This slogan reads: <There will never be walls high enough that can stop organised women from tearing them down>
copyright: REUTERS

LATIN AMERICA:

Opinion by Gino d'Artali - 2 July 2022
as furious the Latin American Feminists still are right now as furious I am. In other words: we're fighting back!

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Sep 16 2022
<<10 years of impunity since Karla Pontigo's feminicide
On October 29, it will be 10 years since Karla Pontigo died following a violent attack in the nightclub where she worked. Although the autopsy revealed multiple mutilations and sexual assaults suffered by Karla before her death, the authorities had classified the case as an <accident>. 10 years later, the finding: although the Supreme Court of Mexico ordered in 2019 that Karla's death be investigated as femicide, the office of the attorney general of San Luis Potosi still does not fully comply with this judgment. No investigation has been conducted into the irregularities committed and the negligence of the authorities in this case. Moreover, Karla's family has still not re-ceived full compensation.>>
Source: Amnesty International

The Guardian
28 June 2022
By Thomas Graham in La Paz
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
<<Bolivia's corrupt system failed to stem femicide. Now, feminists are fighting back.
In parts of La Paz, every surface is papered with layers of bleached and peeling posters: adverts for events, jobs, apartments – and missing women.
In 2021, there were at least 108 femicides in Bolivia, among the highest rates in South America. Many of the perpetrators are either never caught, not punished or go free soon after. In January, fresh outrage was prompted by the case of Richard Choque, a serial rapist and murderer who was given house arrest and then continued to commit crimes. The wave of fury prompted by the scandal has since driven Bolivia's feminist collectives to spectacular measures in an effort to force government action against femicides – and the corrupt justice system that allows them. It started with perhaps the biggest feminist protest seen in El Alto, the one-time satellite city that now flows into La Paz. The march began outside Choque's house in El Alto and culminated at the courts of justice, where activists covered the walls with graffiti, red paint and the names of unpunished rapists and murderers. <We wanted to redirect the discourse,> said María Galindo, founder of Mujeres Creando, a feminist collective in La Paz. <For it not to be a discourse of victimhood, nor a tabloid nor a police discourse. Because what Richard Choque shows is that the central problem is state corruption. This man was a prisoner, and yet he went free.> Galindo has since proved the sharp point of the pressure campaign on the government. She took to barging into state institutions and putting civil servants on the spot, livestreamed on social media. The one-liners she whipped them with went viral on TikTok. Then she teased a run to be Bolivia's ombudsman – before tearing her application up in front of the cameras, in a typically flamboyant outfit of fishnet leggings, black eyeshadow and irreverent takes on patriotic symbols, not least a giant crown capped with an Andean condor. Meanwhile, Mujeres Creando catalogued ignored reports of gender violence and investigated San Pedro prison, where Choque ought to have been held. They found a system of corruption, where inmates bought privileges including house arrest. In response, the government set up a commission to re-evaluate cases like Choque's, which, though extreme, was not unique. Twenty-one others released to house arrest inappropriately have since been reincarcerated, while another 50 arrest warrants have been issued. Eighteen judges are facing criminal proceedings and more than 300 of their cases are being re-evaluated. Such numbers come as no surprise to activists in La Paz and El Alto where gender violence has been accentuated by two factors, said writer Quya Reyn. <First, the absence of the state, which creates insecurity. And second, the fact that the city draws migrants – many of them young women – from across Bolivia’s western highlands. These women are vulnerable to abuse. If you go to [the centre], you’ll find posters looking for nannies, looking for women to work in restaurants, said Reyna. And they are always looking for women – only women.> <You see this with Richard Choque,> Reyna added. <He would go on Facebook and say that he could offer work. These young women were murdered looking for work.> In 2013, the government introduced Law 348, which, among other things, made femicide a crime punishable by 30 years in prison – Bolivia’s maximum sentence. The law was welcomed as progressive legislation at the time, and Adriana Guzmán, a feminist activist based in El Alto, believes the text remains generally sound – the problem is implementation. First, there is a lack of resources. <Right now, there aren't enough judges, there aren't enough prosecutors, there aren't enough investigators.> Then there's corruption, as demonstrated by the case of Choque. <The entire justice system is corrupt – not just with regard to crimes against women.>. Guzmán notes that this discriminates most against the poor. There is some scepticism that the government's commission will address these root problems.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jun/28/bolivia-femicide-violence-feminists

The Guardian
25 Feb 2021
<<The long read
Hunting the men who kill women: Mexico’s femicide detective
Although femicide is a recognised crime in Mexico, when a woman disappears, the authorities are notoriously slow to act. But there is someone who will take on their case
by Meaghan Beatley

On the night of 30 October 2019, as many Mexicans were preparing to celebrate the Day of the Dead, the family of Jessica Jaramillo stood in the pouring rain watching two dozen police search a house on the outskirts of Toluca, the capital of Mexico State. At about 9pm, the authorities carried out a dead dog, followed by two live ones and a cat. Then they pulled out a woman’s body.
Jessi, a 23-year-old psychology student at a local university, had gone missing a week earlier. On 24 October, she hadn’t appeared at the spot where her parents usually picked her up after class. Within a few minutes, she called her mother to say she was going out, abruptly hung up, then texted to add, <Don’t worry, I’m with Óscar>.
That was strange. Óscar, the father of Jessi’s 10-month-old son, was no longer in the picture. Maybe they’d been talking, the Jaramillos thought. But when Jessi hadn’t returned home by morning and her parents’ calls went straight to voicemail, they knew something was wrong. She never stayed out all night. Between school, church groups and her baby, she didn’t have the time.
Growing increasingly concerned, Jessi’s older brother logged on to her computer and tracked her phone through her Google account. A pin appeared in Villas Santín, a satellite of Toluca about nine miles from the university. Jessi’s parents, her brother and his fiancee piled into their van.
After knocking on a few doors, the family was told by a neighbour to check out No 136 Ponciano Díaz street, which they said was home to a strange young man. The man always wore a black shirt tucked into black cargo pants, with calf-high black combat boots. He was muscular, about 6ft tall, and had a military-style buzz cut. This wasn’t the first time a young woman had entered the house and not come out again, the neighbour said.

The neighbour’s description matched one Jessi had given six months earlier of a former classmate who had repeatedly asked her out and then begun stalking her. The family had helped Jessi transfer to another local university so that she could get away from him. She wasn’t with her ex: she must be with this other man, whose name also happened to be Óscar. Now, they rushed over to the address, a two-storey concrete house with iron bars on the front door and windows. A bright yellow sign warned: “Caution: attack dog.”

