The second trial for the femicide of Lucia Pérez, the 16-year-old girl drugged, sexually abused and murdered in Mar del Plata in 2016, is entering her final phases, after a first trial that acquitted the defendants. Or rather, she only sentenced them to a light sentence for selling drugs and decided to ignore the evidence of the murder.
The femicide happened a year after the massive first march of “Not one less”on June 3, 2015, whose trigger was another crime: that of Chiara Páez in Santa Fe, a 14-year-old girl, pregnant and beaten to death by her boyfriend.
The impact of this spontaneous organization throughout the country was that of a true revolution that resounded throughout the world and that, together with the #MeToo, it brought to the table the enormous number of rights that women were still denied and the lack of justice in matters of sexual crimes against them.
In 2016, the murder of Lucía Pérez prompted the first national women’s strike in Argentina, on October 8, under a more than eloquent slogan: #Vivasnosqueremos.
Debit and credit
The latest report from the international body Human Rights Watch on Argentina makes a clear summary of what progress has been made in the country in terms of gender and the path that still needs to be covered. Argentina, according to this report, is one of the first 10 countries that ratified Convention 190 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which obliges the State to protect women from harassment and violence in the workplace. It was also one of the first countries in Latin America to sanction a law that legalizes the voluntary interruption of pregnancy up to the 14th week of pregnancy, although (the report clarifies) the measure still does not widely reach all Argentines due to lack of information or training of the personnel who must attend to them.
The worst data in the report? “Despite a 2009 law that provides comprehensive measures to prevent and punish violence against women, impunity for homicides remains a serious problem. In 2021, the National Femicide Registry reported 231 femicides (that is, homicides of women due to their gender) and only 6 convictions,” the report states verbatim.
Other figures that are added to this describe a truly alarming panorama: from 2008 to 2022, 4,131 femicides were committed and, so far this year, another 48.
For Claudia Acunajournalist, creator of Lucia Perez Observatory who keeps an exhaustive record of femicides and transvesticides and who has closely followed the struggle of the family of the young woman from Mar del Plata to obtain a sentence that punishes the femicides, “we have a justice system that does not combat violence, on the contrary, it enshrines it.” The processes take more than 5 years to wait and when acts of violence occur there are no teams that accompany the victims to protect them and support them in their complaints. “ESI (Comprehensive Sexual Education) is taught in schools, but what does caring for sexual and reproductive health have to do with violence? Femicides are not part of the agenda, what there are are palliatives. And each femicide is the result of a lack of public policies, because each femicide compels us to prevent the next. And that is not done. You transform pain into a lesson and you do prevention in schools, in squares, in bars”, affirms Acuña.
days gone by, the Ministry of women presented the first Global Statistical Report of the Integrated System of Cases of Violence for Gender Reasons, where it records cases from all over the country and the way in which prevention policies act in different situations. According to the figures collected in that report, 97.1% of the records correspond to cases of domestic violence; 1.3 to workplace violence and 1.2 to institutional violence. 95.8% of the aggressors are male; of which 87.8% are the partner or ex-partner of the person in a situation of violence.
The UN Women collects similar data around the world. 56 percent of the victims of femicide are murdered in the home environment, mostly by their partners.
The figures from the Observatory that Claudia Acuña directs include, along with the number of victims, the number of orphans left behind by those deaths. A femicide has an incalculable effect on its surroundings, it is a social problem that affects everyone and leaves an indelible mark on the children, the family and the environment in which it occurs.
“Not one less is a cry. We have to build Nunca Más and that is up to us. We do not see the figures go down because if they do nothing, the same thing will continue to happen -Acuña concludes-. The accompaniment of the State is needed to access justice and, by not achieving it, the only one left is the street. No one is saved alone.”
On March 17, the sentence will be known in the second trial for the death of Lucía Pérez. And it is to be hoped that this time the culprits will be punished.
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