Live
Audio Only
Colombian police arrested the suspect in the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 7-year-old Indigenous girl from a poor neighborhood Monday that has sparked widespread outrage while shining a spotlight on both rampant gender violence and deep class divides in the South American country struggling to build peace after decades of war.
RELATED:
Colombian Women Fight Gender Violence, Celebrate Peace With Art
Authorities detained Rafael Uribe Noguera — suspected of abducting Yuliana Andrea Samboni on Sunday and torturing and slaying her — at a clinic in Bogota where he had reportedly checked himself in for treatment for a cocaine overdose after killing his victim.
The suspected perpetrator is a 38-year-old architect from one of Bogota’s wealthiest neighborhoods, while Yuliana was an Indigenous Yanacona girl from one of the city's poorest areas. The young girl’s family reportedly left the province of Cauca — a region hard-hit by Colombia's long-running civil war — for the capital over four years ago as victims of displacement to seek better economic conditions.
After the young girl's body was found in Uribe's apartment, the streets of Bogota were inundated with hundreds of demonstrators Monday to protest the rape and murder, which anti-gender violence advocates hope will be treated as a femicide.
Police said Monday security cameras captured the moment when a man in a truck snatched the young girl, the New York Times reported.
RELATED:
Colombian Women Wrap Justice Palace in Quilt of Victim Memories
According to government forensic experts, authorities found Yuliana strangled with signs of torture and rape in Uribe’s upper-class apartment in Chapinero, a rich neighborhood of the city.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos expressed “indignation” at the heinous crime on his Twitter account. “Let the full weight of justice fall on those responsible,” he wrote, adding the hashtag #NiUnaMas, or "Not one less," the rallying cry of the growing movement against femicide across Latin America that demands not one more woman or girl be a victim of fatal gender violence.
Bogota Mayor Enrique Peñalosa also said in a statement that he is "providing support and specialized advice" to the victim’s family and has appointed a district lawyer "to ensure this act doesn’t end in impunity.”
The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia also responded to the "atrocious crime," noting that although Yuliana was only 7 years old, "she knew the cruelty and misogyny of a macho, racist and inequitable society."
The case has called attention not only to the systemic violence that girls and women face in Colombia and around the world, but also to the clear class divide contributing to their exploitation.
“Our society is a breeding ground for rapists who murder,” Monica Roa, a lawyer at the Monday protests, told Colombia's El Espectador, adding that as many as 21 girls aged 10 to 14 are raped every day in Colombia.
In Colombia, six women are abused by an intimate partner every hour, one woman suffers sexual violence every 30 minutes, and one woman is a victim of femicide at the hands of a current or former partner every three days, according to official statistics.
OPINION:
Latin American Women’s Problem: We Keep Getting Murdered
The problem repeats itself across Latin America, where many countries have recently seen a surge in movements fighting back against domestic abuse and femicide. A 2014 Gallup survey focusing on the region found that "although notable progress in gender equality has been seen in recent years ... gender inequality and violence against women persist." The report stated that "less than half of adults in 17 of the 22 Latin American countries" thought women were treated with respect and dignity. The survey also found that Peruvians and Colombians were the most dissatisfied within Latin America.
Argentina, in particular, has been in the spotlight with a spate of femicides, including the gruesome gang rape and murder of 16-year-old Lucia Perez, whose femicide invigorated women's movements against systemic violence across the continent and beyond. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences recently slammed Argentina's right-wing government for failing to protect women from an increased barrage of systemic femicides.
On the global scale, the World Health Organization reported earlier this year that one in three women around the world "will experience physical and/or sexual violence by a partner or sexual violence by a non-partner."
Hundreds of thousands of women across Latin America have taken to the streets in recent months to protest rampant gender violence, machismo and institutional barriers, inherited from colonial pasts, that have fueled these systemic crimes.
Newsletter
