Femicide will be struck from Argentina’s penal code, according to a vow from the administration of Javier Milei, the president. It is his administration’s latest attack on women’s rights.
Mariano Cúneo Libarona, the justice minister, said the government will “eliminate the figure of femicide from the Argentine penal code” adding that feminism was a “distortion of the concept of equality”.
“This administration defends equality before the law enshrined in our national constitution. No life is worth more than another,” Cúneo Libarona said.
Femicide – the murder by a man of a woman in the context of gender violence – was added to the penal code as an aggravating factor of homicides in 2012, and is punishable with life imprisonment.
The announcement came shortly after Milei decried the concept of femicide at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and said that “equality before the law already exists in the west. Everything else is just seeking privileges.”
“We’ve reached the point that in many supposedly civilised countries, if a woman is killed, it is called femicide. And this carries more serious punishment than if you kill a man simply based on the sex of the victim – legally making a woman’s life be worth more than that of a man,” he said.
According to a report by the Argentina’s observatory of femicides of the ombudsman of the nation, 295 femicides were recorded between 1 January and 31 December last year.
Mariela Belski, Amnesty Argentina’s executive director, said it was “deeply concerning” that violence against women is not “being understood” by the state. Although globally there are more homicides of men than women, the home is the most dangerous place for women and girls, she said. Sixty per cent of women are killed by their partners or family members, compared with 12% of men.
“Removing femicide as a legal category would pose a greater danger to women and girls,” Belski said.
Argentina has a recent history of strong feminist mobilisation. In 2015, a wave of marches against femicide sparked similar protests in Peru, Uruguay, Italy and Germany, while the country’s Green Wave movement was instrumental in securing safe abortion rights in 2020. Argentina was also the first Latin American country to implement a parliamentary quota system for women in 1991.
But with that progress has come a push-back – a sentiment that Milei successfully tapped into during his campaigning. “I won’t apologise for having a penis,” he said in 2022.
Since taking power, Milei has eliminated the ministry of women and dissolved the undersecretariat for protection against gender violence. He has cut back programmes providing support for victims of gender violence, and at Davos attacked the “bloody and murderous abortion agenda”. In November, Argentina was the only country to vote against a UN general assembly resolution to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls.
“It is more of the same misogyny that this government promised in its electoral campaign and that deepens day by day,” said Soledad Deza, a prominent lawyer and president of the feminist organisation Mujeres x Mujeres.
As it ramps up its “cultural battle” against “wokeism”, Milei’s government is also now working to repeal legislation including labour quotas for sexual minorities, gender parity in electoral lists and non-binary identity documents. The administration also aims to overturn Micaela’s Law, which establishes mandatory training in gender issues for public employees.
“The Micaela Law was created because Micaela’s femicide, like so many others, could have been avoided if the people involved in the days, months and years before had made decisions with a gender perspective,” said Nestor García, the father of Micaela García, whose death led to the law’s creation. “This is a very dangerous issue … to promote these policies against the gender perspective, which are in my opinion in breach of the constitution of our country.”
Milei’s decision also comes as Donald Trump – who has called his Argentine counterpart his “favourite president” – has begun his own crusade against gender and diversity policies. In the past week, Trump has said diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives were “dangerous, demeaning and immoral” and revoked orders aimed at preventing discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Source: theguardian.com
