Guatemala - where it's dangerous to be a woman

Guatemalan women not only have one of the shortest lifespan's in Central America, but a report claims they are also the victims of a rising gender-based violent crimes.

The plight of women in Guatemala is the subject of an Amnesty International report titled "Guatemala: no protection, no justice: killings of women in Guatemala." In the first eight months of 2004 more than 300 women were killed, up from 250 in 2003, and 184 in 2002, according to an Associated Press article last year, which noted that many of the women were "simply in the wrong place at the wrong time." According to the Guatemalan authorities, 1,188 women and girls were murdered between 2001 and 2004. To date, according to the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, only 9 percent of the cases have been investigated.

A different report by the Washington Office in Latin America notes that "since 2001, it is estimated that more than 2,500 women and girls have been brutally murdered in Guatemala. While officials statistics are not fully reliable, police data shows a continuous increase in the murders of women from 313 in 2002 to 351 in 2003, 531 in 2004, 580 in 2005, and close to 600 in 2006. Most of the victims were young and poor, and in many cases, the victims were raped, strangled, decapitated or otherwise mutilated. Progress in the investigation of the murders of women has been fraught with numerous shortcomings, including a lack of technical capacity to preserve crime scenes, interrogate witnesses, and collect and preserve evidence, as well as a lack of political will to resolve the murders."

According to a late-January Human Rights Commission report, in the case of women being murdered only 3 percent of the cases actually make it to court, as reported by the Guatelmala Solidarity Network.

Listing cases of murders, WOLA noted that in the August 12, 2005 murder of 19-year-old law student Claudina Isabel Velásquez the investigation was hampered by the prejudices and discriminatory attitudes of the authorities handling the investigation. Claudina Isabel was categorized as a “nobody” because she was wearing sandals and a belly button ring, according to WOLA.

The aforementioned Amnesty International report begins with the chilling testimony of the mother of María Isabel Veliz Franco, aged 15, who was abducted and murdered in December 2001.

"My 15-year-old daughter María Isabel was a student and worked in a shop in the holidays. On the night of 15 December 2001, she was kidnapped in the capital. Her body was found shortly before Christmas. She had been raped, her hands and feet had been tied with barbed wire, she had been stabbed and strangled and put in a bag. Her face was disfigured from being punched, her body was punctured with small holes, there was a rope around her neck and her nails were bent back. When her body was handed over to me, I threw myself to the ground shouting and crying but they kept on telling me not to get so worked up.

With the help of witnesses, the authorities identified two of the culprits and a luxury car and obtained details of the house where she had been held. The case has been passed to two prosecutor’s offices but those responsible are still at liberty."

According to Amnesty International, the brutal sexual violence inflicted on María Isabel following her abduction and before her murder is a characteristic common to many of the hundreds of killings of women and girls that have been reported in Guatemala in recent years, as is the failure of Guatemalan authorities to subsequently detain and bring to justice those responsible the violent acts.

Compounding the situation, the report said, is the suffering of many of the relatives of murdered women who fe