The family knocked, but no one answered. So they divided up. Two stayed behind to keep watch over the house, while the other two drove over to a prosecutor’s office in Toluca to file a missing person’s report. They were starting to panic. There are more than 73,000 missing people in Mexico, collectively known as <the disappeared>. Their faces haunt billboards and social media feeds, alongside pleas for help returning them to loved ones. In 2019, #We’reLookingForYou and #AmberAlert were Mexican Twitter’s top trending social or political hashtags. Many of the missing are never found.
At the prosecutor’s office, Jessi’s father told officials about her stalker, the message she had sent the previous night, and how they had tracked her phone to Villas Santín. According to the Jaramillos, the officials shrugged them off. Jessi’s message indicated she was with Óscar García Guzmán of her own free will, they said, and besides, they couldn’t report her as a missing person until 72 hours had passed from the time she was last seen. The Jaramillos insisted that the officials launch an investigation and refused to budge. After several hours, the officials relented.
That night, police knocked on the house’s door and when no one answered, left. The following morning, Saturday 26 October, García emerged. The Jaramillos, who had been eating and sleeping in their van opposite the house since the previous day in order to keep watch, approached García to ask him to let them in to check on Jessi. García shouted that he hadn’t seen her and that they couldn’t come in without a warrant. Then he called the police on them. Officers came, took statements outside, and once again left. But before they did, García agreed to go to the prosecutor’s office to leave a statement regarding Jessi’s missing person’s case – though not until Monday. He had homework to do over the weekend, he said. The following day, a judge denied a search warrant request for García’s house.
At about 8.30am on Monday 28 October, García took a taxi over to the prosecutor’s office. In his interview, an account of which I was shown, he described Jessi as a “friend with benefits” whom he’d known for a few months. He stated that the two had met up on the afternoon of 24 October, bought a pizza and gone back to his place to eat it, after which she had left in a taxi to see the father of her baby, the other Óscar.
At 11.45am, García returned home from the prosecutor’s office. Then 20 minutes later, he stepped out again. In a video the Jaramillos took, you can see him stride by, clad in his black, military-style uniform – like an overgrown action figure – a backpack slung over his shoulder, a phone clutched to his ear. With his free hand he flashes them a peace sign before disappearing out of the camera’s frame. According to police, at this point, he skipped town.

On 29 October, five days after Jessi had first disappeared, a judge approved a second search of García’s house based on new evidence – CCTV footage showing Jessi entering García’s house and not coming out again. The following night, police swarmed the house. By then, Jessi was dead. According to local press reports, she had been strangled and left in a bath.
The Jaramillos were exhausted, heartbroken and furious. But then, a few days later, a woman named Frida Guerrera knocked on their door. She told them she could help them track down Jessi’s killer.
Frida Guerrera is a journalist who hunts down men who kill women. A year before Jessi Jaramillo’s death, Guerrera had moved to Villas Santín, just a few blocks away from the house where Jessi’s body was found, a wild coincidence she later ascribed to fate. <I’ve always believed the girls tell me where to go,>she told me when we met last year. <Call it magic.>
For the past five years, Guerrera, who is 50, has devoted nearly every waking hour to searching for disappeared women and memorialising the victims of femicide. A distinct crime recognised in many Latin American countries, femicide is defined as the murder of a woman because of her gender. Some of the signs that characterise a femicide, according to Mexico’s criminal code, include sexual violence, a relationship between the victim and the murderer, prior threats and aggression, and the display of the body in a public space. UN Women calls Latin America the most lethal place for women outside war zones. More femicides are committed in Mexico than in any other country in the region, except Brazil.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/feb/25/mexico-femicide-frida-guerrera

UN 27 September 2018

<<Deputy UN chief hails ‘political courage’ of Latin American countries ‘to confront and end femicide’.

A 50 million euro investment aimed at helping to end the scourge of femicide – where women and girls are killed just because of their gender – was announced at United Nations Headquarters on Thursday, thanks to the ‘political courage’ of a group of Latin American countries, said the UN deputy chief.
Amina Mohammed was speaking at a high-level event to launch the Spotlight Initiative in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.
She described the joint UN-European Union initiative as <a bold and comprehensive response to the tragedies that we see across the world every day>, aimed at ending violence against women and girls.
<These five countries have shown the political courage to confront and end femicide – a crime that claims the lives of 12 women a day, in Latin America,> said the Deputy Secretary-General.

<Given the pervasive, universal, and entrenched nature of violence against women and girls, we knew that we would need to combine our individual efforts if we were to succeed,> she added.

Latin America is home to 14 of the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world and an astonishing 98 per cent of gender-related killings, go unprosecuted.
Ms. Mohammed said that the 50 million Euro investment would help tighten up laws and policy initiatives to curb unchecked violence against women and girls, strengthen institutions and promote gender equality overall.
It will also <provide quality services for survivors, and reparations for victims of violence and their families, producing disaggregated data so we can leave no one behind and empower women’s movements in the five priority countries.>>
Read more here:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/09/1021022

United Nations news 10 nov. 2020:
<<COVID-19 is overshadowing what has become a <pandemic of femicide> and related gender-based violence against women and girls, said independent UN human rights expert Dubravka Šimonovic on Monday, calling for the universal establishment of national initiatives to monitor and prevent such killings.?>>
Read more here:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1078362

The Latinas are the most fierce when it comes down to literally defend not only their rights but more than literally their lives! I lived and worked in Cd. Juarez, Mexico and wrote an article based on me being in the middle of the, also here literally, the battlefield.
But before I quote myself from that article I'd like to ask your attention for the following:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-latam-women-protests-idUSKBN20U095

Note by Gino d'Artali
The UN has again called the period 25 Nov 'till 10 Dec a time to be extra alert of against violence against women and called forward countries, NGO's and of course activists worldwide to take action against violence against women.
UN expert calls for urgent action to end ‘pandemic of femicide and violence against women’
COVID-19 is overshadowing what has become a <pandemic of femicide> and related gender-based violence against women and girls, said independent UN human rights expert Dubravka Šimonovic on Monday, calling for the universal establishment of national initiatives to monitor and prevent such killings.

France 24
17 Jan 2023
Text by: Pauline ROUQUETTE
<<Mexican mother confronts loss, corruption and impunity in a 'femicide nation'
High rates of femicide, combined with a poor track record of bringing perpetrators to justice - particularly the wealthy and powerful - have made Mexico the most dangerous country for women in Latin America, according to the UN. But one grieving mother is determined to seek justice for her murdered daughter, despite the odds. At 8:35pm on June 18, a Saturday, Patricia Garcia received a call informing her that her daughter, Frida Santamaria Garcia, was injured and in hospital. Frida had spent that day working at a reception hall where a baptism party had been held, her mother recounted in a telephone interview from Sahuayo, a city in the western Mexican state of Michoacan. <I immediately called her cousin, who worked with her, to ask if he knew anything. He called my daughter's phone, but it was her boyfriend, Juan Paulo N., who answered,> Garcia said.
When she arrived at the Hospital Santa Maria Sahuayo, Garcia lear-ned that her daughter had been shot. Frida had been left for dead after being robbed of her cell phone, she was told. The gunshots had punctured the young woman's lungs and liver. <It was the most terrible moment of my life,> Garcia said. <A few minutes later, the doctor told me my daughter was dead.> Frida, 24, still had her whole life ahead of her when it was brutally cut short with a firearm. <She was a very humble person with a big heart. She cared about the well-being of her family and friends. She was unconditional, loyal. She was unique,> her grieving mother said. Frida's boyfriend denied involvement in her death. But on December 15, Juan Paulo suddenly retracted his denial and admitted that he shot his girlfriend, saying it was not intentional. His retraction and delayed confession promp-ted the regional public prosecutor's office in Jiquilpan to reduce the charges against him to involuntary homicide. This gave the accused the right to an abbreviated legal process and a three-year prison sentence with the possibility of parole. The punishment for involun-tary homicide in Mexico is far more lenient than for those charged with femicide. In this country of nearly 127 million people where, according to authorities, more than 10 women are killed every day, the case of Frida Santamaria Garcia is yet another illustration of the challenges victims' families face in their quest for justice.>> Read more here:
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20230117-mexican-mother-confronts-loss-corruption-and-impunity-in-a-femicide-nation

MEXICO DAILY NEWS
7 Dec 2021
<<Feminists expose 36 Mexican candidates for harassment and rape.

