“We want life imprisonment, not just 10 or 15 years in prison and then they are able to walk free to do the same,” said Guillermo Perez, Lucia’s father. “My daughter was drugged, raped and impaled. Who can do something like this?” Two armed men allegedly turned up at the family home and told Lucia’s parents, Guillermo and Marta, they would be shot dead. Police guards have been patrolling the house since the threat.
The death of this beautiful girl sent a chill through the spines of Argentinians and around the world. Women walked out of work wearing black to protest against femicide. The protest called “Miércoles Negro” or Black Wednesday was launched after the family demanded justice for Lucia. They launched the #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneLess) protest asking other women to walk out from their jobs for one hour as solidarity to the millions of women that fall victims of gender violence. Many organizations around the world are showing their solidarity by protesting acts of violence against women.
The organizers of the march wrote:”In your office, school, hospital, law court, newsroom, shop, factory, or wherever you are working, stop for an hour to demand “no more machista violence.”
“Next time it could happen to the person you love the most. We should be strong and go out the street in order to shout together, now more than never: “No one else”. Only like this will we will be able to sleep at night, and my sister can rest in peace,” said Lucia’s brother.
“I originally just wanted to write a letter as a tribute to my sister, and to include a picture of her that meant a lot to us, of her being hugged by my parents. But even this simple form of closure is not open to us, because now we have death threats hanging over our heads. My sister was a quiet girl, she did not often leave the house, and on the weekend she died, she had been picked up from home at 10 a.m. My father had just left the house, and my mother had returned four hours later at 3 p.m. She found my sister’s Facebook account still open, because she had only expected to be away for a short while when she went to meet whoever she had spoken to on Facebook. But she had been cheated, and she never returned.”
