femicides, and assures that from the media the panorama is not so different: “The worst thing is that now there is also a political moment, not only in Guatemala, which is also seen in other Latin American countries, which has to do with this swing between left and right and which tries to paint the world black or white. And that is why when one defines themselves as a feminist journalist, they already demonize or criticize you, they disqualify your work, because then you cannot be objective when in reality that never existed ”, she assures.
On June 25, the first round of the presidential elections in Guatemala left a surprising result. Bernardo Arévalo, of the Seed Movement, will face former first lady Sandra Torres in the second round on August 20. What does this result mean for women in Guatemala? Pia Flores says she is hopeful for the initiatives of the movement headed by Arévalo, which, initially, in its structure has a quota where it allows the integration of more women within its formation. That, she assures her, is a novelty among the country’s parties. “I really have no doubt that their policies are more progressive, but if they were to win, they are still in the minority in Congress and it is in Congress where the battles are really fought regarding, for example, legislation that they could improve the conditions for women”, he concludes.
On April 5, the Guatemalan authorities arrested a man for being the alleged femicide of Nesly Consuegra. Sources close to the case have assured that, at some point, the man would have had some kind of relationship with her. In an interview with Nesly, when she was promoting her music and her work, she responded: “Being a woman, born in Guatemala, is a bit complicated. You have to fight with machismo, with not giving you spaces to rap, with the fact that they belittle your work, but over time we have been able to position ourselves quite well.
The name of Nesly has had a tour within the social imaginary of Guatemala in recent months. Her friends and family who try, from social networks or from the street, have contributed to keep the issue on the agenda. This is not the case with the hundreds of thousands of women who have denounced the various types of violence they face every day in that country.
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🎧 And to finish a podcast: Chapter ‘Distorted Bodies’, from Ciberlocutorio
The Spanish Andrea Gumes and Anna Pacheco are the creators of Ciberlocutorio, from Radio Primavera Sound, in which they replicate a model that has proven to connect with many people in Latin America and that will have almost intimate talks about the different issues that concern us as women or simply as members of a society that changes and transforms every day. In this episode, published on May 29, they deal with the subject that they themselves have named as “an elephant in the room.”
In Distorted Bodies, Andrea and Ana raise the complex issue of the female body, but not how it is seen and represented in avalanches of commercials, or in the media, much less in public opinion. In this episode they raise such important questions as the discussion around the urgent need to stop talking about women’s bodies as if they were a common good, a public resource on which to freely comment and judge. And those questions are: what happens when you think you are a ‘worked’ woman in these aspects, but you are unable to feel good inside with your body? Why not just permeate all this speech in us? And part of the answer they have come up with is that it has not been possible to defocus the aesthetic or what we consider beauty in our own bodies. That is to say: “it is not so much how they look at us, but how you look at yourself. And that is a burden, ”they say.
In this episode, they review some readings by authors that have helped them understand the subject of corporeality a little better and how women are subject to all kinds of pressures and internal prejudices when making decisions in our lives, and they talk about her own experiences and the hard work it has meant not falling into the trap of perpetuating those stereotypes almost of her own free will.
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