Mónica Briones

Biography

Early on the morning of 9 July 1984, Mónica Briones and her friend Gloria del Villar left the Jaque Mate bar in downtown Santiago and began waiting for a bus near Plaza Italia.

A tall man with blond hair and green eyes, with a military haircut and bearing, came up to them. He seized Briones by the neck, pushed her, insulted her for being a lesbian and beat her against the pavement. The blows were so violent that her skull was fractured. Gloria, in a state of shock, ran off to look for help, and the attacker fled.

Briones was born in Santiago on 7 July 1950, the daughter of an artisan and a dressmaker. In the late 1960s she studied at the School of Arts of the University of Chile, where her teacher was the well-known artist Nemesio Antúnez. In December 1969, according to the Spanish-language press, a painting contest began on Santa Lucía Hill: contestants had to paint for as long as possible without a break. By one account she won it, working for more than 72 hours; by another she lasted 61 hours and painted sixteen works in that time. The newspaper La Nación called her “excessively dynamic and restless”. She usually sold her pieces in Parque Forestal. She was a painter and a sculptor, but I have no surviving works to go on, and I will not try to judge them.

According to the police report, death came at 6:20 in the morning: the woman had supposedly been run over by a vehicle that fled the scene. The autopsy of the Legal Medical Service, led by the thanatologist América González Figueroa, concluded that it had been a car accident causing a cranioencephalic trauma of the face. The wake was held at the Nazareno chapel in Providencia, the body was cremated, and the ashes were scattered on Horcón Beach.

The case was opened in 1985, when her father, Manuel Briones Espinoza, filed a complaint for quasi-offence of homicide. The lawyer Alfredo Etcheberry handled it free of charge. In the early 1990s he managed to recover the address book that Briones had had with her on the day she died, and began questioning everyone listed in it. One line of the investigation was that the attack had been commissioned: Briones, it was believed, was in a relationship with a married woman named Natalia, whose husband was an agent of the National Information Center, the regime’s political police. For almost ten years the papers lay in the former criminal courts. In September 1995 the case was closed for good: the court stated that there was not enough evidence to charge any particular person as perpetrator, accomplice or accessory.

Her story continued in the years after her death. The group Colectiva Lésbica Ayuquelén was formed, the first association of lesbians in the country, which campaigned for Briones’s death to be recognised as the first lesbophobic crime in Chile. The group lasted about fifteen years. Several television reports were made about Briones, and she was the subject of a chronicle by Pedro Lemebel, of plays, and of Ignacio Juricic’s film “Enigma”, which deals with what happened after her death. Every 9 July since 2015, Chile has marked Lesbian Visibility Day.

In 2019 lesbian feminist groups asked the National Monuments Council to install a memorial at the intersection of Merced and Irene Morales streets, where she was attacked, in memory of all lesbian women attacked, subjected to violence or murdered because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. In September 2024 her first biography, “Con mi recuerdo encendí el fuego”, was published. A memorial at that intersection was unveiled on 13 March 2025.