On the list is the candidate of Going for Mexico, Gabriel Quadri, who is going for a place in the Chamber of Deputies.
The feminist collective Las brujas del Mar exhibited 36 candidates for different positions of popular election and of the 10 national parties, to be accused of assault, sexual harassment, rape, and child pornography.
Through their social networks, they said <here we feminists are doing the job of investigating their candidates, we leave their representatives here.>
On the list is the candidate of Going for Mexico , Gabriel Quadri, who is going for a place in the Chamber of Deputies; there is Sergio Estrada , who is the candidate of Fuerza por México for the municipal presidency of Cuernavaca. Both are accused of assaulting women.>>
SOURCE: https://mexicodailypost.com/2021/04/10/feminists-expose-36-mexican-candidates-for-harassment-and-rape/

France 24
26 Nov 2021

<<Thousands of Mexican women march in protest against violence.

Mexico City (AFP) – Thousands of women marched through the Mexican capital and scuffled with police on Thursday demanding an end to femicide and other gender-based violence in the Latin American country.
See picture as part of the article titled:
<They didn't die. They killed them,> read one of the banners carried at the rally to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Shouting <Not one (woman) less,> the crowd, dressed in black with flashes of purple, the color of the women's rights movement, demanded justice for victims of gender violence.
<Femicide Mexico! They're killing us!> one protester cried out during a brief scuffle with the police.
Tensions flared when a small number of hammer-wielding protesters tried to grab shields from police officers, who repelled them with smoke bombs.
Around 10 women are killed every day in Mexico and activists accuse the government of not doing enough to tackle the problem.
More than 10,700 women have been murdered in Mexico since 2019, according to official figures.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has criticized feminist marches on more than one occasion, suggesting that they are promoted by his enemies to undermine his government.>>
Read and view the article/picture here:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211126-thousands-of-mexican-women-march-in-protest-against-violence

The Guardian
Rights and freedom is supported by
Humanity United

David Agren in Mexico City
Mon 20 Sep 2021

<<Ten women and girls killed every day in Mexico, Amnesty report says.
Families often left to do their investigations into killings amid widespread indifference by authorities, report claims.

At least 10 women and girls are murdered every day in Mexico, according to a new report that says victims’ families are often left to carry out their own homicide investigations. The scathing report, released on Monday by Amnesty International, documents both the scale of the violence and the disturbing lack of interest on the part of Mexican authorities to prevent or solve the murders.
<Mexico is continuing to fail to fulfil its duty to investigate and, therefore, its duty to guarantee the rights to life and personal integrity of the victims as well as to prevent violence against women,> says the report, Justice on Trial.
<Feminicidal violence and the failings in investigation and prevention in northern Mexico are not anecdotal, but rather form part of a broader reality in the country,> the report adds.
Femicide has been rife in Mexico for decades – most notoriously in an epidemic of murders which claimed the life of some 400 women in the border city Ciudad Juárez during the 1990s. In recent years, a growing feminist movement has held massive street protests against the violence, but authorities have proved unwilling to take action to stop the killing.

<It’s always a question of political will,> said Maricruz Ocampo, a women’s activist in the state of Querétaro.

Ocampo has been part of teams lobbying state governors to issue an alert when femicides reach scandalously high levels – a move to raise awareness and mobilise resources. But officials often resist such moves, she said, as governors worry about their states’ images and investment.
<They refuse to recognise there is a problem,> she said.
The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has also downplayed the problem. He branded the women protesting on 8 March, International Women’s Day, as <conservatives> and alleged a dark hand manipulating the demonstrations.
When asked last year about rising violence against women, he responded, <Tell all the women of Mexico that they are protected and represented, that we’re doing everything possible to guarantee peace and quiet and that I understand that our adversaries are looking for ways to confront us.>

Mexico recorded the murders of 3,723 women in 2020. Some 940 of those murders were investigated as femicides.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/sep/20/mexico-femicide-women-girls-amnesty-international-report

The Chihuahua Post
21 July 2021

<<Woman tired of being beaten, murders husband in Ciudad Juarez.

A woman, tired of being beaten by her husband, decided to kill the man inside his own home, in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. According to police reports, the homicide was committed on Sunday, July 18th, at 7 AM in a home in the Torres del PRI neighborhood.
The police officers found the body of a man with two bullet wounds to the head.
At the crime scene, the police officers interrogated Juana N, who confessed to the murder and revealed that she and her husband returned home from a party they attended together, and they had an argument that ended in a fight in which the subject hit her repeatedly. This version was also confirmed by next-door neighbors, who declared that it was not the first time the man attacked his wife.
The police statement also revealed that the woman claimed to be tired of being beaten by her husband and therefore took a pistol and shot him twice in the head. Faced with these events, the police arrested 24-year-old Juana N, who was in possession of a 9-millimeter pistol with a magazine supplied with six useful cartridges, and which she used to commit the homicide.

Source: Diario MX
https://thechihuahuapost.com/2021/07/19/woman-tired-of-being-beaten-murders-husband-in-ciudad-juarez/

The Washington post
9 March 2021
Miriam Berger

<<Women in Mexico are protesting femicide. Police have responded with force.

Femicide protests in Mexico City turned violent Monday after women clashed with riot police stationed outside the National Palace, the residence
of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Activists say he’s failed to take rampant sexual violence seriously, even as it’s led to the deaths of 10 women a day.
López Obrador, also known by the acronym AMLO, dismissed the protests that coincided with International Women’s Day, arguing they were spurred by his conservative opponents. But the populist president with left-wing origins, who has long had tense relationships with feminist movements, has in recent weeks stoked the anger of many women for his support of a gubernatorial candidate accused of sexual assault, alongside continuing high cases of gender-based violence.
Ahead of Monday’s planned protest, police set up a barricade around the presidential palace, which a spokesperson described as a “peace wall” to prevent vandalism, the Guardian reported. But protesters said the barrier was symbolic of the president’s refusal to take on the issue, noting that he frequently makes a show of traveling in drug cartel-controlled parts of Mexico but felt unsafe ahead of their protest.

Women instead plastered the barriers with slogans and the names of murdered women. Nearly 1,000 women in Mexico were victims of femicide in 2020, according to an official database, the Guardian reported. Some of the cases have been particularly brutal: In February 2020, 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was stabbed to death, cut up and partially skinned.>>
Read more here
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/09/womens-day-protests-amlo-mexico

<<In Mexico’s state of Nuevo León, a new sororidad rises.

Monterrey, Mexico — On February 21, 2020, more than 400 women stood silently in front of the Government Palace of Nuevo León in the Mexican city of Monterrey. They were dressed in black with purple and green handkerchiefs tied to their necks, holding up homemade signs denouncing femicidal violence that kills 10 women every day in Mexico. Their jaws were clenched tight with endless rage. Their gazes reflected that which is born when a sense of hopelessness converges with sorority. They those gazes for over three hours.
Later, a group of women between 19 and 24 years old came before the crowd and took turns sharing their own stories of sexual harassment and violence. <I do believe you,> the crowd chanted after each woman’s testimony. Surrounded by dozens of police officers, the women filled the Esplanade of Heroes in front of the palace to secure a safe space for them to grieve the collective sexualized violence against women.

