Buenos Aires---One was beaten to death because she got pregnant. Another was stabbed to death in a jealous rage. Another had her throat slit because she asked for a divorce.
These brutal murders show the alarming violence that women face in Latin America, a region that has begun adopting new laws to address the problem but where thousands of women are ll killed by their partners each year.
Statistics are incomplete and inconsistently kept across the region. But where they are available, they are startling: Domestic violence kills nearly one woman a day in Argentina, more than five a day in Mexico and 15 a day in Brazil, for example.
The issue has surged to the surface in Argentina, where a recent series of gruesome killings has raised new alarm.
One of the victims was Maria Eugenia Lanzetti, a 44-year-old kindergarten teacher in the central province of Cordoba who was separated from her obsessive husband and had a restraining order against him, as well as a panic button on her cell phone.
That did not stop him from bursting into her classroom on April 15 and slitting her throat in front of her students.
The country was also shocked by the case of a 14-year-old girl whose boyfriend is accused of beating her to death and burying her after learning she was pregnant.
Outraged Argentines have called a march Wednesday to condemn violence against women, which has killed more than 1,800 in the past seven years, according to women's rights group La Casa del Encuentro.
Marches will also be held in neighboring Chile and Uruguay.
But underlining the persistence of the problem, less than 48 hours before the march a man violating his restraining order shot his ex-partner in the back with a shotgun in the Argentine city of Santa Rosa, leaving her in serious condition.
These macabre crimes reflect "a society that is sick with machista attitudes where the woman continues to be seen as a thing to be dominated," said Fabiana Tunez, the head of La Casa del Encuentro.
"The government shows up too late to stop it. In Argentina, a woman is still dying every 31 hours."
AFP
