On December 8, 1990, 17-year-old María Soledad Morales was last seen. Two days later, his body was found in a park.
The new Netflix documentary María Soledad: The end of silence focuses on the emblematic case that shook Argentina three decades ago: the murder of María Soledad Morales. The documentary debuted on the platform streaming on October 10 and was directed by Lorena Muñoz, an Argentine director and producer who previously directed the miniseries The Daughter of Gody Gilda, I don’t regret this love.
But the documentary is not only about Morales’ murder, but also about the fight of her schoolmates to have the crime recognized as the first feminicide in the history of Argentina. Thirty-four years later, the same companions talk about their experience, the night when everything happened and about María Soledad Morales, their friend.
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María Soledad in ‘María Soledad: The End of Silence’ (Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024)
What is the real story behind María Soledad: The end of silence?
Morales was a high school student who was murdered in the Catamarca neighborhood, Argentina, on September 8, 1990. She was last seen at the Le Feu Rouge nightclub, at a party to raise funds for the graduate trip. That night, the young woman had planned to stay at a classmate’s house, but changed her mind in the middle of the night and told her friend that she was leaving with her boyfriend, Luis Tula.
Nobody knows exactly how Morales would end up that same night in another nightclub with several children of important politicians. Two days later, his body was found by National Highway workers in Daza Park.
Forensic examinations revealed that Morales was drugged and sexually abused, and it was later discovered that the amount of drugs in her system was the cause of her death. His body, which was found in a ditch, was completely mutilated. He was covered in cigarette burns, had been scalped, and had his blood drained. Despite this, her parents, Elías Morales and Ada Rizzardo, were able to recognize her by a small scar on her wrist.
The discovery of the body, however, did not lead to any immediate arrest, despite the fact that there were important indications pointing to a group of young people from powerful and wealthy families. In view of the delay in the investigations, the rector of the Carmen and San José de Catamarca school, Martha Pelloni, allowed the so-called “marches of silence,” which were led by the young Argentine’s classmates.
The marches were held every Thursday throughout the course of the case, and brought together up to 33,000 people demanding an answer. The suspects, Luis Tula and Guillermo Luque, were arrested. Luque, son of the then deputy Ángel Luque, was treated with favoritism. The other names mentioned in the investigations, all “sons of power” or children of politicians, were never arrested.
In December 1990, Catamarca’s police chief was fired for irregularities in the case, including ordering the body to be washed. Later, in April 2021, the irregularities became so many that the president of Argentina, Carlos Menem, intervened in the province of Catamarca and sent an investigator to lead the case.
In 1998, after two trials plagued by irregularities, and despite the investigators’ hypothesis indicating that Morales had been raped and subsequently murdered by three to four people, Tula and Luque were the only ones sentenced to prison. Tula received 9 years in prison and Luque 21, of which he only served 14. The same court ordered an investigation into the cover-up of the crime by former governor Ramón Saadi, former police chief Miguel Ángel Ferreyra and multiple municipal officials, medical personnel and false witnesses, but the investigation was not continued.
María Soledad: The end of silence is available on Netflix.
