Macho wave in Peru leaves more dead than 2023 protests: one woman killed every 48 hours

Machismo killed one woman every 48 hours in Peru in 2023. In the 112 days to date of the year, 51 feminicides have been recorded, a shocking figure that even exceeds the 48 victims taken since January in the anti-government protests that have swept the country.

According to official data, more than fifty women have been murdered at the hands of men in just over three months. Not even the repression by the forces of order at the demonstrations that resonated so much on an international scale has shed so much blood.

In the case of the social outbreak, there were 48 deaths between January and March: 28 civilians killed in clashes6 soldiers drowned in a river and 14 other victims of checkpoints in various circumstances.

A thousand lives in seven years

Just in the last seven years, there are more than 1,000 women murdered due to gender-based violence in Peru and the trend, at least for this 2023, is far from being downwards.

Femicides in the Andean country have in fact gone from 84 in 2015 to 150 in 2018, which means a 79% increase.

In the following years the number stabilized at around 137 cases per year, again according to the registers of the authorities of a country in which half of the women declare that they have ever suffered violence from their partner and where impunity seems to be rampant.

In this 2023, not only are the statistics setting off alarms, but cases of gender-based violence are increasingly taking on a more extreme level of cruelty, as several feminist organizations and human rights defenders have warned in recent weeks.

Xiomara Huallparimachi, for example, it was dismembered; Karina Clemente, drowned; Katherine Gómez was burned alive by her former partner in the middle of the street in Lima; and Yoni Taipe’s body was found this week, decapitated and limbless.

These are just some of the best known cases, which paradoxically occurred during the country’s destinations They are first led by a woman.

“We must reject the issue of violence against women head on (…) We will not stop creating support programs for the families of the bereaved and we will take some steps to extend these subjects to longer prison sentences,” he declared this Wednesday, without further details, the president Dina Boluarte.

The tip of the iceberg

since yesterday when feminicide was confirmed 51 So far this year, following the death of a nurse who was raped and attacked by two of her colleagues, the profiles on the social networks of the Ministry for Women wear black, as a sign of mourning.

“Figures that hurt and indignant. We continue to work for respect for the life, freedom and rights of all women. For the victims and their families. For a country where women can live without fear”, writes the portfolio led by minister Nancy Tolentino, who recently increased the controversy by stating that she wants “young people to choose well who to stay with”.

Meanwhile, relatives of Xiomara, Karina, Katherine, Yoni and many others mourn their irreparable losses which, nationally, are the pieces that reveal the tip of the iceberg of this terrifying mosaic of gender-based violence in Peru.