Every 12 hours a woman dies violently in the country and the probability is high that it will happen in the department of Guatemala and that the victim is a woman between 10 and 30 years old. This is the behavior of violence against them in the last four years.
From 2019 to July of this year, 2,145 deaths of women by firearms and knives, suffocation, burns and decapitation have been reported, are data from the National Institute of Forensic Sciences (Inacif) that the vivirsinviolencia.org platform, a project of Hivos within the framework of the Diverse and Inclusive Guate program, collects and analyzes to locate the points where it is recurring to find the bodies.
Pamela Molina Barrios is one of the victims of violence in the country. She is a primary school teacher, she was 26 years old and lived in Villa Nueva. On December 3, 2020, she left her house in the morning to process the Ornament Ticket, she did not return. It was the last day that her family saw her alive.
The complaint of his disappearance was filed with the authorities. The days and nights passed like torture for his parents, unaware of his whereabouts. Two weeks later they received the news that she had murdered her. The torture marks on her body did not allow for her prompt identification. A tattoo was the sign that helped establish that it was the young woman.
This is the story of Pamela and her mother narrated in the first person on the platform, but it is a story that is repeated dozens of times as a result of the violence that kills and snatches away the dreams of women in Guatemala, where the scourge is increasing. .
Although the analysis of Vivir sin violencia shows a decrease in cases in the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, since from January to September there were 26 monthly reports on average, these data increased to 48 for October, November and December.
The increase was maintained during the following year, to the point that the last quarter of that period began to match the cases reported prior to the pandemic. In 2019, the violent deaths of women were 55 cases per month, and by 2022 the average is maintained.
58% of the victims (1,250) were killed by gunshot wounds. While 29% (624) died from different forms of suffocation, such as suffocation, suspension, hanging or abdominal compression. 10% died from stab wounds. Burns (1.68%) and decapitation (0.51%) appear on the list as the fourth and fifth causes of deaths.
In the murder report there are girls from one to 10 years old -it is not ruled out that there are younger victims-. In this age range, violent deaths stand at 3%, and it is in the ages between 11 and 30 years that the accumulated number of cases is higher (56%).
most dangerous places
The data analyzed identifies the place where the bodies of the murdered women were found, and in this sense, the departments where the most deaths have been registered are Guatemala (42%), followed by Escuintla (7%) and Chiquimula (6%). .
In the last four years it is in the department of Guatemala where the cases are concentrated, and from January to July 2022 the trend continues, registering 189 cases. When disaggregating the figures by municipality, Guatemala is the most “dangerous”, since 99 women were brutally killed there. The next most violent place is Villa Nueva, where Pamela lived, where 28 deaths occurred, followed by Mixco with 12.
By delving deeper into the information, it is possible to know in which areas of the capital there are more bodies of women killed by acts of violence. The analysis found on the vivirsinviolencia.org site details that zone 18 is the most violent for them, 21 corpses were located in that place.
Another of the areas where the largest number of reports were given were 11 and 1, at these points it should be noted that 11 cases are taken into account that have the Roosevelt and San Juan de Dios hospitals as places of death, but the violent act did not occur at that point Even so, these sectors are among those with the highest risk for the female population in the capital.
It has been identified that another dangerous area is located at the entrance to the Wholesale Center (Cenma) to the El Búcaro neighborhood in Villa Nueva, there are 3.08 square kilometers where 25 bodies of women have been located in the period from 2019 to July of this year, this geographic area is shared by Guatemala and Villa Nueva.
There are seven cases that appear without a zone report, according to Daniel de León who analyzed the data published on vivirsinviolencia.org, this is because Inacif does not detail the place where the victim’s body was located, nor details are available if they died in a public area or inside a home.
Read more: Only 10% of the complaints for violence and femicide manage to reach the courts
He points out that searching Google Maps for the location of each of the 2,145 cases was a job that required more than two months. The purpose of this effort is to locate where the violent deaths of women occur recurrently, and that based on this information, solutions can be proposed for the prevention of these events.
“We see with concern the little regulation regarding firearms, how easy it is to access them, how many ballistic tests the Public Ministry does on the victims of these events,” says De León, regarding the fact that six out of ten victims died from gunshots.
Gabriela Melgar, Hivos Regional Communications officer, mentions that attacks against women continue to be a deep-rooted social problem in Guatemala derived from the sexist violence that predominates in the country.
“As an organization that defends human rights and women’s rights, we are concerned that little is being done on the issue of violence prevention,” he indicates, according to this account, the main purpose of the platform is to become a tool consultation to make visible the violent deaths that occur in this population and that specific demands can be made to the State to build public policies to prevent them.
