Men are raised in a society created by the men who came before them, which leads every generation of dudes to believe that they’re somehow the superior gender. In their defence, there are some centuries-old arguments: that men provide for the family, they are naturally wired to ‘lead,’ and that men are somehow smarter than women, which is obviously not true, even when you look at all sorts of scientific evaluations. But even in big ’26, you’ll genuinely find a majority of men who still believe that women are the horrible sex simply because they demand equality, while terms like ‘feminazi’ are sadly thrown around in everyday conversations in this so-called civil society. So it’s not a shocker that when an Argentinian dentist in the 90s slaughtered his own wife, mother-in-law, and two daughters, only to claim that he was the victim of their abuse, the contemporary media and the public hailed him as a rebellious hero who did what most Argentinian men couldn’t. Daniela Goggi’s crime drama, “Barreda,” is based on this chilling true story, of a trial that divided Argentina in two groups. But Goggi has to be applauded for trying her best to show what kind of a sick man Barreda was in his personal life, while portraying his victims, the women of his family who just wanted to live a normal life without his stinky nose in their business. The domestic tension is clearly visible from the very beginning of this retelling of the story, and someone like me could argue that the film does put a bit too much of a spotlight on Barreda’s character. In the end, I ended up feeling that this film became more about trying to pick apart Barreda’s psyche, which isn’t that deep to begin with, and the adulation he got during his trial. Except for the prosecutor, nobody else seemed to care enough about the innocent women Barreda gunned down, and that’s bound to leave a sour taste in your mouth. Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the film?
On Sunday, November 15, 1992, Barreda shot and killed his daughters, Adriana and Cecilia, his wife, Gladys, and his mother-in-law, Elena. He’s locked the family dog in a room as he walks out of the house after taking a nice shower, rinsing the blood of his family off his skin. Barreda hands his bloody clothes to his spiritual guide, Maria, a clairvoyant. Maria is obviously pretty screwed up herself, as she doesn’t even question him once, and agrees to get rid of his bloodstained clothes. Barreda then goes to a fishing pond to get rid of the shotgun he used to kill everybody. Then we see him sitting in a zoo, watching a couple of giraffes, before heading out to meet his mistress and having intercourse. He ends the night by having pizza at the most famous restaurant in town, before going home to report the murders to the police, claiming that a robbery has taken place at his house, and the robbers have killed his family. The cops comb through his house, and while the rest of the house has been ransacked, Barreda forgot to mess up the room he sleeps in. The police commissioner gets suspicious, so he asks Barreda to come to the station for a routine procedure and later on, this said commissioner exploits Barreda’s fear of being punished, and tells him that he can save him from prison if he cooperates and presents himself as mentally unstable at the time of the killings. Barreda takes the bait, and he leads the cops to the pond where he dumped the murder weapon. As soon as the gun is found, Barreda’s is arrested by the cops, and the man is visibly annoyed that the commissioner didn’t keep his word. What follows is one of the most infamous trials in Argentinian history, as Barreda becomes a household name for all the wrong reasons.
How does Caceres portray Barreda as a victim of mental abuse?
Barreda’s defense attorney, Caceres, has a stellar reputation, and hasn’t lost a case in five years. Along with his assistant, Debora, Caceres plans to build a narrative that Barreda wasn’t valued in his own household, though he provided for everyone. But if we go back to the time where Barreda was feeling such a manly man, things were pretty different. Barreda had no relationship with his wife, Gladys, and he barely communicated with her for anything. On the other hand, Gladys is the one who kept feeling neglected by her husband everyday, but she still put a face on and cared for their daughters and the family. Barreda was also, obviously, having an affair, and it was no secret, as his daughter’s friends had seen him half-naked with his mistress in the swimming pool of a club. Both of his daughters were also terrified of him, since he never had an approachable attitude, and he’d be unpleasant to them over the smallest of things. For someone who thinks they weren’t ‘valued’ in his own home, Barreda’s Christmas presents would paint a different picture. Gladys made him a handkerchief, and Elena bought him the shotgun he used to murder the family. What made Barreda’s blood boil was the fact that his own behaviour and attitude had driven his family to avoid him as much as they could, while the fact that his daughters had grown into modern, progressive women was simply beyond his conservative comprehension. But when Caceres asks him what sort of injustice he faced at home, all Barreda can truthfully say is that he felt like their driver, a lackey, and that he wasn’t appreciated for paying the bills—things that patriarchal society has long normalized for men. However, when Barreda mentions the one time Gladys called him a maid, that too, after she was heartbroken about the fact that he was cheating on her, Caceres pushes him into lying and exaggerating. So Barreda comes up with the lie that his family members called him a derogatory term associated with the female reproductive organ, the P-word. Before the trial even begins, Caceres makes a huge show in front of the media, talking of how the women in Barreda’s family abused him for years and called him the P-word. The men without spine across the country rally against the dead women, and they make a hero out of the murderer who has taken four innocent lives.
Was Barreda’s family actually mean to him?
