According to the report published by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), at least 4,091 women were murdered last year in the region.
According to the report, which determined that femicides decreased compared to 2019 in countries other than Ecuador, Costa Rica and Panama, the country with the highest rate of murder of women and girls compared to the population was Honduras with a murder rate of 4.7 per 100 thousand women. Honduras is followed by the Dominican Republic with 2.4 per 100 thousand and El Salvador with 2.1 per 100 thousand.
According to the report covering 26 out of 46 countries in the region, 72.6 percent of Latino women killed were between the ages of 15 and 44, and 4.3 percent were younger than 15; In addition, 4.5 percent of the murdered women are women living abroad.
The report states that the rate of exposure to sexual violence by people over the age of 15 among Latino women is 11 percent, which is twice the world average, and it is noted that different forms of sexual violence are experienced in the region, from forced marriages at a young age to sex slavery.
Gangs kill women
According to Venezuelan feminist researcher and activist Aimee Zambrano, who stated that the number of femicides may be much higher than expected, organized crime organizations are one of the most important reasons for increasing femicide in the region.
For example, Zambrano said that in Mexico, where more than 17 thousand women have been killed in the last five years, a significant part of the murders of women are carried out by drug gangs; He points out that it is not a coincidence that such organized crime groups are active in countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and even Colombia and Venezuela, where femicide rates are high.
Speaking to VOA Turkish, Zambrano says that killing women and exposing their corpses in neighborhood squares are among the methods of sending messages to residents or other gangs in places where gangs involved in all kinds of illegal activities such as drugs, smuggling and human trafficking are under control or want to dominate.
Pointing out that there has been a significant increase in the number of women killed by gangs in Venezuela and Colombia recently, the researcher states that as the influence of gangs in Latin America increases, the number of femicide also increases.
Zambrano states that women, who go beyond the role assigned to them and clash with the patriarchal system, are subjected to violence by their spouses, ex-husbands, lovers and relatives all over the world, but the addition of criminal organizations to these perpetrators in Latin America causes both the number of murders and the dimensions of violence to increase. .
The fight against criminal organizations and violence in Latin America, where one-third of the murders are committed despite making up about 8 percent of the world’s population, is also important as a part of the fight against violence against women.