Days before, a modified version of the viral <Femme Fist> print with the hashtag #YoPorEllas circulated through social media and WhatsApp groups. It gave a time, a date, and a place. But no feminist collective or women’s association was mentioned. It was a leaderless protest.
These days, women, especially young women, are a more common sight in public spaces in the northeastern state of Nuevo León, just across the U.S.-Mexico border from Texas. Even though they’re in constant danger of being harassed, attacked, murdered and disappeared, they show up not only to denounce gender-based violence but to find one another, forge relationships, and create new forms of organizing and activism.
Protests against gender-based violence are regular occurrences in the country’s capital, Mexico City, but now, they’re also increasingly more present in Monterrey, the industrial capital of Nuevo León known for its deep conservatism and dominant business culture. The protest on February> 21 signaled the re-emergence of feminist organizing and mobilizing in one of Mexico’s most conservative states.>>
Read more here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/in-mexicos-state-of-nuevo-leon-a-new-sororidad-rises

The Guardian
25 Feb 2021
<<The long read
Hunting the men who kill women: Mexico’s femicide detective
Although femicide is a recognised crime in Mexico, when a woman disappears, the authorities are notoriously slow to act. But there is someone who will take on their case
by Meaghan Beatley

On the night of 30 October 2019, as many Mexicans were preparing to celebrate the Day of the Dead, the family of Jessica Jaramillo stood in the pouring rain watching two dozen police search a house on the outskirts of Toluca, the capital of Mexico State. At about 9pm, the authorities carried out a dead dog, followed by two live ones and a cat. Then they pulled out a woman’s body.
Jessi, a 23-year-old psychology student at a local university, had gone missing a week earlier. On 24 October, she hadn’t appeared at the spot where her parents usually picked her up after class. Within a few minutes, she called her mother to say she was going out, abruptly hung up, then texted to add, <Don’t worry, I’m with Óscar>.
That was strange. Óscar, the father of Jessi’s 10-month-old son, was no longer in the picture. Maybe they’d been talking, the Jaramillos thought. But when Jessi hadn’t returned home by morning and her parents’ calls went straight to voicemail, they knew something was wrong. She never stayed out all night. Between school, church groups and her baby, she didn’t have the time.
Growing increasingly concerned, Jessi’s older brother logged on to her computer and tracked her phone through her Google account. A pin appeared in Villas Santín, a satellite of Toluca about nine miles from the university. Jessi’s parents, her brother and his fiancee piled into their van.
After knocking on a few doors, the family was told by a neighbour to check out No 136 Ponciano Díaz street, which they said was home to a strange young man. The man always wore a black shirt tucked into black cargo pants, with calf-high black combat boots. He was muscular, about 6ft tall, and had a military-style buzz cut. This wasn’t the first time a young woman had entered the house and not come out again, the neighbour said.

The neighbour’s description matched one Jessi had given six months earlier of a former classmate who had repeatedly asked her out and then begun stalking her. The family had helped Jessi transfer to another local university so that she could get away from him. She wasn’t with her ex: she must be with this other man, whose name also happened to be Óscar. Now, they rushed over to the address, a two-storey concrete house with iron bars on the front door and windows. A bright yellow sign warned: <Caution: attack dog.>

The family knocked, but no one answered. So they divided up. Two stayed behind to keep watch over the house, while the other two drove over to a prosecutor’s office in Toluca to file a missing person’s report. They were starting to panic. There are more than 73,000 missing people in Mexico, collectively known as <the disappeared>. Their faces haunt billboards and social media feeds, alongside pleas for help returning them to loved ones. In 2019, #We’reLookingForYou and #AmberAlert were Mexican Twitter’s top trending social or political hashtags. Many of the missing are never found.
At the prosecutor’s office, Jessi’s father told officials about her stalker, the message she had sent the previous night, and how they had tracked her phone to Villas Santín. According to the Jaramillos, the officials shrugged them off. Jessi’s message indicated she was with Óscar García Guzmán of her own free will, they said, and besides, they couldn’t report her as a missing person until 72 hours had passed from the time she was last seen. The Jaramillos insisted that the officials launch an investigation and refused to budge. After several hours, the officials relented.
That night, police knocked on the house’s door and when no one answered, left. The following morning, Saturday 26 October, García emerged. The Jaramillos, who had been eating and sleeping in their van opposite the house since the previous day in order to keep watch, approached García to ask him to let them in to check on Jessi. García shouted that he hadn’t seen her and that they couldn’t come in without a warrant. Then he called the police on them. Officers came, took statements outside, and once again left. But before they did, García agreed to go to the prosecutor’s office to leave a statement regarding Jessi’s missing person’s case – though not until Monday. He had homework to do over the weekend, he said. The following day, a judge denied a search warrant request for García’s house.
At about 8.30am on Monday 28 October, García took a taxi over to the prosecutor’s office. In his interview, an account of which I was shown, he described Jessi as a “friend with benefits” whom he’d known for a few months. He stated that the two had met up on the afternoon of 24 October, bought a pizza and gone back to his place to eat it, after which she had left in a taxi to see the father of her baby, the other Óscar.
At 11.45am, García returned home from the prosecutor’s office. Then 20 minutes later, he stepped out again. In a video the Jaramillos took, you can see him stride by, clad in his black, military-style uniform – like an overgrown action figure – a backpack slung over his shoulder, a phone clutched to his ear. With his free hand he flashes them a peace sign before disappearing out of the camera’s frame. According to police, at this point, he skipped town.

On 29 October, five days after Jessi had first disappeared, a judge approved a second search of García’s house based on new evidence – CCTV footage showing Jessi entering García’s house and not coming out again. The following night, police swarmed the house. By then, Jessi was dead. According to local press reports, she had been strangled and left in a bath.
The Jaramillos were exhausted, heartbroken and furious. But then, a few days later, a woman named Frida Guerrera knocked on their door. She told them she could help them track down Jessi’s killer.
Frida Guerrera is a journalist who hunts down men who kill women. A year before Jessi Jaramillo’s death, Guerrera had moved to Villas Santín, just a few blocks away from the house where Jessi’s body was found, a wild coincidence she later ascribed to fate. <I’ve always believed the girls tell me where to go,>she told me when we met last year. <Call it magic.>
For the past five years, Guerrera, who is 50, has devoted nearly every waking hour to searching for disappeared women and memorialising the victims of femicide. A distinct crime recognised in many Latin American countries, femicide is defined as the murder of a woman because of her gender. Some of the signs that characterise a femicide, according to Mexico’s criminal code, include sexual violence, a relationship between the victim and the murderer, prior threats and aggression, and the display of the body in a public space. UN Women calls Latin America the most lethal place for women outside war zones. More femicides are committed in Mexico than in any other country in the region, except Brazil.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/feb/25/mexico-femicide-frida-guerrera

Women's Media Center
February 14 2012
Maria Hinojosa

<<Women, words, and violence in Mexico

Femicidio. Femicide. The female counterpart to homicide.

It is a concept our country has been less exposed to than, for example, Mexico, Honduras or Guatemala, where the word femicidio is seen on the front pages of newspapers much too often.

The phenomenon of gender-based murder, rape and violence is so massive in these parts of the world that the Nobel Women's Initiative, a project based in Canada and led by women who have won the Nobel Peace Prize, undertook an all-women fact-finding delegation to get firsthand accounts and investigate. I was asked to join the delegation as an embedded journalist. The delegation was led in Mexico by Jody Williams, who won the Peace Prize in 1997 for her campaign against land mines.
In Mexico, the delegates spent two days listening to dozens of horrible stories about women who had been murdered, raped, tortured, disappeared or threatened. Women came from all over the country to tell their stories to 11 Canadian and American women, among them singer Sarah Harmer, human-rights expert Lisa VeneKlasen, journalist Paula Todd and activist-blogger Veronica Arreola. The fact that working women with kids would travel 15 hours to speak to us for about seven minutes each touched the delegates. Mariusa Lopez, a longtime women's human-rights activist, said: <They have knocked on so many doors, and they have been closed. You came to hear them. They will do what they can to tell their stories to the world, a world that wants to listen.>.

