Mar 28, 2024, 2:15 p.m. ET
The work, which exhibits the player in life size, was covered with a garbage bag at the end of last year and in February it was covered in white paint.
A Brazilian activist has taken a petition to court to remove a statue that honors the footballer Daniel Alves in Juazeiro, his hometown, after he was convicted in Spain for rape.
The student and activist Manuella Tyler Medrado He stated, in an interview with EFE, that the permanence of this sculpture calls into question the “value and dignity of women.”
The decision to request its withdrawal, she notes, not only channels her own indignation, but that of “all the women of Juazeiro,” a city of nearly 220,000 inhabitants located in the interior of the state of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil.
“We have to form a society where rape culture is not normalized,” defended Medrado, who believes that this is a great opportunity to make it clear that “sexual crimes have to be repudiated,” in this case with the loss of her position as “national hero”.
The Public Ministry of Bahia reported last week that it had received Tyler Medrado’s request through the Human Rights Operational Support Center and sent it to the municipal Prosecutor’s Office for analysis and adoption of pertinent measures.
Alves was sentenced on February 22 to four years and six months in prison for sexually assaulting a 23-year-old girl in a Barcelona nightclub, but he was released from prison last Monday after having paid bail of one million euros imposed by the Barcelona Hearing.
As a result of the violation, the statue inaugurated in 2020 on a central avenue in Juazeiro has been the subject of various acts of repudiation.
The work, which displays the life-size player wearing the Brazilian national team shirt, was covered with a garbage bag and duct tape at the end of last year and in February it was discovered covered by white paint.
On March 8, International Women’s Day, several women demonstrated around him with banners with slogans such as “no to rape culture”, “stop killing us” and “Daniel Alves rapist”.
For its part, the Juazeiro City Council stated that it would not take a position on the statue until Alves’s process was definitively concluded, after he announced that he would appeal the judicial decision.
