Machismo nation faces up to domestic violence
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Argentina yesterday to condemn violence against women after a series of brutal domestic murders.
A woman is killed in a domestic abuse attack every 31 hours, an Argentinian rights group says.
The plight of females in Argentina’s macho society was highlighted last month when the body of Chiara Paez, 14 years old and three months pregnant, was discovered buried in the garden of her 16-year-old boyfriend’s home.
He is accused of beating her to death in an argument over whether to have an abortion.
In April a kindergarten teacher, 44, died when her former husband – against whom she had a restraining order – entered her classroom in Cordoba and cut her throat in front of the toddlers.
Another woman was stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend in a cafe in Buenos Aires.
Marchers in Buenos Aires, the centre of the protests, and 100 other towns and cities across Argentina, chanted the movement’s new rallying cry, ‘‘Not one woman less’’, which has spread as a hashtag on social media. They also carried banners reading ‘‘Machismo kills’’ and ‘‘Enough deaths’’. Argentina’s top footballer, the Barcelona striker Lionel Messi, added his voice to the protest on Facebook.
Argentina President Fernandez de Kirchner spoke out against a ‘‘culture that devastates women’’, and condemned the habitual ‘‘violence’’ of catcalls, dirty jokes, obscenities and television shows that ‘‘objectify’’ women.
Argentina has made ‘‘femicide’’ – attacking a woman because of her gender – punishable by life imprisonment. However, murders continue, with about 277 women killed every year.