On the second day, we traveled to the state of Guerrero, one of the poorest in Mexico, where one-third of the population is indigenous. There continues to be an institutional racism toward indigenous people. In Chilpancingo, we heard stories about young and middle-aged women treated like dirt by hospitals or ambulance services, resulting in deaths and stillborn births. Another woman was kidnapped two months ago for being a human-rights activist. Left behind are her two daughters, 21 and 26 years old. "I am not afraid to die. I just want to see my mother free before that happens," said the 21-year-old, who is having to negotiate for her mother's freedom with shadowy people of the criminal underworld, along with government officials who may know her whereabouts.
The female journalists who tell these stories also have been murdered. One was beheaded, with her head thrown onto the steps of a government building in her town. Another's body was hung on the street.>>
Read more here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/women-words-and-violence-in-mexico

BBC
Marcos González Díaz
Corresponsal de BBC News Mundo en México
3 Febrero 2021

<<Arussi Unda, de Las Brujas del Mar: <El machismo y la impunidad hacen la mezcla perfecta en donde se odia a las mujeres y no pasa nada>>
<<Arussi Unda, the Witches of the Sea: <The masichism and the impunity es the perfect mix where the hate against women results in the fact that nothing happens.>>
Read more here: (Article in Spanisch),
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-55885880

In 2020 I, as journalist for cryfreedom.net and radical feminist I wrote
and publisched 2 articles:

3) In the years 2000-04 I lived in Ciuad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico
where I was schocked by the femicides! I got into action resulting in:
www.cryfreedom.net/FF1.html

____

Al Jazeera
8 Mar 2022
By Natalie Alcoba

<<A family’s unrelenting fight to end Argentina’s femicide crisis
Lucia Perez’s 2016 killing sent shockwaves across Argentina. Her family is still pushing for justice.
Mar del Plata, Argentina – Recently, Marta Montero dreamed of her teenage daughter, Lucia. It happens from time to time. She felt the soft fabric of the dress that Lucia was wearing, and she felt peace when she woke up to a world in which Lucia is no longer there.
Lucia’s life was snuffed out five and a half years ago in one of the most emblematic cases of femicide in Argentina — not just for the violence that was exacted on the 16-year-old, but for the way in which a court judged her. “The first year is just terrible. The first birthday. The first Christmas,” said Montero, sitting at the kitchen table of the modest house where she lives with her family in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, about 400km (248 miles) from the capital Buenos Aires. <That absence makes your skin hurt. Your soul hurts. You feel it in your body. Your body hurts. It is just terrible. I remember coming home from work on the bus, and seeing Lucia. And getting off the bus crying and thinking, ‘I must be going crazy.'>
It has been a devastating and maddening time for Lucia’s family and their allies since the teenage girl’s lifeless body was dropped off at a health clinic in her hometown in October 2016 by two men, Matias Farias, 23, and Juan Pablo Offidani, 41. They were accused of drugging, raping and killing her – and Farias also faced a charge of femicide – but acquitted by a trio of judges who found them only guilty of administering drugs to a minor. The judges also absolved a third man who is now deceased of helping them cover up the crime.
The ruling was quashed in 2020 by a higher court, and the family is still awaiting a new trial date to be set. They also are waiting for a hearing that could strip the original trial judges of their posts for relying on gender stereotypes and prejudices in their ruling. That would be a milestone in the battle waged by women’s rights activists to dismantle the patriarchal underpinnings of Argentine society, including in the judiciary. <The movement of women has not only conquered the streets, but we are also conquering these spaces and we will use all tools that are available to us,> Maite Guerrero, a lawyer with the Equipo Latinoamericano de Justicia y Genero, told Al Jazeera. <This case could set an important precedent for us.>

Seminal case

In Argentina, one woman is killed roughly every 30 hours, a statistic that has not shifted much since a new wave of the feminist movement exploded onto the streets in 2015 under the banner Ni Una Menos — Not One Less.
Lucia’s death prompted the first women’s strike, which saw hundreds of thousands of people demonstrate in the streets in 2016 demanding more action from legislators. They were driven there at least in part by the horrific revelations by a prosecutor, who told the press in the days after the crime that the teenager had been impaled during the brutal attack, and that her body was cleaned.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/8/a-familys-unrelenting-fight-to-end-argentinas-femicide-crisis

USIDHR
Us institute of diplomacy and human rights.
14 Nov 2021

<<Tackling Violence Against Women in The Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA).

Introduction

The Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) – which consists of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – is the most violent region in the world (Verite, 2014). El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala respectively have some of the highest homicide rates globally – with the highest homicide rate in the world (82.84%), the second-highest (56.52%), and the 14th highest (27.26%) respectively (World Population Review, 2021). A deeper issue is that perpetrators target women and girls based on their sex and gender. Sexual and gender-based violence – including femicides (international murders of women for being women) – plagues the NTCA. El Salvador (3.3 per 100,000 women) and Honduras (6.2 per 100,000 women) are among the top five countries with the highest femicide rates (Kennon and Valdevitt, 2020). Guatemala, which had a femicide rate of 7 per 100,000 women from 2010 to 2015, is not much better (Horizons of Friendship, 2018). Rampant violence in the NTCA, including domestic violence, forces women and girls to seek asylum in the US and Mexico. As the assistant high commissioner for protection at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) stated, there is a <hidden refugee crisis> within the migration (Moloney and Thomas Reuters Foundation, 2017). This article explores the factors contributing to violence against women and girls in the NTCA.

Contributing factors to violence against women

The NTCA is home to many violent gangs, including the maras. Decades of civil war and political instability (including during the Cold War) enabled
the gangs, among whom the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the Eighteenth Street Gang (M-18) are particularly infamous, to grow powerful. These
groups brutally kill, assault, rob, and extort people (Cheatham, 2021; Seelke, 2014; World Bank, 2011). Together, MS-13 and M-18 have 85,000
members. According to a 2017 Latinobarometro survey of NTCA respondents, 70% considered gang violence one of the worst types of violence in the region, and 46% had the same opinion about violence against women (Runde and Schneider, 2019). According to the Inter-American Dialogue’s
research, a 1% increase in homicides contributes to migration from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador growing by 120%, 100%, and 188%
respectively (Orozco, 2018). By 2018, MS-13 was active in 94% of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities (Crisis Group, 2018). According to Melida Guevara, an Oxfam program manager in El Salvador, <Gang violence exercises power over women by means of violence over their bodies. To resist is to die. So girls and young boys, some just 8 years old, are recruited to work for gangs or be girlfriends of gang members, and they are trying to survive in this complex and violent context.> (Oxfam America 2018).

According to the UNHCR, 85% of women from the NTCA seeking asylum in the US described living in communities that armed crime groups controlled – be it maras or other groups. The women, in interviews, stated how they faced rape and abuse and lived amidst death and disappearances. 64% of theinterviewed described direct threats and attacks by criminal armed groups as ‘’at least one of the primary reasons for their flight’’, while 62% of respondents reported witnessing dead bodies in their communities, and many reported being forced to pay a <tax> for living or working in a particular area. Although 69% tried to find safety in their country, they were unable to flee their perpetrators or found similar violence in their new locations.
The crime gangs terrorized many women so deeply the latter <increasingly> stayed and kept their children at home instead of going to school or work (UNHCR, 2015). It was the only way some young girls and women felt relatively safe (McEvers and Garsd, 2015).

