Argentine university students Maria Emma Cordoba and Ana Laura Gonzalez were the victims of yet another act of femicide in Argentina.
RELATED:
Chilean Women March to Support Victims of Gender Violence
Both were sexually assaulted, cut with a knife and lit on fire by a neighbor identified as 23-year-old Ariel Osvaldo Baez, lmneuquen reported Monday.
Laura Gonzalez survived while Emma Cordoba was killed in the attack, which took place early Saturday morning in Ensenada.
According to official sources, the young women were surprised in their home by knife-wielding Osvaldo. The suspect tied down Cordoba and Gonzalez and raped them, according to La Nacion. Soon after, he stabbed both victims and set them ablaze.
Believing that the women had died, Baez returned home to sleep with his young daughter, according to local media outlets.
Though seriously injured, Gonzalez was able to seek help from a passerby after Baez went home. Local police were notified and Gonzalez was taken to a nearby health center for treatment.
Baez was charged with double homicide, aggravated sexual abuse and a host of other crimes after Gonzalez identified him as the attacker and explained to police what happened.
Cordoba was a 26-year old medical student at the National University of La Plata. Faculties from different university departments, student organizations and trade unions held a mass anti-femicide protest in response.
RELATED:
Dominican Republic Notes ‘Terrifying’ Rate of Femicides in 2017
Distraught over the death of his daughter, Horacio Cordoba stated, “we can't continue to bury girls,” adding that “something is failing” in regard to the spike in femicides occurring in Argentina.
Priscila Zijlstra, a university classmate of Cordoba, wrote an essay for her deceased friend in Cosecha Roja. It reads, in part, that the perpetrator of the heinous crime is not sick or crazy but “the result of patriarchal society that teaches that women are objects.”
Nodal reported that there have been 133 femicide victims in Argentina this year alone. Six out of 10 murders are committed by a husband, boyfriend or ex-partner. In 25 percent of the cases, the victims had made a previous complaint but did not obtain sufficient protection from state officials.