Women's Murderers Evade Justice as Femicide Surges in Guatemala

Femicide in Guatemala continues to spiral out of control, showing that specialized laws and personnel charged with fighting the epidemic of gender violence have so far not been able to do enough to tackle the fatal problem affecting the country’s women, according to information published Monday.

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Despite measures to try to improve women’s safety, femicides in the Central American country have risen over the past year compared to the previous year, the Guatemalan daily Prensa Libre reported.

Between April 1, 2015 and March 31, 2016, a total of 262 cases of femicide were reported, according to the Prosecutor’s Office — up from 198 reported cases the previous year.

Femicide now figures as the third most common crime resulting in death in the country, after manslaughter and murder.

Guatemala’s Law Against Femicide and Violence Against Women aims to recognize the unequal power relations between men and women and indicates that a perpetrator of femicide is a man who kills a woman for being a woman, which could include cases of fatal intimate partner violence, family violence, contempt for a woman’s body, and misogyny.

But the number of sentences handed down for femicide compared to the number of cases reported shows a lasting trend of impunity for fatal gender violence. According to a report from the Prosecutor’s Office, between 2015 and 2016, just 74 sentences were issues while reports of femicide continued to mount.

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Given the situation, prosecutors are considering setting up a new office to deal specifically with femicide.

According to the National Forensic Science Institute of Guatemala, violent deaths of women are on the rise perhaps even more starkly than official government statistics demonstrate, with 222 in the first four months of 2016 alone after a total of 766 in 2015.

According to U.N. Women in Guatemala, at least two women are violently killed in the country every day. Rampant impunity fuels the widespread crisis of femicide.

Guatemala — along with its neighboring countries El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico — has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world.

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