Gangs were not the only perpetrators of gender-based violence against girls and women. The dangers could be further compounded if the women
themselves were in abusive relationships at home, which was very much the case for many of the respondents (who faced <life-threatening and
degrading forms of domestic violence>). In some cases, the domestic abuser was also part of the gang (UNHCR, 2015). According to a 2017 national survey, 67% of Salvadoran women have suffered some form of violence in their lifetime, be it sexual assault, intimate partner violence, or abuse from their own family. Yet only 6% of victims had reported abuse to authorities (UN, 2018). For comparison, the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that more than 50% of domestic violence survivors have reported cases to the police (Morgan, PhD, and Oudekerk, PhD, 2018). The primary cause for so extremely few reports may be lack of access to the necessary public services, according to the Secretary of Social Inclusion. Responses to The National Survey of Violence against Women indicate 15% of surveyed women didn’t think the police would believe them, 11.5% were threatened to not report at all, and 9% did not know where to go – in addition, among all the reported cases, only 6% of the real support has been provided. 48% of the cases involved not reporting due to the difficulty in accessing public services (Laguan, 2018).>>
Please read more here:
https://usidhr.org/tackling-violence-against-women-in-the-northern-triangle-of-central-america-ntca/

Note by Gino d'Artali:
The ISIDHR parly based the above rapport on a report by the UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS.
Read it here:
https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23873&LangID=E

The Guardian
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
By Jeff Ernst in Tegucigalpa
Thu 27 Jan 2022

<<Women's rights and gender equality.
Honduras: can first female president usher in a new era for women?

Xiomara Castro will be sworn in as the first female president of Honduras on Thursday, marking the culmination of a remarkable rise to power that began just over 12 years ago when she led a massive protest movement in response to the ousting of her husband, former president Manuel <Mel> Zelaya, in a military-backed coup.

Castro’s resounding victory in the 28 November election has generated hope for a new era for women in the country with the highest rate of femicide in Latin America and some of the region’s most draconian laws with regards to reproductive rights. <In her plan for government she took us into account,> said Regina Fonseca, director of the Centre for the Rights of Women in Honduras. <That gives us enormous hope to return to life.> Activists are optimistic that Castro, of the center-left Libre party, will not only take actions that help improve conditions for women in the immediate, but also accelerate broader changes in the country’s culture. <This small break in the patriarchy that her win represents can become bigger and bigger, in the sense that it can open even more spaces for participation in government and political participation in general for women in the country,> said Carmen Haydée, a human rights lawyer and representative of the feminist group Luchemos. Among the first order of business, Castro is expected to undo a prohibition against emergency contraceptives enacted in the wake of the coup. Honduras is the only country in Latin America with absolute bans on both abortion and emergency contraceptives. As a result, women who have been raped have been forced to seek out emergency contraceptives on the black market.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/26/honduras-first-female-president-xiomara-castro-women

Contra Corriente
August 8 2020
By Vienna Herrera
Translation: John Turnure

<<Femicide in Honduras: women dismissed by their own government.
Heidy Garcia still bears the scars of the violence she has endured for years. On October 23, 2018, her ex-partner tried to kill her with a machete. Now 39 years old, her face and body are scarred, and her health has deteriorated. There is still so much pain and fear.
Heidy had to report Andres Martinez for domestic violence five times to get a restraining order. However, no one checked whether the orderwas enforced, and he returned one day.
<So that he could finish killing me,> says Heidy, who was assaulted the day after her birthday, after she returned home from lunch with a friend. He attacked her in front of her youngest daughter as she was cooking dinner for her children.
<He was going to hit me in the face, but I jerked away out of reflex, and I screamed ‘You’re killing me!’ He said, ‘Yeah, and I’m going to finish you off now,’"
Heidy managed to escape that attack and was admitted to the National University Teaching Hospital (Hospital Escuela Universitario).

Heidy’s case of attempted femicide is now pending before the Supreme Court of Justice. The number of other pending femicide cases is not known; the judiciary did not respond to a freedom of information request placed by Contra Corriente.
In April 2013, the crime of femicide entered into effect in the Criminal Code. However, the Public Prosecutor’s Office only began reporting data on this crime in 2017, four years later. Only 30 cases of femicide have been prosecuted through 2019. This number stands in sharp contrast to the 7,041 reports of murder, infanticide, parricide and homicide filed between 2008 and 2009, in which the victim was female.
Most of these cases have not been prosecuted. Between 2010 and 2019, only 35% of the cases received by the Public Prosecutor’s Office were brought before the courts. Of the 104 cases of femicide that reached the Supreme Court of Justice between 2014 and 2019, only 23 have been adjudicated. Seven of these cases were acquittals, 15 were convictions, and the resolution of one case is not clear since the case file indicates that it involved two charges – a femicide and a misdemeanor. The perpetrator was acquitted of one charge and convicted of the other, but the case documentation does not specify which one.>>
Read more here:
https://contracorriente.red/en/2020/08/08/femicide-in-honduras-women-dismissed-by-their-own-government/

GENDER EQUALITY FORUM
2018-'19

Femicide or feminicide
Latin America, the Caribbean (21 countries): Femicide or feminicide, most recent data available (In absolute numbers and rates per 100.000 women)

2019:
Number for Honduras: 299 femicides (rate per 100.000 women).
View the whole chart here:
https://oig.cepal.org/en/indicators/femicide-or-feminicide

'Men can do anything they want to women in Honduras': Inside one of the most dangerous places on Earth to be a woman

"Nightline" went inside one of the most dangerous places on Earth to be a woman.

2011-'14
THE BORGEN PROJECT
<<Tag Archive for: Femicide in Honduras. by Grace Arnold (i.e. excerpts from the article.):

1: Murder – In 2011 Honduras experienced a peak in murder rates making Honduras the holder of the highest homicide rate in the world. Between 2011 and 2015, the murder rate in Honduras decreased by 30 percent. Homicides went down from 88.5 per 100,000 residents to 60.0 per 100,000 and have remained constant or decreased slowly depending on the year. However, in Honduras, only 4 percent of reported homicide cases result in arrest showing there is still lots of room for improvement.
6: Domestic Violence – One woman is murdered every 16 hours in Honduras, and the country has the highest femicide rate in the world. Shocking numbers of rape, assault and domestic violence cases are reported. However, 95 percent of cases of sexual violence and femicide in Honduras were never investigated in the year 2014. As mentioned above, widespread underreporting is likely to be linked to the lack of trust in governmental figures such as police and judicial systems. Rape is widespread and is employed to discipline girls, women and their family members for failure to comply with demands. In Honduras, there is a 95 percent impunity rate for sexual violence and femicide crimes and the lack of accountability for violations of human rights of women is the norm rather than the exception.>>
https://borgenproject.org/tag/femicide-in-honduras/

Feminist Organisation Report
6 June 2014

<<Status of violence against women in Honduras.
Submitted to the special raporteur on violance against women, its causes and consequenses, in her visit to Honduras>>
Download the PDF here:
https://www.protectioninternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Violence-Women-Honduras-RapporteurONU-June2014final.pdf

EL SALVADOR

Infosegura
18 June 2021

<<Violence against women, El Salvador 2020.

(Note from Gino d'Artali: the info is also available in Spanisch and includes a PDF to download).

