Femicide is not a matter of isolated incidents or individual “bad apples.” Instead, violence against women, especially indigenous women and women of color, has long been a structural component of establishing and maintaining capitalist and colonial states. Systemic discrimination that women face in state institutions, including the justice system, perpetuates impunity and fuels ongoing gender violence.

Some feminists argue that gender violence in all its forms works to normalize inequality and is part of the driving force of capitalism. This positions violence against women as a justified and structural part of the state that upholds patriarchal systems, including capitalism, which doesn’t see inherent worth in women’s bodies or the work they do.

For Honduran feminist artist Melissa Cardoza, the “brutality of neoliberalism and the framework of militarization and exploitation” encourage femicide in Honduras, which is home to one of the highest femicide rates in the world.

“Violence against women is the way that patriarchy - this system that denies the life of humanity, natural resources, and everything living - tries to control our actions, autonomy, thought, and creation. Femicide is the most brutal expression of these acts of control,” Cardoza told teleSUR English, adding that by systematically devaluing women, patriarchal ideology makes women’s bodies able to be violated, commodified, and even murdered.

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What’s more, many women fighting to defend rights in the face of neoliberalism’s injustice and promote alternatives are particular targets of gendered abuses. The main perpetrators of violence against women rights defenders in Mesoamerica, for example, are state actors, according to a 2015 report on violence against women by the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Humans Rights Defenders.

Impunity Normalizes Violence Against Women

Alongside soaring femicide numbers, Mesoamerican countries of Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador are considered among the top ten countries globally for impunity. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, impunity has a particularly heavy impact on women and “perpetuates the social acceptance of the phenomenon of violence against women.”

Photo: AFP

Impunity for femicide and other abuses means that when women attempt to seek justice, they face gendered discrimination that places blame on the victims for causing their own violence, or even deaths. The police, the justice system, and therefore the state as a whole are complicit in, and at times active perpetrators of, gendered violence.

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The failure of governments to respond to and address these epidemics of gendered violence, perpetuating the culture of impunity and highlights the state-sponsored nature of violence against women.

Mesoamerica Suffers a Femicide Crisis

Violence against women is a “global pandemic,” according to the United Nations and femicide has reached crisis levels in countries including Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras.

U.N. Women reports that 14 of the 25 countries with the highest femicide rates in the world are in Latin America, with the Central American countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala among the worst countries for gender violence and femicide. Similarly, in Mexico, seven women are killed every day in the country’s ongoing femicide crisis.

In Honduras specifically, the rate of violent killings of women increased by over 260 percent between 2005 and 2013. In 2014 alone, at least 513 women were victims of femicide in Honduras, according to Cepal statistics. In 2015, Honduras’ Center for Women’s Rights reports one woman is killed every 16 hours in Honduras.

Gender Violence in Honduras Beyond Statistics

While femicide and other forms of gender violence can easily be reduced to statistics, providing an often shocking demonstration of the extent of the problem, looking at femicide in a way that goes beyond the numbers is key to understanding the gravity of gender violence and how to tackle it.  

In the same period that femicide in Honduras has skyrocketed, the country also lived through a military coup that ousted former President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 and aggressively recharged neoliberal politics in the country. The coup ushered in a policy of making Honduras “open for business for transnational companies to privatize rivers for dams, concession lands for mining operations, and set up mega-tourism developments, among other projects.  A wave of grave human rights abuses, increased militarization, criminalization, and deeply rampant impunity also followed in the wake of the coup.

Photo: AFP

“Honduran women are the most impacted by policies of exploitation, misery, contempt, frustration. The worst paid, held back in decisions about their bodies, the last to eat, sleep, study,” Cardoza said. “Women’s work sustains whole families in the midst of this brutal capitalism, but at the cost of their lives, life plans, and health.”

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According to the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Humans Rights Defenders, women in the region are disproportionately responsible for family duties, yet these contributions are not equally valued alongside men’s work under capitalism. This context, combined with widespread impunity and a justice system that puts the burden of responsibility for abuses on women themselves, normalizes misogyny, gender violence, and even femicide. In Honduras, many cases of femicide are perpetrated at the hands of a victim’s intimate partner.

Outside the home, many women face criminalization and violence for fighting the system. The Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Humans Rights Defenders reports that in 2014, women defending land and territory in the face of mining operations and other projects were the most vulnerable among all women rights defenders in Mesoamerica to gender violence, including harassment, abuse, assassination attempts, and other attacks.

Meanwhile, the justice system bends with the interests of capitalism, and impunity in the abuses under the expansion of transnational corporations in Honduras combine with existing state violence to compound violence against women.

This violence against women rights defenders, as the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders argues, not only puts women’s lives in danger and undermines their movements, but also “inhibits the participation and organization of women in defense of their rights.”

Facing Violence, Women Resist

In the face of a mounting femicide crisis in Honduras and elsewhere in the region, women are raising their voices against injustices, leading campaigns to demand justice for victims and an end to impunity, and raising awareness about gender violence.

“Honduran women are fighters. For many years we have been making our proposals … and projects visible,” said Cardoza. “We have built movements that highlight the cultural fabric upon which this violence it is built and justified.”

In Honduras, women’s struggle for rights has been broad and diverse, ranging from fighting for the right to abortions and respect for lesbians, to proposing laws, to direct action in the form of street demonstrations, land occupations, and defense of indigenous territories, according to Cardoza.

Photo: Reuters

Such actions are part of the region-wide movement of women across Latin America speaking truth to power to pressure authorities to take action on violence against women while also educating communities, including men, about women’s rights and the societal changes necessary to build gender equality.

According to Cardoza, part of the struggle is integrating women’s issues into broader movements for social justice and reclaiming those social movement spaces to bring all struggles together in the fight against a “culture of violence.”

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But prioritizing violence against women isn’t always easy in social movements that themselves can sometimes be anti-feminist or misogynist, said Cardoza.

“Men are reluctant to leave their patriarchal privileges, to say publicly that violence against women is an embarrassment,” said Cardoza. “The ‘masculinist’ culture is aggressive, intolerant, criminal.”

In this context, the challenge for Honduran women, according to Cardoza, is to understand that gender violence is “produced and reproduced” systematically within so-called democracies and that it is this “whitewashed” neoliberal system in Honduras that  “kills women by starvation, racism, and outright crime.”

Nevertheless, women in Latin America and beyond are on the front lines of struggle against a patriarchal, capitalist state system that often denies their existence and responds with indifference and impunity when women are disappeared or murdered. Violence against women is structural, not coincidental, and impunity allows injustices to go unpunished.

“We struggle, we are women who fight,” said Cardoza. “We do not forget their names, or their actions, we do not forgive.”