“My children were two gifts that gave me my life.” Ruth Ortiz said it, a woman dragged without asking for a gale that has now reminded her, 14 years after the murder of the children Ruth and José, all the horror. “Although they are not with me physically, I think they see me, they like to see me happy,” he said in an interview. He then assured relief, managed to leave him “in the past.” I think about her while I read the book galleries Hatewhere Luisgé Martín writes the story of Breton, and that of Ruth Ortiz, only with the testimony of the executioner, his letters and his conversations. Why nobody called her? Why didn’t they take it into account?
I have met more women like Ortiz. Ladies to whom their partners snatched their children, but not the ability to face the world despite everything. I try to understand what mechanism they manage to activate to separate their pain and fight for others. In cases of sexist violence, I am more interested in the minds of the survivors than that of their executioners.
I do not understand how or the Anagrama editorial or the author notified it. How they did not think about the consequences for her to air terrible details about the death of the children, the lacerating words of her murderer. I do not know what the review chain of that book was. Nor do I know if they raised any ethical consideration with her. In the legal field, the Minors Prosecutor’s Office has asked to suspend the publication precautionary. The publisher appeals to the Constitution to defend “the fundamental right to literary creation” and the publication of the book. The Prosecutor’s Office remembers the limit to these freedoms “especially, in the right to honor, to privacy, to the image itself and the protection of youth and childhood”, which also includes the Magna Carta. It will be a judge who decides. For me the essential is not what happens with the book. It’s not about censoring it. The key was to have taken into account during the process that could become the prolongation of an abuse.
In the midst of an unimaginable duel, Ruth Ortiz was recomposed and decided to fight so that the world is a less inhospitable place. Personally pushed so that the State Pact against Gender Violence gathered Vicaria violence, a form of macho abuse that seeks to hurt where it hurts more, through the children. Thanks to the case of Ortiz, to his impulse, the mothers to whom their partners or ex -partners kill their children are recognized as full victims. “It was time,” she said when it was approved. “You are totally broken and you need a lot of help.” Nobody thought he deserved at least one notice, the right to tell his version and not leave only the murderer’s story?
Ruth Ortiz has once counted that she suspected her ex -husband from the moment her children disappeared, although he never confessed where they were. They confirmed with forensic tests almost a year after the murder that the remains burned in a farm in Córdoba were from the children. “I did not discover her evil until the last moments of coexistence,” he said years ago.
Decipher the mind of the murderer
Luisgé Martín explains in Hate that sought to decipher the murderer’s mind, to reveal his hidden motifs. “I had thought many times about making that literary trip to the heart of a murderer, as Truman Capote or Emmanuel Carrère had done before, to learn about the dark edge that separates the goodness – or vulgarity – from vileness.” “Your purpose is excited,” Breton replied when he contacted him to tell him that he wanted to write about him. Perhaps the wish of the executioner, which confesses for the first time in the book that killed children, was to obtain penitentiary benefits.
Inexplicably, neither the author nor the publisher contacted Ruth Ortiz at any time to tell him what he was doing. “When I started the project of this book (…) I made the decision – perhaps wrong – to speak only with José Bretón. My purpose was to try to understand the mind of someone who had been able to kill their own children, and for this I found any other point of view, especially that of Ruth Ortiz, to which, in any case, I would not have dared to mortify with inquiry,” writes the author of Hate. He did not want to mortify her with inquiries, but he did not think about everything that could be for her what he was going to describe in her work.
He did not alert her that she was going to get a book where she recounts passages from her life, recreates the coexistence between the two, crumbles details of the murder of her children narrated by Breton. He did not notice that there may be things that are not as the murderer tells him and he tells his book. “I already have it in the past,” said Ruth Ortiz about his executioner. Unfortunately, this book has returned Breton to his present.
“Is it morally fair to feel compassion for a man who murdered his two children?” Martin asks at another time in the work. It is hard to understand how the reality of her, of the survivor does not call compassion.
The book does not decipher what is in the murderer’s mind. I also don’t know what interests Breton, what was enthusiastic about embarking on this work. What I do know is that Hate It is a new vehicle to perpetuate a man’s abuse about a brave woman whom no one notified of what was coming.