The following infographic presents an analysis of violence against women differentiated throughout the life cycle for the year 2020 in El Salvador. It includes advances in the legal framework, challenges, and data on intrafamily and domestic violence, sexual violence, and femicide. This analysis was prepared by the infosegura team based on international instruments and national legislation on violence against women for 2020 and with data from official sources in the country: CID Gallup (May 2020), Attorney General’s Office (FGR ), Technical table for conciliation of figures of intentional homicides of the Directorate of Information and Analysis (DIA) and Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP), Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ), Legal Medicine Institute (IML), National Civil Police (PNC), General Directorate of Statistics and Censuses (DIGESTYC).
Read more here/Leer mas aqui:
https://infosegura.org/en/2021/06/18/violence-against-women-el-salvador-2020/

NACLA
Reporting on the Americas since 1967
March 5th. 2021
Kristina Zanzinger, SJ Fernandez, and Yanxi Liu

<<Underreported and Unpunished, Femicides in El Salvador Continue.
In one of the most dangerous Latin American countries to be a woman, lockdown measures exposed longstanding challenges in combatting gender violence.

The same day President Nayib Bukele announced a strict lockdown for El Salvador at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, a collective of local women’s organizations launched a hotline to support women confined indoors with their abusers. The country was not prepared for the public health emergency nor for protecting women against violence. >Emergency situations,> the groups noted, always exacerbate <acts of violence against women stemming from existing inequalities.> By early June, the feminist organization Colectiva Feminista para el Desarrollo Local had documented 26 femicides during the lockdown.
In recent years, El Salvador has reported high rates of domestic violence and epidemic rates of femicide, the intentional killing of a woman or girl based on her gender identity. A 2017 survey found that 67 percent of Salvadoran women had experienced some form of violence in their lives, and in 2019, the country had one of the highest femicide rates in Latin America, second only to Honduras. Although El Salvador passed a gender violence law in 2011, establishing sentences of 20 to 50 years for femicide, acknowledging and prosecuting these cases remains arduous. The pandemic has further exposed these challenges, including by exacerbating structural barriers to reporting gender-based violence. Local human rights lawyers and feminist activists have been fighting to address these limitations by expanding support systems for victims of domestic violence.
Salvadoran law defines femicide as the killing of a woman with <motives of hatred or contempt for her condition as a woman.> Some scholars have proposed the term feminicide, rather than femicide, to underline the role of state negligence in these crimes and the intersection of power dynamics and cultural and socioeconomic factors.

In El Salvador and elsewhere, most femicides happen within the context of domestic violence, and structural machismo and the societal normalization of gender-based violence perpetuate both abuses and impunity. Campaigns and events organized by groups like Colectiva Feminista aim to educate women on their human rights, improve their sense of agency and self-worth, and dismantle the normalization of violence. However, underreporting of domestic violence is still an issue.
<Domestic violence is the beginning [of feminicide] since women suffer domestic violence in silence,> explains human rights attorney Arnau Baulenas of the Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Centroamericana (IDHUCA) in San Salvador. And according to Marshall University Latin America history professor Chris White, in El Salvador, a geographically small country with a high-density population, the normalization of violence is also shaped by a strong historical memory of civil war-era violence.

<Impunity Means More Violence>

Calling attention to the growing irregularity of resources available for women facing violence in 2020, Colectiva Feminista partnered with the abortion decriminalization organization Agrupación Ciudadana para la Despenalización del Aborto as well as the women’s human rights group Red Salvadoreña de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Humanos to create a hotline to provide psychological and legal support. The support line responds to an increased need since the start of the pandemic for remote resources for victims, their families, and others hoping to report instances of gender-based violence or gain information about preventative actions. Many callers are from family members and partners seeking legal assistance to press charges against their abusive counterparts, explains activist and lawyer Laura Moran.
According to Moran, the Colectiva Feminista received more gender-based violence cases in the first six months of the pandemic than it did during all of 2019. Reports to the police also increased during lockdown. However, uneven awareness among public officials about the problem, combined with normalization, has created significant barriers to building substantial legal services to protect victims of abuse.

Potential for revictimization by police who uphold patriarchal norms, such as the idea that domestic violence is a family matter, is one possible deterrent to reporting abuse. Such barriers to reporting, a lack of political will to dedicate resources to combatting feminicide, and structural problems in the judicial system also translate into a lack of justice for victims. Activists have often pointed out the hypocrisy of El Salvador's justice system criminalizing women for having abortions—or stillbirths or miscarriages in many cases—while failing to pursue prosecutions for femicides.
According to Baulenas, prosecutions are often overshadowed by personal and cultural biases against victims that color cases with patriarchal and machista assumptions. These biases contribute to impunity for gender-based crimes, and it can also retraumatize survivors who choose to report their abuse. <Impunity means more violence,> Baulenas explains, underlining a cycle of inaction that fuels further underreporting. “The system needs to be fixed and authority figures need reeducation,” he adds.>>
Read more here:
https://nacla.org/news/2021/03/04/femicides-el-salvador-pandemic

United Nations
Meetings Coverage and Press Releases.
8 December 2020

<<Deputy Secretary-General Applauds El Salvador for Implementing Spotlight Initiative, Tackling Highest Rate of Femicide in Latin America.

Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at the “Let’s Talk about Violence against Women” conversation, held virtually today:
It is a pleasure to join. I thank the honourable Minister of Foreign Affairs of El Salvador, Alexandra Hill Tinoco, for convening this event during the 16 days of Activism against Gender-based Violence.
The Government of El Salvador is a key partner in the Spotlight Initiative — our global multilateral partnership with the European Union to end all forms of violence against women and girls.
This is an enormous challenge, one that has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but I am convinced that with the participation of Member States, civil society, the private sector and others, we can make decisive progress towards ending violence against women and girls and achieve gender equality by 2030.
This is an absolute imperative for global progress and well-being. We will not achieve the Sustainable Development Goals if women and girls are side-lined from quality education, lack employment opportunities and live in fear of violence and insecurity — in the home, in public transportation, online, school, in the workplace or marketplace.
Globally, 1 in 3 women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence. In El Salvador, that percentage is 7 in 10 — more than twice as high.
El Salvador also has the highest rate of femicide in Latin America, and one of the highest rates in the world. In August 2020, La Prensa Gráfica reported that 10 women were murdered in the first eleven days of August alone.
In support of the Government’s efforts and in partnership with civil society, the Spotlight Initiative is being implemented across El Salvador to address the roots of this violence. To date, nearly 800,000 people have been impacted by these efforts.
The Initiative’s investments serve to strengthen laws and legal protections and the ability of national institutions to prevent, document and eradicate violence. It is building the capacity needed to gather data on prevalence which can inform effective policy measures. And critically important, the Spotlight Initiative is channelling resources to women’s rights organizations on the frontlines.>>
Read more here:
https://www.un.org/press/en/2020/dsgsm1519.doc.htm

YRIS
The Yale Review of International Studies
Posted on March 2020
El Salvador's femicide crisis.
by Sophie Huttner

I, Gino d'Artali, highly recommend this article from which I cannot quote 'cause it's in an image format:
http://yris.yira.org/essays/3794

<<While murder rates fall in Brazil, femicide remains on the rise.
Cuiabá, Brazil — Murder rates in Brazil are falling. In 2019, the number of victims of violent crimes fell 19 percent from 2018, down to 41,634, the lowest number since the Brazilian Public Security Forum began collecting data in 2007. In fact, those numbers have steadily been declining since 2018, after hitting a peak of nearly 64,000 murders in 2017.
While President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters are quick to claim credit, the decline can be largely attributed to the end of violent conflict between rival criminal factions, who have long fought for control of the country’s drug trade; measures taken by the government under former President Michel Temer — which, among other things, has improved the coordination of police forces; and state-level interventions in prisons, such as isolating leaders of criminal groups to make it more difficult to coordinate actions beyond prison walls.
And yet, femicide in the country remains on the rise.

