Five years after the attack, more than a thousand people signed up as jurors. The accused is an ISIS terrorist. “We have to close this story,” says one of the widows.
He answered the phone. They were with the FBI. They would give her the things of her dead husband. They would go to Rosario to personally return her belongings: some clothes, the smartphone where the videos of the fateful journey had been left, her passport. Ana was in mourning at the time. Not even her duel: she was numb with pain and she let events do anything to her. In parallel, I had to be a mother. Lonely mother. She had to assume a new destiny for herself and for her three children, but without Hernán, that beacon that illuminated the family project they had carried out with vitality. Now Hernan Mendoza, an architect by profession, was gone and Ana couldn’t stop crying. She told herself she had to be strong. I wrote for catharsis.
Hernan is one of the five of Rosario’s friends murdered in Lower Manhattan from a lone wolf of Isis on October 31, 2017. They were riding bicycles on the Tribeca trail and the terrorist hit them with a van rented for this purpose. Five other friends from the same group survived.. The first attack from the Twin Towers and a few meters from that same place.
Ana did what she could with the pain. She has drawn strength from where she still does not know. He put himself at the forefront of the demand for justice. She coined a phrase: “Let love overcome hate”. With that flag you started a long journey that took you to the UN to speak on behalf of the victims of terrorism around the world.
Five years passed. The paths have been opened. The city of Rosario elaborated the memory of that group of friends struck by the madness of a murderer as they celebrated their 30 years of graduates from the Polytechnic. There are trees planted in memory of him. Plaques and murals that remember the five that are no longer there. In New York, where the crime took place, a cenotaph has grown. There is a white bicycle, hanging from a pole. There are letters and photographs. Friends survive in that place of silence, where life, again, passes.
Ana, Alejandra, Vera, the wives now without their husbands have started their claim. The survivors have chosen discretion, silence, the construction of a memory of those who are no longer there. Overcoming, resilience and justice.
The killer was arrested. Sayfullo Saipov, 35 years old. Born in Uzbekistan. Uber driver. He was living in an apartment in New Jersey when he radicalized. Father of three children. Married. No background. In the FBI archives it was marked, but it did not deserve a special following. There is talk of contacts with imams of the mosques in the area. But it is assumed that his entire path to the massacre was led by links established through social networks. Maybe in the “deep web” or maybe in plain sight.
Saipov kills. He is wounded and arrested. President Donald Trump calls for the law to fall on him with all possible weight: calls for the death penalty. He agrees to provide justice even before his Argentine peer and friend of the time, Mauricio Macri, who visits the scene in New York. So there had to be a process. This was scheduled for April 2020. A jury trial. No press presence in the room. A test that is rolled, session by session. Them, the widows. Them, the surviving friends. They would all go to the Manhattan courthouse to tell who the dead were, their lost friends, their dead husbands. But the pandemic has arrived.
The coronavirus has stopped everything. New York has entered quarantine. The world. Rosary beads. Ana, Eva, Alejandra. The last time the three women met this reporter from Clarione it was Sunday. Sunday in March, in the Fisherton district, on the outskirts of Rosario, among the groves. We decided to keep seeing each other. She keeps talking. The story deserved coverage. But that same afternoon the radio announced that mandatory preventive social isolation was beginning. Strange times came when no one imagined living.
Despite the pandemic, at a certain moment, the envoys of the North American justice arrived in Rosario. They roamed the lives of the victims’ women. They called several. They were trying to get them to rethink the process. To modify the complaint. sophisticated pressure, obviously intended to mitigate the punishment that may be suitable for the murderer. They attended, hung up, talked to their lawyer, Félix Marteau. They resisted. The American envoys returned to the United States empty-handed.
There was a time when it seemed the world would never happen again. That nothing would have been the same as before the coronavirus. Could one think of resuming what was suspended, in a continuity that did not recognize the holes, as if nothing had happened? It seemed difficult. But he came out of the pandemic voraciously. There were vaccines. The journey is back. The managements. Events. The congresses. The calls. They called the women of Rosario again. They wanted to let you know that this time the trial for that man in a high-security prison in upstate New York, the murderer of their husbands, was at the top of the list for now. A few days later, Ana picked up the phone and said to me: “We are confident again, everything is starting to move again. May love overcome hatred “.
History has started again. A run of more than 1,000 people entered the jury in what will be the first death penalty trial in upstate New York in over 50 years. It will also be the first possible death penalty case faced by the Joe Biden government. The echoes of the trial come and go from Manhattan to Argentina. In Rosario, again, where Ana answers her phone. “I insist with my sentence, that love overcomes hatred. Those were difficult years. And I still am. It’s been years in which we haven’t lowered our arms and here we are, carrying out the same demand for justice as ever, “Ana says.” We need a sentence to end this story and move on, “says Ana.
Ana, who managed to go to the scene of the attack. Be quiet. Remember your unforgettable Hernán. Ana who is now another woman. They transform life and death. A birth or a departure transforms us, all of us, into others. An even more violent game. Ana wants justice. Her voice is no longer just her voice, but that of all the victims of terrorism on the planet. It is therefore, a countdown time. Yet.
“Putting the jury together is a delicate process, which takes time – explains Ana -, but it is being done. We are seeing that this is progressing and that is what we want most ”. Remember the pressures undergone. She remembers the pain. She says she writes. That she wrote a chronicle about returning to the scene. She looks strong in this stretch. The trial would be formally in the coming months. Ana feels strong for what’s to come, despite the fact that the process will definitely lead her to a painful area. You need, like so many in this story, that there is Justice once and for all. She is willing to put up with anything.
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