Every 30 hours a female is murdered in Argentina. “Actresses, politicians, artists, business women, community organizers … We are all women, bah .. are we not going to raise our voices? THEY ARE KILLING US.“ Marcela Ojeda, journalist who co-founded the protest movement #NiUnaMenos after this tweet.
16-year-old Lucia Perez did not go straight home after school October 8 last year. According to the police, she went off to buy marijuana from some guys she didn’t know in the coastal city of Mar del Plata. Upon her arrival in the house, she was drugged down with force, gang-raped and tortured with a wooden stick left empaled. “An act of inhuman sexual aggression”, the prosecutor said. Next she got washed and dressed by her assailants. She was taken to medicine center in an attempt to erase evidence by two men saying she did an overdose.
The girl was dead.
Later the 16-year-old became a symbol for the Argentinian women’s fight against gender-based violence and murder – so-called femicides. A week later tens of thousands of women marched the streets of Buenos Aires behind the rallying cry “Ni Una Menos”, meaning Not One Woman Less. “Machismo kills” the women repeated, like they yelled “equal rights” and “make abortion legal” on the International Women’s day March 8 and in a big topless march earlier this year. While only 5 percent of the femicides are committed by men without any relation to the victim, the gran majority is done by men like ex husbands or boyfriends, according to The National Register of Femicides in Argentina. 235 women got killed because of their gender in 2015, the register reported while the NGO and women’s rights organization, La Casa del Encuentro, say at least 1800 women have been killed since 2008.
Every 30 hours a new woman gets killed.
I went to the marches photographing the women and men protesting against the gender violence. The pictures of the topless women is from a march in February this year, called tetazo – when hundreds of women in Buenos Aires took to the streets after some bathers at a beach called the police saying that three women were sunbathing topless. The police patrol came out, talked to the women and called in reinforcements. At last 20 policemen threatened the women with handcuffs and arrest for being without bikini. This was the final straw for many, arguing like a woman told the BBC:”Instead of protecting us from abuse and violence, the only thing the police are doing is restricting our rights to go topless”.
Sadly, it is also the poorest women sufferings the most. Of the homicides in Buenos Aires, almost half is take place in villas, poor shanty town areas housing 10 percent of the city’s population. It is estimated that one of three femicides occurs in these neighborhoods.
If you want to see the special video of the police calling reinforcement at the beach in Necochea, look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-U80Qyvrw