Latin America Hip Hop Unites Against Femicide, Gender Violence

Bolivia held a hip hop festival against gender violence in the capital La Paz on Saturday, denouncing all types of discrimination against women.

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"Hip Hop Latin America" featured artists and musicians from five countries, including Soule Zapata, an emerging Chilean artist; Nativo Elt, a rapper from Peru; and Elneka y Les chiens de la rue, or Elneka and The Street Dogs, a Spanish band from France.

All four elements of hip hop — the DJ, the MC, graffiti and breakdancing —  featured at the festival. The event served as a fundraiser for the feminist Apthapi Jopueti Foundation, which works on empowering Bolivian women.

This year's edition, which was organized by SonidoenVena Records, follows from a similar event held last year on urban issues. The organizers plan on hosting the festival annually, with each year focusing on a different social issue.

Nico Nekaone, one of 12 organizers, told Pagina Siete that the festival is self-organized and "committed to different causes that affect society and strive to find solutions with the help of hip hop."

The choice to focus on gender issues in 2016 comes amid another challenging year for women's rights activists across Latin America, with a series of high-profile femicide cases sparking outrage across the continent. 

In October, women in over 150 cities took part in marches to end the epidemic of violence against women after a 16-year-old girl was brutally raped and murdered.

In Argentina, at least 226 women have been killed in 2016 while in Mexico, new figures show that 40,000 women were killed between 1985-2014.

The most recent high-profile case of femicide recently occurred in Colombia, when a 7-year-old Indigenous girl was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a wealthy architect, sparking widespread protests and demands for justice.

In Bolivia, which suffers from one of the highest rates of gender violence in the world, a raft of measures combating gender violence have been introduced in recent years including femicide being incorporated into the country's penal code