The media wastes no time in shaming the dead women, as their ‘sources’ reveal that all of them had exorbitant expenses and whims, and poor Barreda had to pay for all of it. So when the trial finally begins, Barreda finds himself with a crazy amount of support from the public, something he clearly doesn’t deserve. But through the flashbacks we get, it becomes very clear that Barreda wasn’t even the man who paid the bills entirely by himself. Elena was a woman with plenty of money, so anytime her daughter or granddaughters needed some money, she was the person they’d go to instead of the so-called man of the house. Barreda also gets terribly offended when Elena gets the roof fixed with her own money. When Barreda confronts her about it, Elena is not shy to say that half the house belongs to her, so she can do whatever she wants in her half. While Barreda lies in the court about his wife, Gladys, being jealous because he dealt with so many women due to the nature of his profession, that’s entirely untrue. Gladys is the one who always defended Barreda despite his horrible behavior and tantrums, and he’d just lock himself in his office with his music and wine, while his poor wife would wait for hours outside, waiting for him to come out of this little man cave. One of Cecilia’s friends also testifies in court, where she reveals that the women often felt awkward going to her place because Barreda would constantly stare at their legs, which made them uncomfortable. Barreda would rather do little chores around the house than talk with anyone, but he tells the court that after working all day in his clinic, his family made him do all the household chores. He also claims that the women in his house would insult him if he didn’t pay for their whims, which is hilarious, since the women in his house couldn’t even talk freely if he was around. When Adriana tells Gladys to talk to a therapist, Gladys defends her husband yet again, and refuses to talk about her personal life with anyone else, not knowing that the same husband would kill her and then tell the court that she never tried to involve him in her life and did everything behind his back.
Why did Gladys want to divorce Barreda?
Barreda tried to fix the faucet in the kitchen one day, and ended up breaking the tap, soaking his wife and daughters. But instead of being mad at him, all three of them just laughed it off, but Barreda felt small by himself for not being able to handle such a tiny thing. On top of that, he started feeling a weird and sharp pain around his lower abdomen, and instead of talking to a doctor, he went to Maria for answers. Maria made him cut a deck of cards and told him that his wife and daughters were putting him under a spell, and that he needed to search his house to find the source of the black magic. When Cecilia’s lover, Gaston, fixes the faucet he couldn’t fix, Barreda is mad. He’s even more mad when he gets to know that Cecilia is planning to move in with him, and he obviously doesn’t care about his daughter enough to even make an effort to get to know her boyfriend. While a normal father would be worried about the fact that his elder daughter’s wedding day is approaching, Barreda decides to enroll in a shooting range and refine his marksmanship. Barreda also collapses to the ground in his house a few days later, and requires a hernia surgery, so Gladys stays by his side in the hospital for days. But as soon as Gladys walks out of the room to talk to the nurse, her horrible husband opens his eyes, and Maria walks into his room while Gladys helplessly sees it happen. Gladys feels that Maria is Barreda’s mistress, which might or might not be true, since Maria doesn’t deny being Barreda’s lover later in court. But Barreda, being the jerk he is, feels that nobody from his family was there for him in the hospital, and this incident solidified his hatred even more. While Gladys is crying for days and going through a horrible, depressive phase, Barreda keeps plotting against her and their daughters. Gladys and Elena decide to sell the house, since both Adriana and Cecilia would move soon anyway, so they’ll have money in store while Gladys files for divorce. But Barreda sees this as a betrayal, and imagines that his family is stabbing him in the back for no reason, not even accounting for how horrible and rotten he is from inside.
Did Barreda get the punishment he deserved?
Caceres knows that there’s no way that he could possibly prove Barreda is innocent, despite all his attempts at villanizing the victims. So he does what a defence lawyer does best, getting his hands dirty, digging up every possible argument to prove that his client was mentally unstable when he killed his family. Caceres makes a smart move by making Maria spew all the nonsense about how the women were using black magic on Barreda. She also mentions how Barreda found a voodoo doll in the house, which is nothing but a pin cushion every household used to have during that time. Caceres uses this instance to convince the judges that Barreda was clearly unstable and wasn’t thinking straight. Barreda takes great offence seeing his lawyer trying to prove that he’s mad, but Caceres convinces him that this is the only way he could ever dream of having freedom someday. Since the other option is to spend his life in jail, Barreda reluctantly agrees to play along. However, during the last day of the trial, when Barreda is expected to recount the Sunday when he slaughtered his family, things take a turn. Cecilia was supposed to move out of the house that day, and everybody was in a good mood, so Gladys warned Barreda to not be his mean self and leave the girls alone. Barreda tells the court that ever since his surgery, he had been getting closer and closer to the inevitable moment when he would murder his family. When Barreda cribbed about an overgrown vine, Gladys asked him to buzz off, and he tells the court that she called him the P-word. So he went to get the pruner, and came across the shotgun instead. Now mind you, Elena only gifted him the gun, not the ammunition, so he himself procured the ammos he’d fire at his own blood. Following Caceres’ advice, he changes the order of events, telling the court that he killed Gladys first in the kitchen, followed by Adriana, who was sitting nearby. When Adriana was still breathing after getting shot, Barreda put another round in her just to make sure she didn’t survive. Cecilia was upstairs and had headphones on, and when Elena came running to her after hearing the gunshots, Barreda shot his younger daughter immediately. Poor Elena tried to call the cops, but was gunned down with the same gun she gifted her son-in-law for Christmas. Despite Caceres’ relentless attempts at proving his client is unstable, the prosecutor makes sure that he establishes the fact that no mentally unstable person would build alibis like Barreda did after killing his family. The prosecutor also argues that Barreda chose to kill them that day because that was the last day the family would be under the same roof, and all his actions were premeditated. Caceres’ dirty tricks don’t work, because the prosecutor also asks the judges what kind of example they’d be setting for the rest of the country if a man like Barreda were allowed to walk out of this trial on the grounds of supposed mental problems that haven’t even been proven. The court finally rules in favour of the prosecutor, sentencing Barreda to life imprisonment for the femicide.
However, Barreda didn’t serve the sentence fully, being released after seventeen years of imprisonment. He then remarried at the age of eighty-four, tying the knot with one of his fans, with whom he had exchanged letters while he was in prison. Even after his death, his case still divides people, and he continues to be an idol for many men who suffer from deep-rooted misogyny. According to the Buenos Aires Herald, people even came up with a prayer card depicting Barreda as a saint, and he remains a figure of fascination for many men who identify with his claims of feeling mistreated by the women in his life.
