Argentina Femicide Soars Higher As New President Vouches To Dilute Protection: Report

Argentina has reported 322 femicide in 2023. The figure is a record spike by 33 percentage from the 2022, when the number marked was 242. Femicide is a term that refers to the misogynist killing of women. Report from National Ombudman’s Office said 61 of the victims had filed complaint against gender violence, and 22 were allegedly murdered after being raped. The killings have left almost 200 children without a mother, and some even witnessed the attack. The report added that the new figure in femicide is “alarming”, and noted that it is higher than 2020, during Covid 19, when the number was 295.

“Femicides have experienced constant growth, despite the measures and policies for the protection of women that the Argentinian state has tried to implement…These statistics reflect a painful reality that highlights the persistence of gender violence in Argentine society”, said the Ombudman’s office.

According to the report, the entrenched patriarchal culture, impunity cases and the persistence of gender stereotypes has added to the high prevalence of femicide in Argentina.

In the deaths happened in 2023, almost 60 percentage of the murder happened at home and three out of four of the killed had a relationship with the alleged perpetrator. “Women continue to die at the hands of people with whom they have a close relationship”, said the executive director of Amnesty International Argentina, Mariela Belski.

Though Argentina has made a specific offense of femicide in 2022, issuing life sentence as punishment for the crime, the number of the crime committed remained high for more than a decade.

Latin America has long been home for high rates of gender violence. At least 4,050 women were recorded as victims of femicide in 2022 alone, as per report from Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The increase in the number of violence comes at a time when Argentina’s congress is having debate over the controversial reforms of gender law, which came under the guidance of the country’s new right-wing president Javier Milei.

The death of 21-year-old Micaela Garcia, who was raped and killed has caused protest across the country. Garcia’s decomposed and decayed body was found a week later at a field. She was killed 2017, and in 2019 Micaela’s law was created, which demanded all levels of government to train officials on violence against women.

But since Milei has assumed office, he initiated plans to narrow the scope of the law by restricting the training of the government to question only of “family violence”. According Amnesty International, Argentina’s new President Milei’s amendment would also limit the training only to state officials, who are “competent in the matter”, and “move away from addressing the gender-based violence as a structural problem”.

Milei government claimed that the Micaela law has “yielded no result”. Amnesty deemed the amendments as “regressive”, and says that it may deepen barriers to accessing justice and effective judicial protection.

With inputs from agencies.