Death in Argentina : Wife Beating--Dark Side of Machismo

BUENOS AIRES — Carlos Monzon was more than a great middleweight champion. He was a national hero, he became a millionaire, he starred in movies and he usually had a beautiful woman on his arm.

But along the way to national adulation, he also showed himself unable to control the seething aggression that earned him the championship and 14 world title defenses over seven years until he retired, still champion, in 1977. Outside the ring, the targets of that aggression included the women who passed through his life.

On Feb. 14, Monzon, 47, finally reaped the consequences of his own acknowledged failings. While he and his estranged second wife were quarreling, and after he had struck and choked her, she plunged to her death from a balcony. He was charged with homicide.

A few still shout “Go, champion!” when he emerges from pretrial court appearances in the seaside resort town of Mar del Plata. But most cry “Murderer!”

Society of Machismo

The death of Uruguayan model Alicia Muniz was tailor made for the gossip magazines in the final days of the Southern Hemisphere summer. But beyond the lurid headlines, the celebrity case also has focused public concern in Argentina on the broader problem of wife beating in a society of machismo.

“Unfortunately, she had to die so that this pile of issues would come to the surface,” said Zita Montes de Oca, director of the year-old government Office for Women. “And it had to be her, and it had to be Monzon. If she were another woman, or he were an ordinary worker, this debate would never have begun.”

Some politicians who had not considered the problem of family violence before now are calling for new laws and different priorities. One senator has filed a motion seeking more support for programs to help abused women.

Victims Seeking Help

More important, the victims themselves have begun to come forward to seek help. Since the death of Muniz, the number of women turning up each day at The Woman’s Place crisis center has doubled to two dozen, Lucrecia Oller, the center’s director, said.

“It has awakened women to the fear that they may be the next to die,” she said.

Yet Montes de Oca, Oller and others argue that the debate still must percolate further through the society to the abusers and the abused--and to those who can help both groups.

Newspapers have quoted court officials as saying that Monzon testified that although he had insulted and beaten his wife that February night, it could not have seriously harmed her because “I beat all my women, except one, and nothing ever happened to any of them.”

Viviana Benbersky, one of the coordinators of The Woman’s Place, said of such comments: “Here, many men consider it almost a right to beat women. And the consciousness among women that they are human beings remains very low.”

In all of Argentina, there is not one shelter for battered women. Police remain reluctant to accept formal charges from abused wives, Oller said, because the disputes are viewed as a family matter. Women themselves remain reluctant or too ashamed to file complaints, as if they were the perpetrators and not the victims, Benbersky and three volunteers at her center, former abuse victims themselves, agree.

Divorce Newly Legalized

The prevalence of such attitudes makes it impossible for Argentine authorities to measure the extent of family violence, social workers say. They also note that divorce was legalized only last year and that it remains extremely difficult to extract alimony from husbands who refuse to pay, a strong disincentive to women considering leaving abusive men. Women’s rights activists agree that wife beating is more serious in the provinces than in Buenos Aires, where women have access to more resources and information.

Even women who know their rights face problems in getting help. Julia Sanchez, 31, a left-wing writer, said she left her husband in 1985 partly because he beat her. She said her younger brother, a professional soldier, then began to beat her because he was angry that she left her husband.

She went to the police three times to file charges. The first time, she recalled, “They said, why don’t you forget it--he’s your own brother.” The violence continued, leaving her with bruises and cuts on her face. A second trip to the police station also was fruitless, she said.

Finally, after a noisy, violent attack that aroused the neighborhood, the police accepted her complaint and detained her brother for five days. That stopped the beatings, Sanchez said, but the legal charges against her brother are still pending--three years later.

Sanchez went to The Woman’s Place to seek companionship and counseling and became a volunteer at the collective of former abused women who lead self-help discussion groups, arrange free legal and psychological aid and provide other support services.

Prosecution Difficult

She cites cases suggesting that prosecution can be futile: A woman named Mariana filed court charges after being beaten by her husband, the police ordered him to stay out of the home, but he returned six weeks later and beat her so badly that she lost seven teeth. But he was acquitted because, as happens in many cases of family violence, there were no witnesses, Sanchez said.

Such cases are all too typical. But it is the Monzon case that has sparked the current brisk debate. Bernardo Neustadt, a prominent and acerbic social commentator, wrote recently: “Argentines have done badly in indulging Carlos Monzon. . . . We are a macho society that idolizes a man who beats or violates a woman, a macho society that taught Monzon to dress up, to speak a bit better, but didn’t teach him to think, a macho society that wasn’t horrified when Monzon said he beat all his women except for one.”

