‘I can’t face how much she suffered’: Argentina femicides at record high as Milei dilutes protections
The evening before 21-year-old Micaela García disappeared, she spoke to her mother on the phone. Their conversations were always easy and meandering – that Friday, they spoke about groceries, Micaela’s studies and a gift they were sewing for a friend’s baby.
It would be the last time Andrea Lescano would hear her daughter’s voice.
On 1 April 2017, García was followed home from a nightclub in Gualeguay, 140 miles north of Buenos Aires, raped and killed. Within a week, her decomposed and naked body was found in a field on the outskirts of the town.
“It is a heartbreaking pain,” Lescano says. “It is still hard for me to understand that she is gone.”
Sebastián José Luis Wagner – who had served time for raping two women in 2010 – was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of García in the “context of gender violence”.
“I still can’t face how much she suffered before he took her life, I know she must have fought,” Lescano says. “In the mornings I would always write Micaela a message saying ‘Good morning my daughter, I love you very much’. It has taken me a long time to get used to not sending her these texts.”
Argentina reported 322 femicides in 2023. The term is used to refer to the misogynist killing of women, or, as feminist Diana Russell has said, “the killing of females by males because they are female”.
The figure is a record high and marks a 33% increase from 2022, when 242 died, according to a new report by the National Ombudsman’s Office.
Women continue to die at the hands of people with whom they have a close relationship
Mariela Belski, Amnesty
The report says 61 of the victims had filed complaints about gender violence, while 22 were allegedly raped before being murdered. The deaths left almost 200 children without a mother, and some witnessed the attacks.
The ombudsman called the rise “alarming”, noting that the figures exceeded those of 2020 – a year marked by the pandemic that saw a then record high of 295 femicides.
“Femicides have experienced constant growth, despite the measures and policies for the protection of women that the Argentinian state has tried to implement,” the ombudsman’s office says. “These statistics reflect a painful reality that highlights the persistence of gender violence in Argentine society.”
A feminist movement protest outside the courts in Buenos Aires over the murder of 18-year-old Úrsula Bahillo in 2021. Photograph: Alejo Manuel Avila/Le Pictorium Agency/Zuma/Shutterstock
Entrenched patriarchal culture, impunity in many cases and the persistence of gender stereotypes also contributed to the high prevalence of femicides, according to the ombudsman.
In three out of four cases in 2023, the victim had a relationship with the alleged perpetrator, while almost 60% of victims were killed at home or work, the ombudsman’s report says.
“Women continue to die at the hands of people with whom they have a close relationship,” says Mariela Belski, the executive director of Amnesty International Argentina.
Argentina created a specific offence of femicide in 2012, punishing the crime with life sentences, but numbers have remained high for more than a decade.
Belski says Argentina is failing: “The testimonies of women who speak out are minimised, the risk to which the woman is exposed is improperly evaluated, and there is a lack of gender perspective among judicial and police authorities.”
Latin America has long suffered high rates of gender violence. In 2022, at least 4,050 women were victims of femicide across the region, according to the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean.
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Argentina’s president, Javier Milei. Photograph: Agustín Marcarian/Reuters
The highest femicide rates per 100,000 women are in Honduras (six per 100,000 women) and Trinidad and Tobago (5.5). Argentina ranked 16 out of 32 (at one per 100,000), but had the fourth highest absolute numbers, with 232, after Brazil at 1,437, Mexico at 976 and Honduras at 309.
The increase comes at a time when Argentina’s congress is debating controversial reforms of gender laws, under the guidance of the new rightwing president, Javier Milei.
“Javier Milei won with a discourse that denies gender issues,” says Raquel Vivanco, a feminist and the founder of the NGO Now That They See Us. “Once again, we will have to build solidarity among women in the absence of the state.”
Since Milei took office in December 2023, he has closed down the ministry of women and gender, while his government contends that “violence has no gender”.
Alongside her studies, García had been an activist in Ni Una Menos (not one less), an Argentine protest movement against gender violence which started in 2015 and spread across Latin America.
Her violent death reignited the protests across the country, and in 2019 Micaela’s Law was created, requiring all levels of government to train officials on violence against women.
But now Milei has initiated plans to narrow the scope of this law, by restricting training to questions only of “family violence”.
Estimated 45,000 women and girls killed by family member in 2021, UN says
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According to Amnesty, Milei’s amendments would also limit training only to state officials “competent in the matter” and “move away from addressing gender-based violence as a structural problem”.
The new government has argued that the law has “yielded no results”, but Amnesty has deemed these amendments “regressive” and says they may deepen barriers to accessing justice and effective judicial protection.
García’s mother, meanwhile, says the modifications are “almost the same as repealing it”.
“If there is a crime, it is because we are too late. The law is preventive, it makes us see violence and change in the everyday – whether at home, at a club, walking down the street, I think that is why it is so resisted,” says Lescano. “But we should not wait to take the initiative once something happens, like it did to me, losing my daughter at 21 years old.”