“I broke up with Patricio, who would be my femicide, on November 16, 2003. He had inappropriate behaviors, was following me, and stayed outside my house. When I noticed this, I tried to offer him help from a psychiatrist. A month went by, and I tried not to see him anymore. Counting the days from when I broke up with him until this happened adds up to a month. He tried to come back to me during that time, but I never accepted; I had it clear.
It all happened the day after Christmas when he went to deliver a gift to my house. I was with my sister and my children were playing in the garden in the passage with their friends. After talking to him for a while, always very carefully because I knew he did not have very healthy behaviors, he told me he was leaving. I went to open the gate for him. Then he asked me to go to the car, and even though I said no, he insisted. I go, and that’s when he opens the trunk, points a gun, and throws a liquid at me.
“The day after Christmas, they burned me alive.”
I first drove to my father’s house; if I went back to mine, I was compromising my children. I tried to jump over the gate, but Patricio was a tall and robust man: he grabbed me with his hand and pulled me down. He looks at me with a crazy look on his face and pulls out a box of matches, and that’s when I realize that he had thrown gasoline on me. What he wanted to do was to burn me.
At that moment, I felt the fire and, as if something exploded, I started to burn. He drove off and quickly disappeared from the place. My neighbors heard me scream, helped me, put out the fire, and took me to the hospital. The same day he killed himself, leaving a letter asking for forgiveness. The letter said that he had gone crazy, could not live without me, and did not want me to stay alive.
I spent two months in Posta Central in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). I had to go to the ward 12 times, and I spent two years in rehabilitation with kinesiologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists”.
