Killing a woman can lead to life imprisonment in Argentina or a sentence of up to 60 years in Mexico. In Guatemala it implies up to 50 years in prison, 41 in Colombia, 40 in Honduras and no less than 12 in any of the 17 Latin American countries that have criminalized the crime of femicide. But even with such high punishments, the subcontinent is home to 14 of the 25 most violent countries for women.
It has been almost a decade since the region began to take the issue seriously, at least since legislation. However, “there is only one reality: they continue to kill us,” denounced Ada Beatriz Rico, director of the Femicide Observatory of Argentina and president of the civil organization La Casa del Encuentro, the most relevant in the protection of women.
Her diagnosis this November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, is simple: “We have the best laws in the region, but their implementation fails.”
The figure of femicide
Latin America began to sanction gender norms in the first decade of the 2000s, which the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) called “first generation on domestic or intrafamily violence.” As of 2010, penal reforms began to germinate to create the figure of femicide.
Guatemala and Chile were the advance in 2008 and 2010, respectively. Femicide has been punished in Argentina since 2012, in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru since 2013; in Ecuador and Venezuela since 2014, and in Colombia since 2015.
Cuba and Haiti are the only ones that lack a specific criminal offense for the violent deaths of women with a gender component and these are treated as aggravated homicides.
This legal armor governs a territory of 640 million inhabitants where the deaths of women are counted by the hour: a woman is murdered every 38 hours in Venezuela or Ecuador, for example.
In Mexico, 3,750 women were murdered in 2021, of which 1,004 were classified as femicides, according to data from the National Public Security System. And up to September of this year there have been 695 femicides, a figure below the 736 for the same period last year.
Marches against violence Almost two years have passed since Katty Muñoz began the hardest and most painful battle of her life: to demand punishment for the femicide of her murdered daughter in Ecuador.
This Friday, the International Day for the Eradication of Violence against Women, she got up very early to go to court where the third hearing of the lawsuit for procedural fraud that she filed against the husband of her daughter Lisbeth, a fugitive from justice, was taking place. .
The trial for femicide is suspended because the law does not allow the defendant to be tried in absentia.
This November 25, the Ecuadorian will go out to demonstrate against impunity. “What non-violence are we talking about if there is no respect for the life of women, there is no right to justice… if women are killed every day,” she complained.
Just this Friday, but in Mexico, the body of the lawyer and feminist activist Grisell Pérez Rivera, who has been missing since 2021, was found, according to the statement released by the National Network of Human Rights Defenders. There is a detainee presumed responsible for the disappearance and murder.
In the text, the Network demanded a “criminal process with strict adherence to the standards of gender perspective and human rights.”
In Colombia, women will go out to protest from mid-afternoon at emblematic points in Bogotá such as the Monument to the Heroes and the National University. In Santiago de Chile it will be at sunset in Plaza Italia, a central area often the scene of protests.