Maria Kazé remembers the first time she saw Julieta Hernández Martínez and her orange bicycle one evening in January 2022 at the coach station in Picos, a rural town in Brazil’s dusty north-east. “I was struck by her brilliance, her bravery. I suddenly felt small before this extraordinary woman,” said Kazé, 51, a leader of the local peasant farmers movement – and not someone prone to being awestruck.
Hernández, a professional clown who in December 2019 began a solo bicycle journey across Brazil in the direction of her native Venezuela, had a way of enchanting everyone she met. And throughout her epic ride, the 38-year-old developed a large network of fellow artists and bicycle travellers, who followed her progress closely.
So when Julieta went missing just before Christmas, her friends knew something was amiss. After two weeks of searching, their worst fears were confirmed. On 5 January, her body and the wreckage of her bike were found in Presidente Figueiredo, the Amazon town 120km north of Manaus where she had last stopped off. Police later confirmed that a couple had confessed to killing her. They face charges of robbery with homicide, rape and concealment of a corpse.
Those close to the warm-hearted clown believe it was her empathy that led her to her death. Julieta apparently took pity on five hungry children and followed them to the run-down lodgings where their parents later murdered her. The children have been put into care.
Friends don’t want Julieta to be remembered for her cruel death, but rather for her remarkable life spreading joy wherever she went.
Julieta, who had previously trained as a vet, first arrived in Brazil in 2015. She intended to take a drama course in Rio de Janeiro, but then discovered the world of clowning – and a new vocation entertaining people as Miss Jujuba, a red-nosed clown often wearing a Christmas bauble as an earring and strumming on her Venezuelan cuatro, a four-stringed instrument she had built herself.
“She had a knack for making people smile. Suddenly, you’d be laughing,” said Mariana Miranda, 43, who knew Julieta from her work volunteering with Rio’s homeless population.
In 2019, amid growing unrest in crisis-gripped Venezuela and a climate of hostility towards women and artists under Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Julieta decided it was time to head home to Puerto Ordaz to see her ageing mother. Some friends urged her to make at least part of the 4,000km journey by air, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She would travel a much greater distance up Brazil’s coast by bicycle, stopping wherever she was welcome and performing in some of the country’s poorest hinterlands.
“She had this very firm purpose. The objective of her journey was to bring art to communities that rarely had access to it,” said Vanessa Darmani, 43, a fellow clown who hosted Julieta for eight months during the coronavirus lockdowns at the start of her journey, on the coast just north of Rio.
Fernando Girlan remembers his excitement last July when he heard a clown would be performing in his sleepy home town on the banks of the Tapajós River in the Amazon. “It was incredible,” the 25-year-old student said of Miss Jujuba’s performance.
Disgust and fury at Julieta’s brutal femicide have reverberated across Latin America, a region that is notorious for its high levels of violence against women. Last Friday, thousands of people took to the streets in cities across Brazil and its neighbouring countries to express their outrage at a society that denies women the right to be safe and then often blames them when things go awry.
“A woman isn’t allowed to make mistakes – because a mistake for us can be fatal,” said Karla Concá, 55, a clowning professor and friend. Julieta, said Concá, had defied societal norms. She was a woman without a husband or children, travelling alone. She was an immigrant, working a traditionally male profession. She laughed, loudly. She was courageous and free.
Darmani also described her friend’s death as a symptom of the poverty and overexploitation of the Amazon, a region where the homicide rate is in some places double the national average.
Fran Marinho, 39, who spent some time with Julieta in Manaus just days before her murder said that despite the hardships of her journey, the itinerate artist never lost her sense of wonder
“One of the last things she said to me was, ‘Fran, I’m living such a beautiful story on these roads,’” recalled Marinho, choking up.
