Femicide
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Femicide is the murder of women that occurs because the victim is a woman. However, the gender related aspect of this crime is often ignored by the media and the judiciary and is categorized as murder or homicide.
- Intimate Femicide - the killing of a woman by her partner. It is the most common form of femicide, and the most reported on by the media.
- Racist Femicide - the killing of women because of their race or culture, by men of another race.
- Sexual Femicide - where the rape of a woman or women is followed by murder.
For example, In the past three years nearly 1,500 young women in Guatemala have been murdered.
- In Mexico: A woman is raped every 9 minutes.
- In Peru: 75% of all women are raped before their 15th birthday
- In Ecuador: 3 out of every 10 children have been sexually abused by the age of 16
”Death
to the b**ches, I'm back” read a sign found next to the body of one of the nearly 1,700 Guatemalan women who have been murdered in the past five years.The worst waves of brutal, unsolved murders of women in Latin America have been seen in Ciudad Juárez, on Mexico's northern border, where close to 400 killings have been reported since 1993, and Guatemala, where 527 women were killed last year alone.
Congresswoman Alba Maldonado told IPS that it is especially alarming that the methods used in the murders in Guatemala, an impoverished Central American country of 13 million, are reminiscent of those employed against the guerrillas and the residents of rural indigenous villages during the 1960-1996 civil war.
The lawmaker, who belongs to the former insurgent Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) party, also noted that one-quarter of the nearly 200,000 people killed during the armed conflict - mainly by the security forces - were women. Although peace agreements were signed in 1996, Guatemalan society seems to have lost its sensibility and to have suffered a grave deterioration of values, which stands in the way of combating the violence against women, said Maldonado, who underscored not only the large numbers of victims, but also the cruelty with which they are murdered.
The 527 victims of what women's rights groups call ”femicide” accounted for 12 percent of the total number of people killed in Guatemala in 2004.
In the view of Guatemalan Ambassador to Mexico Arturo Soto, the murders of women are the result of an explosive cocktail in which soaring crime rates, drug trafficking and the proliferation of youth gangs known in Central America as ”maras” combine with cultural aspects like a male-dominated society and domestic violence.
Femicide in Mexico
As the United States and the rest of the world focus their attention on the Middle East, atrocities are taking place in other regions of the world unnoticed by the international community. The violence that ravaged Latin America during the 1980s is not over. A wave of violence is taking place at this moment in Guatemala that is unknown to most of the world. The targets are young women between the ages of 15 and 26, and the murders are taking place primarily in or around the nation’s capital, Guatemala City. The pattern of violence includes sexual assault and physical torture before the women are killed and left in public places. In a country fraught with residual violence from its thirty-year civil war, murders are not front-page stories. This is particularly true when the victims are women, who are not valued by paternalistic Guatemalan society. In the past three years, nearly 1,500 young women in Guatemala have been murdered. Already this year, 257 women have been murdered, with the perpetrators going unpunished. In the Mexican border towns of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, a similar pattern of violence against women has caught the attention of international human rights groups and non-governmental organizations.
According to a new report by Amnesty International, 370 women have been murdered in Mexico during the last ten years. Among the responses to the international press on the Mexican killings is anew resolution in Congress, which calls for the United States government to work with the Mexican authorities in an effort to solve the cases. Remarkably, though the murder toll in Guatemala is far greater than that of Ciudad Juarez, the violence there has been ignored by the international press and non-governmental organizations alike, and the killings continue.In Ciudad Juarez, (5 minutes over the US border) more than 340 women have been raped, dismembered, and assassinated in 10 years. But in east Guatemala the number has surpassed this figure in one year.
In 2004 there were 341 women violently raped, dismembered, and assassinated. Many as young as 7 years old. From January to April there were over 1,320 murders. Like in Juárez City the victims are young, and from humble families who are kidnapped, tortured, violated, mutilated, barbarously stabbed, or strangled and shot. The official statistics say that more than 1,300 murders of women happened since the year 2000. In 2002 the violent number stood at 244 dead women. In 2003 the number rose to 383. This year the forecasts are of victims exceeding over 400.
Femicide in Guatemala
In Guatemala, like in Juárez City, one does not look for the assassins who calmly live in freedom while new atrocities against the woman occur. It seems to be that to kill, to torture or to mutilate it is not a consequence of the law in this country. It is possible to kill a woman just like a fly? There are a number of corrupt police and judges.
We know that in the municipalities of Villa Nueva, and in the provinces of Escuintla and Quiche' are places where the most murders are registered. Police monitoring has not reinforced anything. The minister of Interior, Carlos Vielmann says: "We are not going to hide anything.
It is an internal problem in Guatemala, but is it necessary to hope that international organizations, and Churches will give a voice of alarm. Of course unless they want to put a boundary to these crimes, then the international community must be quick to not only look for the guilty, but also to judge them and make sure that they fulfill the complete sentence handed down to them in a court of law!
It will not only be necessary to judge the perpetrators, but also those who have known about it, have allowed it, and to a lesser extent to those that have been lazy and have not moved a finger to stop this massacre. Also the possibility of those who may have benefitted in the business of trafficking organs. Important it is to make notice that all the victims are of humble origin, and if they had been of rich families, then what would have happened? It's interesting to know the responses to the questions that Guatemalans have asked.
Now the O.A.S. (Organization of American States) is investigating these murders. While they do and they meet with the highest leaders of the three powers of this country with the different representatives of feminists groups -- two to three poor and young women every 24 hours will be raped and murdered in Guatemala.
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