A longstanding scourge

According to a survey conducted by Brazilian news site G1, and based off official data, Brazil experienced a 7-percent increase in femicides from 2018 to 2019, as the number of recorded cases jumped from 1,173 murders in 2018 to 1,314 murders in 2019. And the 2018 figure was already a 12-percent increase over the year before.
Femicide is described as <any crime that involves domestic violence, contempt, or discrimination against women, which results in their death.> It was codified as a criminal offense under the country’s Femicide Law of 2015, which was announced by then-President Dilma Rousseff on International Women’s Day, and added harsher penalties for specific cases, such as when violence is committed against pregnant women, girls under 14, women above 60, and women and girls with disabilities.
<It has taken us a long time to say that the killing of a woman is a different phenomenon,> Nadine Gasman, then-head of UN Women in Brazil, told Reuters. <Men are killed in the street, women are killed in the home. Men are killed with guns, women with knives and hands.> >>
Read more here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/while-murder-rates-fall-in-brazil-femicide-remains-on-the-rise

WOMEN'S MEDIA CENTER
Februari 24 2019
Raphael Tsavkko Garcia

<<Bolsonaro’s new gun law could put Brazil’s women in the line of fire.

São Paulo, Brazil—On January 15, Brazil’s newly-elected president Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree loosening restrictions on gun ownership in the country that leads the world in firearm deaths, as of 2016. Already, women's rights advocates and policy experts fear that, in addition to a potential rise in violence overall, women will become the main targets.
<It is estimated that, in 2016, about half of the women killed in Brazil were victims of firearms and, of these, about 25 percent were murdered [in their homes],> said Elaini Cristina Gonzaga da Silva, director of the Orbis Center for Studies in Law and International Relations and a law professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). <By focusing on the use of a weapon to defend ourselves against those who come from outside the house, we forget that the weapon is often used [by and against] those who are inside the house itself.>

Letícia Bahia, co-founder of the feminist site AzMina and a consultant for the United Nations Foundation, told Women Under Siege, <Women are killed at home almost three times more than men. In half of the cases, the crime is committed with a firearm.> Responding to the decree, she said, <Some people think that firearms could save these lives, but it is clear that women will come off worse in a fight… Violence and aggression are, historically, the attribute of masculinity.>
According to Relógios da Violência (Clocks of Violence), a data project designed by the Maria da Penha Institute to visualize country statistics on violence against women, a woman is the target of a firearm in Brazil every two minutes. In a country where gender-based violence is already at staggering levels, fears that easing gun possession will only increase domestic violence seem closer to being realized. >>
Read more here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/bolsonaros-new-gun-law-could-put-brazils-women-in-the-line-of-fire

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The Guardian
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

By Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá
25 Jan 2021

<<'Nowhere is safe': Colombia confronts alarming surge in femicides.
This article is more than 10 months old.
Vice-president joins activists in calling for zero tolerance of ‘machismo’ that has left hundreds of women and girls dead.

When authorities pulled the lifeless body of four-year-old María Ángel Molina out of a river in rural Colombia on 13 January, the South American country mourned what was the 14th documented case of femicide this year. Her murderer, Juan Carlos Galvis, also kidnapped María’s sister, and later admitted to authorities that he committed the brutal crimes in order to punish the girls’ mother for seeing another man.
With five more femicides, murders directly related to the victim’s gender, documented since María’s killing – 18 in total, with a further 13 to be verified – rights groups are worried about the safety of women and girls once again forced indoors with abusive men amid a new round of strict lockdowns to curb coronavirus outbreaks.
<Sadly when we speak about violence against women in Colombia, there isn’t a single place that we can call ‘safe’,> said Juliana Castillo Rodas, who works with the Femicide Foundation Colombia, an NGO that provides support for women and tracks gender-based violence. <But what we can say is that the home has become one of the most dangerous places for women.>
Throughout last year – which involved six months of lockdown – the foundation confirmed 229 femicides, of which 35 were girls, and is trying to verify a further 260 cases of violent deaths of women and girls that could be defined as femicides.
While a rise in confirmed cases did not occur, rights groups say the numbers are probably much higher, with cases often unreported by women for fear of reprisal. Women are also less likely to reach out for help when trapped at home with their abusers. When authorities are contacted, they are often unresponsive.

<We’re worried that when women inform authorities, they are not listened to by the state or its institutions,> Castillo said. <We may not have noted a rise in cases last year, though we did see an increase in the number of violent acts against women, such as disappearances, immolations and dismembering, alongside sexual violence.>
Measures such as better gender education and safer, well-lit cities could help make Colombia safer for women, Castillo said. Other activists say coronavirus measures such as bans on alcohol sales and curfews that limit parties and social gatherings can reduce some risks for women and girls who live with abusive men.
Colombia’s vice-president, Marta Lucía Ramírez, addressed the alarming situation for women on Tuesday while visiting Medellín, the country’s second city. <We have to reach zero femicides,> she said in a speech announcing opportunity programmes for women. <We have to end machismo and any kind of violence against women.>
Horrifying murders of women and girls are not uncommon in Colombia, and are sometimes committed by authority figures. Last June, scandal engulfed the military after seven soldiers gang-raped a 13-year-old indigenous girl.
<We know that this is not an isolated issue, it is structural,> said Aida Quilcue, at the time a human rights adviser at the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC).>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jan/25/nowhere-is-safe-colombia-confronts-alarming-surge-in-femicides

WOMEN'S MEDIA CENTRE
September 21, 2020
Christina Noriega

<<Surge in Femicides Under Lockdown Renews Calls for Colombia's Reckoning with Gendered Violence.
BOGOTÁ —On the night of June 14, police reported that 30-year-old Heidy Soriano and her four-year-old daughter had been killed by her partner in the home they shared in the capital city of Bogotá. The double homicide made headlines across Colombia after weeks of mounting violence against women during a nationwide lockdown. Just that morning, 23-year-old university student Daniela Quiñones had disappeared returning home from a party. Police, who later found her body dumped in the Cauca River, said another partygoer had killed her when she refused his sexual advances.
The back-to-back killings— two out of a total five violent deaths in less than 48 hours — were enough to set off national indignation.
Experts have attributed the spike in violent crimes against women to the state-mandated quarantine, which was in place from March 25 to September 1. The country has since begun to gradually reopen and moved on to a <selective quarantine> for people confirmed or suspected of having the coronavirus. While the quarantine has helped curb the contagion, official reports suggest that women are suffering from violence at alarming rates.

The weekend after the murders, demonstrators marched in various Colombian cities, blocking important thoroughfares and singing feminist chants, to protest what they perceived as the government’s failure to protect women as reports of gender-based crimes were skyrocketing. In the first 11 days of the quarantine, calls to a national hotline for violence against women jumped 103 percent compared to the same period last year.
<Violence against women is not a priority for the government,> said Laura Daniela, a 21-year-old sociology student at a march in Bogotá. <It’s only when we come out to the streets that the government recognizes the problem.>
From March 25 to July 2, the national hotline for violence against women received an average of 119 calls daily — a 130-percent increase from last year, according to government figures. Surprisingly, the government also reported a dip in legal medical evaluations (which are usually conducted after a police report) for all forms of gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual abuse, and homicides. Experts, however, have stated that victims may have been more inclined to seek support from a hotline than report their abusers to the police.>>
Read more here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/surge-in-femicides-under-lockdown-renews-calls-for-colombias-reckoning-with-gendered-violence

Note from Gino d'Artali:
For me it would be at least be more then a month's job to cover all the countries at South- and Latin America.
Impossible really if one considers all the other work I do for Cryfreedom.net
But I promise I'll keep track concerning it!