We Want to Stay Alive and Fighting: Peru Women Blast Femicide

Dressed in black and shouting slogan like “We want ourselves alive and fighting!” Peruvian women took to the streets Saturday against gender violence amid a spike in femicides and attacks on women in recent months in the South American country.

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A march in the capital city of Lima brought together women of all ages with banners and artistic demonstrations to raise awareness about the ongoing suffering women face and demand urgent action to put an end to gender violence, just one day after the U.N. International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

“The struggle will not stop as long as women are affected daily by male chauvinist violence,” Peru’s November 25th Collective, organization against gender violence, wrote on its Facebook page Sunday after the march. “Demanding the right to happiness for girls, adolescents, youth, adult women, and older adult women keeps us strong and resisting.”

The action comes amid a resurgence of the movement against femicide in South America under the banner “Ni Una Menos,” or “Not One Less,” a slogan that calls for not one more woman to be a victim of femicide, the crime of killing a woman for her gender.

Women also marched in other cities in the region over the weekend, including in Buenos Aires, Mexico City,and Quito.

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In Colombia, thousands of women participated in a week-long arts festival coinciding with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in the third annual “Not even with a rose petal” festival aimed at raising awareness and creating public pressure to address gender violence, particularly in the context of the country’s budding era of peace after 50 years of civil war.

The movement against femicide has been reinvigorated in recent months by a spate of brutal sexual violence and murders of women and girls, including the gruesome rape of 16-year-old Lucia Perez  in Argentina. Perez’s death become a rallying cry for the Ni Una Menos movement.

In Peru, between January and October of this year, authorities recorded 108 femicide cases and at least 222 more attempted murders of women, a 13 percent spike compared to femicides reported all year in 2015.

According to official statistics, women in the country have suffered 898 femicides since 2009. The majority of attacks are carried out by a current or former intimate partners of the victims.