At the cry of “Justice!” About 300 people protested on Saturday in Portuguesa, a Venezuelan agricultural state shaken by the killing of three women in less than a week.
“We are afraid,” Ariadna González, a 22-year-old psychology student, told AFP during a protest in Acarigua, about 400 kilometers from Caracas.
Display a banner with the message “Being alive should not be an achievement.”
The succession of feminicides began last Sunday, February 21, with the murder of 17-year-old Eliannys Martínez, after she attended the evangelical church to which she belonged in the city of Turén (Portuguesa).
In the same city, 20-year-old Eduarlis Falcón was killed after leaving his home on Monday to go to the gym.
The bodies of Martínez and Falcón were found with signs of sexual violence, according to local media reports.
The third femicide registered in Portuguesa in the last week was that of Carmine Sosa, aged 33, who died at the hands of her former partner.
Holding white balloons with the phrase “There is no one left” written in black, women and men marched peacefully in Acarigua. The drivers honked their horns in support.
“As a woman I feel vulnerable, I am here because this cannot continue to happen (…) Acarigua is a very crowded city and this seems to be a ghost town [luego de los crímenes]”Klinmarian Bracamonte, 20, a medical student, told AFP.
There were also protests by activists in Caracas. The state “must act to avoid impunity,” the human rights NGO PROVEA called for.
Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced Saturday night the arrest of a man he identified as Nelson Saavedra, whom he described as “responsible for the atrocity of the outrage and the mass murder” of Martinez and Falcón. The official said he was “convicted and confessed” after being betrayed by his wife.
Saavedra will be charged with femicide aggravated by sexual violence, the prosecutor added, who would carry the maximum sentence in Venezuela: 30 years in prison.
According to the prosecutor, the Public Ministry registered over 610 cases of femicide in 2017, considered killing women for misogyny or machismo. Half of these cases have been resolved.
– Daily harassment –
“We want to have the same right that men should go quietly to the gym at 6 in the morning, to go home alone after a Sunday meal, to return home safely when it gets dark. We feel that they took this right only because we were born women “, says an excerpt from the letter that Daniela Durán wrote to read during the protest in Acarigua.
The 23-year-old performing arts student, with long dark hair, says she was harassed on the street.
“It’s part of everyday life and you don’t have to cut yourself, you can come out covered with your hair up, and the men in the cars slow down and start rolling sideways,” he observes.
The independent monitor Femicide, an initiative of the digital communications platform Utopix, estimated the number of cases last year at 256, compared to 167 in 2019. In January 2021, 23 were registered, compared to 34 in the same month in 2020.
In general, Venezuela suffers from one of the worst waves of violent deaths in the region.
The country recorded almost 12,000 violent deaths in 2020, according to the NGO Observatorio Venezolano de Violencia, with a rate of 45.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, seven times higher than the world average.