La Nacion, a major Buenos Aires newspaper, wondered in an editorial about those who still shout encouragement to Monzon: “Is there an overdose of machismo which condones violent behavior in a man who strikes a woman. . . ? The least that can be said is that there is a grave mutation of values which reflects a high social morbidity.”

If the debate and the problems sound reminiscent of the situation in the United States and Europe two decades ago, feminists have an explanation: In Argentina and elsewhere in Latin American, concerns over family violence and women’s rights in general have often taken a back seat to the struggle for democracy.

“The women’s movement is still in the 1960s; we are still learning the ABCs, because of nearly 20 years of military rule. . . . When the women’s movement took root elsewhere, we were focusing all our energy on regaining democracy, and feminism fell by the wayside,” Montes de Oca said in an interview.

When civilian President Raul Alfonsin was elected in 1983 after the latest 7-year era of military rule, he declared women’s rights a priority and endorsed the need for a women’s program. Montes de Oca’s department has an annual budget of about $2 million and works with police departments, hospitals and others involved in handling battered women, along with funding educational programs to help abused women understand that they do have rights.

Throughout South America, where until the last few years military rule has been prevalent, the abuse of women has rarely received adequate attention, Oller said.

“At least after the return to democracy, we could talk about the problems openly,” she said. “During the dictatorship, the women’s movement was forced underground and seen as a subversive force.”

Yet Benbersky stressed that “the roots of machismo go much deeper in the society. They haven’t changed just because of democracy.”

Monzon, a one-time shoeshine boy who grew up in the dirt roads of provincial Santa Fe, had long displayed the social mores of machismo, boasting about the many women in his life and his sexual prowess.

“I learned to love and to fight in the same way: by impulse and brusqueness,” he once said.

A girlfriend gave birth to his first child when he was 18, but he didn’t marry her. A year later, in 1962, he married a 15-year-old girl, with whom he had three children during a fiery 12-year marriage.

In 1971, a year after he won the middleweight crown from Italian Nino Benvenuti, his wife shot him twice in the arm at home during a fight. They went through a bitter divorce in 1975, after he had publicly taken up with a nationally known actress, Susana Gimenez. Then he and Gimenez also had much-publicized quarrels, and she left him in 1976 after a virtual brawl in a Rome hotel, declaring: “Carlos can’t leave his world, and it’s not my world. It’s a world of aggression.”

In a 1979 interview, Monzon declared that violence “is my worst fault. All my friends tell me that before I get angry, I should count to 10. But when I get to two, I explode.”

In 1976, he was given a suspended jail term for attacking a photographer. Two years later, he was fined for smashing into a bus with his Mercedes Benz and wounding three people. He later got into at least two more brawls.

He was arrested in 1981 for illegal arms possession and spent 31 days in jail before he was freed on the order of the governor of the local province, a fan.

The Muniz family’s lawyer, Rodolfo Vega Lesich, said that Monzon had made death threats against Muniz at least twice before she died but that she had resisted Vega Lesich’s suggestion that she file a police complaint because she didn’t want to hurt their 7-year-old son or damage Monzon’s reputation.

The couple, married in 1981, separated for the fourth time in 1986, but spent time together again this February. After an evening out Feb. 13, they returned to Monzon’s rented second-floor apartment at 4:30 a.m., where they argued over money, Monzon said during questioning.

Hazy on Incident

Monzon admitted that he slapped Muniz and “squeezed her neck,” said the investigating judge who took his testimony. The ex-boxer said he remembered little after that. He did not know how Muniz toppled over the railing to the ground floor below, where she died of head injuries. He was sure he didn’t push her and suggested she might have jumped or fallen.

Monzon also fell from the balcony, breaking two ribs and a collarbone. He said he was trying to save Muniz.

Medical evidence indicated that she was already unconscious when she plunged, the judge said, noting that her hands showed none of the customary bruises that a conscious person would have sustained in trying to break the fall.

Monzon fought 101 bouts, losing just three early in his 17-year career. His trainer, Amilcar Brusa, said on the day that Muniz died that Monzon was “always a bully in the ring. But in his life, he was a defenseless boy.”

In one of the few remarks he has made to the hordes of reporters who stalk him, Monzon said two weeks after his arrest: “I am well and confident. All should be calm because I am going to leave here soon, because I am innocent and I believe in God and justice.”

Muniz had told a friend last December that she was frightened about the future: “I love him, but he will never change. He will continue being violent. I cannot go back to living with him. But neither can I live without him.”

Solutions have been elusive in such cases, which mix love and guilt, financial fears and concern for children. Muniz’s death may persuade Argentine women to seek help.