Raising Awareness: Women's Disappearances in Peru and the Urgent Need for Action

2023-08-08 22:00:37

At least 5,341 women were reported missing between January and June 2023 in Peru, which is about 200 more cases than in the same period of the previous year, the NGO CHS Alternativo reported on Monday, which used reports of the National Police.

This figure represents 59.7% of the total cases registered in the first six months of the year, when the authorities received a total of 8,937 reports of missing persons, CHS Alternativo detailed in a statement.

The organization found it striking that “among the people reported missing, at least 100 were girls and adolescents of Venezuelan nationality.”

Of the 7.3 million Venezuelans who have left their country due to the crisis it is going through, close to 1.5 million have emigrated to Peru, making the country the second nation that has received the most citizens from Venezuela after Colombia.

In the opinion of the president of CHS Alternativo, Andrea Querol, “the figures reveal that, in the case of Peru, the disappearance of people mainly has the face of women.”

He explained that in Peruvian territory disappearances are especially linked to the crime of human trafficking or some form of human exploitation.

In order to join efforts and work so that cases of disappearances can be resolved quickly and efficiently, as well as prevent future disappearances, eight organizations from different countries around the world have recently formed the International Network of Associations of Disappeared Persons (RIAPD).

For Querol, the RIAPD will make visible the direct relationship that exists between the impact on human rights in the region with situations such as gender violence, forced disappearances or human trafficking, and will contribute to the exchange of experiences to improve mechanisms search and identification.

The purpose is to “provide emotional support to the families of the disappeared persons and strengthen the complaint and investigation processes in each country.”

The RIAPD intends to share work methodologies, such as action protocols or search courses, and promote international initiatives that increase the dissemination of alerts and enable prevention through the use of digital tools.

In this sense, one of the first projects that they have shared is the search by facial recognition, which has been implemented by the SosDesaparecidos Association in Spain, last March.