The dismembered remains of the body of , 14 years old, were found in an open field. The first reports suggest that a man close to her, Claudio Barrelier, sexually abused her and then hanged her. In the case of Dulce María Beatriz Candia, who was 17 years old and was searched by her family for two weeks, her body was in the septic chamber of an abandoned construction; It is suspected that a 46-year-old taxi driver, Mario Yung, dumped it there. Noelia Carolina Romero, 30, managed to call the police to ask for help, but when the officers arrived, her partner, Tomás Adrián Núñez, had already stabbed her to death.
The three cases, which occurred in Argentina in recent days, reflect that gender violence, and femicides in particular, continue to be an urgent problem despite the fact that official statistics show a slight decrease in cases and that the Government of Javier Milei has decided to prevent them. This Wednesday, thousands of women from all over the country took to the streets to repeat the cry that took shape 11 years ago and that, from its epicenter in Buenos Aires, became a flag in other countries around the world: Not one less!
“We love each other alive, free and debt-free,” was the slogan with which the feminist organizations gathered in the afternoon near the National Congress. “We mobilize carrying the sadness and anger of the most recent femicides, lesbicides, transvesticides and hate crimes and of all those that are no longer there,” says the document that the artists read from the stage, when the winter night began to close over the Buenos Aires square. “Today in front of the Milei Government, which is a denier of patriarchal violence, we say: Our lives are not disposable! The lives of girls are worth it! We denounce the cruelty exercised on our bodies-territories, against all forms of subjugation, exploitation and violence,” they roared.
According to official numbers, a woman is murdered in Argentina for reasons of gender every 44 hours, in figures from 2025, which represents a drop of 12.3% compared to the previous year. The National Registry of Femicide of the Argentine justice system counted 200 victims of direct feminicide – including four trans women – compared to the 228 registered in 2024 and 19 people murdered for being part of the environment of a woman whom they sought to harm. In 83% of the cases there was a previous link between the victim and the aggressor.
These data, however, were questioned by feminist organizations, which maintain that judicial statistics respond to a specific methodological cut and do not reflect a real decrease in gender violence. They claim that there were up to 71 more victims last year alone.
Natalia Gherardi, from the Latin American Justice and Gender Team (ELA), warned that an annual variation does not serve to establish a consolidated trend and that the increase in attempted feminicide forces us to analyze other indicators, beyond completed deaths. “Violence does not begin with feminicide. That is why the State has to arrive first,” he said. The head of the Prosecutor’s Unit Specialized in Violence against Women, Mariela Labozzetta, pointed out that, although homicides are decreasing globally, femicides remain and the number of cases judicially recognized as such “is still very low.”
The organization Ni Una Menos estimates that between June 3, 2015 – the day of the horror of the crime of Chiara Páez, 14 years old – and May 24, 2026, at least 3,205 cases of fatal victims of gender violence were recorded: 3,144 direct and linked femicides, 46 transfeminicides and transvesticides, and 15 instigations to suicide.
A photo and a purple scarf hang from Isabel Quintero’s neck, the symbol of the feminist struggle. It is the portrait of her daughter, Anahí Rizzo Quintana, who was “very feminist and a fighter” and who died two years ago, at 34. “How can I not be with her today? How can she not bring me?” she says. Isabel is meters from Congress, surrounded by her “lifelong friends,” five other women who are around 70 years old. “The feminist struggle is always changing, at one point the discussion was whether women had to work or not or whether (at the height of militancy in the 70s) they had to take up arms or not. Now there is something special that has to do with recognizing something that has always existed but that cannot be allowed anymore, which is the murder of women at the hands of men who seek to exercise power in that way,” says Mercedes.
Betty, who has lived in Spain for years and is visiting the country, adds that they themselves have been changing and “correcting their mistakes,” understanding how patriarchy operates in everyone. “We learn from them,” she says, referring to the dozens of young people who have occupied the street with violet scarves tied to their bodies and handmade posters in which they raise their demands and thoughts: “That being a girl is not a sentence,” “Which woman in your life do they have to kill for you to care?”, “If justice is sexist, let memory be feminist.”
The recent feminicide of Agostina Vega gave many women the impetus to take to the streets this afternoon, like Jazmín Viondo, 18, who assures that although she grew up in a generation that was more advanced in gender discussions, she is not exempt from suffering what so many women suffered before and feeling, for example, unsafe when walking alone or going out at night. “Being a woman conditions you from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep,” she says. Her friend Miranda Yapur, also 18, points out that the speeches issued from places of power do not contribute to improving the situation among the youngest. “The influencers “They are bringing a place of comfort to have very ugly, hateful opinions in relation to women or in general,” he says.
State antifeminism
With the arrival of Javier Milei to the Government, women’s rights experienced a great setback in the country. Policies to prevent and address violence had a budget cut of 89% compared to 2023, according to a , and key policies such as the Acompañar program (which went from assisting 102,000 women in 2023 to 0 in 2025) or the 144 hotline (which reduced its staff by almost 50%) were dismantled.
On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, data shows that policies to prevent and address violence had an 89% cut compared to 2023.
— ELA (@EquipoELA)
Furthermore, with the closure of the Undersecretariat for Protection against Gender Violence—to which the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity had previously been reduced—the Argentine State was left for the first time in 37 years without a national organization specialized in the promotion of women’s rights.
All the games intended for women suffered a similar fate. There were, for example, cuts in purchases of contraceptive methods that led to a drastic drop in the number of protected women: from more than 1.2 million in 2024 to just 63,000 projected for 2026, which is estimated to lead to thousands of unintentional pregnancies and abortions that could have been avoided.
The pattern indicates that, far from proposing superior alternatives, the libertarian Government chose to defund and suppress, avoiding contemplating that the initiatives now emptied were the result of a long history and that they arose to respond to a structural problem that persists and that requires state presence.
“This Government exercises state anti-feminism that attacks us while promoting violence and cruelty as the only social bond,” summarizes the Ni Una Menos document read in the square. The feminist group has criticized the bill that seeks to increase penalties for false complaints, promoted by a senator close to the Executive, and they have highlighted that it seeks to “silence women.”
Milei has been in the State and even criticized the legal figure of feminicide, which she seeks to eliminate, claiming that it weights the lives of women over those of men. “We have reached the point of normalizing that in many supposedly civilized countries if one kills a woman it is called feminicide, and that carries a more serious penalty than if one kills a man just because of the sex of the victim. Legalizing, in fact, that the life of a woman is worth more than that of a man,” he said from the lectern of the Davos Forum, in Switzerland, in January 2025.
The ignorance of the issue on the part of the president and his team adds up to a cruelty against the women’s agenda, which is at the heart of the “cultural battle” that Milei promised to lead and in which she made all her tools available.
