Rita Segato: ‘The present is sinister. We are all threatened’
The Argentine anthropologist, who has dedicated 30 years to the study of violence, weaves the connections between the sexual crimes of Ciudad Juárez and the massacres in Gaza, in what she calls the end of the era of respect for human rights
Rita Segato has been searching for a reason all her life. Why do men rape women? Why do they torture them, enslave them? Why do they dispose of them, in pieces? Why, for what? They have called her to answer the question in Brasília, in Ciudad Juárez, in Guatemala, in El Salvador, and in Colombia. They keep calling her, like an oracle. In each location she hesitates — “it is what a scientist should do” — but in each one she returns to her original idea. “The cruelty on women’s bodies is an exhibition of the capacity for cruelty, of territorial domination, of power and impunity,” she says, and in that last word she finds the threads that take her to a new place, one she has never set foot in, but which does not let her sleep: “Gaza is a watershed in history.”
