Why The World Should Care About The War Against Guatemalan Women

Why The World Should Care About The War Against Guatemalan Women
By Abigail Bessler June 20, 2014 at 9:00 am Updated: June 20, 2014 at 10:38 am



Jorge Velásquez refuses to allow his daughter’s death to become “another murder statistic.”

Claudina Isabel Velásquez was raped, shot in the head, and dumped in an alley in Guatemala City in 2005, one of 665 women killed in Guatemala that year. Her case, like nearly all of the others, was never solved. But almost a decade after her death, Jorge’s constant fight to keep Claudina’s case open has made her a symbol for increasing violence against Guatemalan women and girls. It’s the same violence that’s spurring more and more unaccompanied young girls to leave Guatemala and attempt to cross the U.S. border.

Last year, 759 women were murdered in Guatemala, a 7 percent increase from the year before. A terrible new report divides the deaths into causes: 522 deaths from firearms, 70 from stabbings, 156 from asphyxiation, 11 from decapitation or dismemberment.

In 2008, the Guatemalan government set up a specialist prosecutor to investigate female murders and support victims, along with a new court to try perpetrators. But those measures have failed to stop the rising numbers of killings or bring perpetrators to justice — less than 10 percent of last year’s cases were successfully resolved and prosecuted.

Women in the country also live in fear of being sexual assaulted. Guatemala has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the whole Latin American region, largely because many teenagers are raped by family members. Last year, there were 61,000 girls aged 10 to 19 who became pregnant, an increase from 49,000 girls two years before. One advocacy organization in the country recently created a campaign using images of abandoned dolls and stuffed animals being placed for “adoption,” each the toy of an abused girl who was forced to “lose her childhood.”

So it’s not surprising that more and more young girls under the age of 13 years old are fleeing Guatemala to try to cross the border to the United States.

More:
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/06/20/3450611/guatemalan-girls/