Cash for killing your wife ends

BRASILIA, Brazil — Late one evening in March 2013, Claudenice Josefa Olimpia, a 33-yearold shop assistant in Brazil’s Northeast, was shooting the breeze with neighbors when her husband came home, drunk.

An argument ensued. Shortly afterward, Olimpia lay bloodied and unconscious on the couple’s bed, stabbed repeatedly in the neck. Her husband fled, but the authorities tracked him down, tried him and sentenced him to prison for her murder.

Then they granted him a widower’s pension, worth a little over $200 a month, the minimum wage at the time.

In one of the more grotesque quirks of the Latin American nation’s benefits system, until November last year Brazilians responsible for the deaths of their spouses were eligible for compensation for their loss. In a country grappling with one of the highest rates of femicide in the world, this financial settlement tended to reward men who murdered their wives.

To combat what they described as a possible incentive to violence against women, Chief Prosecutor Raquel Dodge and Attorney General Grace Mendonca, two of the most powerful females in a country still led overwhelmingly by men, signed an agreement late last year suspending benefits to the perpetrators of acts of domestic violence resulting in death. It has been applied to at least 10 cases so far, according to data sent by the attorney general’s office to Bloomberg.

In 2016, a woman was murdered every two hours in Brazil, according to a report published by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security, a not-forprofit policy group.