HRW: Poverty is a common element in open cases of sexual violence in Latin America

Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), Jul 4 (EFE).- Poverty will remain the common denominator in 2024 in the worst cases of sexual violence once morest women and girls that have been ongoing in Latin America since 2017, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned.

This was denounced in an interview with EFE by the executive director of the Women’s Division of HRW, Macarena Sáez, who specified that these are not isolated cases, since “poverty is not a problem of bad luck in the region, but rather has to do with structural conditions of double and triple discrimination.”

In this sense, it is a form of discrimination “that has to do with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Sáez participated in a side event of the Fifth Regional Conference on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, held in Cartagena de Indias, by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

At the ‘Causa Abierta’ meeting, organized by the Mercosur Feminist Articulation (AFM), they presented a report in which they analyzed ten cases of sexual violence once morest women and girls in Latin America that remain open and “the only thing that links them is poverty,” added Sáez.

“A disgrace for the region”

Among the ten cases they selected, the most notable was that of the 41 Guatemalan girls who died in a fire following protesting once morest sexual assault in the place where they lived, the Virgen de la Asunción Home.

The building was managed by the President’s Social Welfare Secretariat, and the protest was followed by a mass breakout that ended with the girls being violently captured by the police and locked up in a 47-square-meter room where the flames started the following morning.

The meeting highlighted the testimonies of some survivors, who said that when they asked the police to let them go, they heard phrases such as: “Let those unfortunate women suffer,” which Sáez described as “a disgrace for Guatemala and for the region.”

“What if the girls had been in the top 1% of the economic population in Guatemala? Who would have been behind these legal proceedings and who would have been the lawyers behind them? How would the medical services have acted?” Sáez asked.

She added that “what happened in Guatemala is not an isolated incident” and that the scale of the fire had overlooked the reason behind the protests by the girls, who were protesting once morest the mistreatment and sexual violence they suffered at the centre.

Government Action

The HRW lawyer, on the other hand, criticized that in these events, such as the ECLAC summit, although urgent issues are addressed, there is no necessary financial support for them: “The big question we have to ask the States is how much they are willing to invest in equality.”
“If these commitments are not translated into significant budget allocations for training and bills in the corresponding government departments, it is clear that there is no political will to promote them,” he said.

Sáez warned that these cases will remain open until “the day comes when women do not have to design our routes thinking regarding whether we will suffer sexual violence and when we do not have to design our cities thinking regarding which streets should be lit.”
Paula Cavaleiro