Over the last five years at least 2,000 mujeres have been murdered in Guatemala. The majority of these women have been poor young women found with body parts missing including their breasts. So is Guatemala becoming another Ciudad Juarez, Mexico? And why is the mainstream media not covering this story? The answer is that obviously the mainstream media doesn’t consider the murders of Latina women important but a delegation of U.S. advocates does and will be travelling to Guatemala to call attention to the crimes against women there and to the fact that over the past five years only 14 of these murder cases have been solved. Juana Batzibal, a human rights lawyer with the Center for Legal Action on Human Rights (CALDH) in Guatemala City said:

The gall with which these women are killed is telling women that they shouldn’t be on the street, that they should go back home.

While the government in Guatemala is blaming the murders on the growing drug and gang problem in the country, there may be a political side to the killings as well.

The conflict between the military government and leftist guerillas–which ended 10 years ago–left 200,000 dead, the majority of them unarmed civilians from the country’s indigenous Maya population. Rape and sexual violence were central to the military’s counter-insurgency strategy, and about one-fourth of those killed during the conflict were women. Batzibal said the failure to hold accountable those responsible for the wartime human rights abuses has created a culture of impunity and helped perpetuate extreme forms of violence against women.

The fact that the women found murdered have been mutilated and possibly raped points to the targetting of women specifically. This is why the Washington-based Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA is organizing a delegation of U.S. professional rights advocates and other concerned individuals to visit the country, meet with women’s rights leaders and government officials and look into efforts to curb violence against women.

Via / Women’s e News