Argentine newspaper publishes massive obituary of femicide victims

Argentina's largest newspaper on Wednesday published an obituary filling several pages with the names of more than 300 women and girls killed because of their gender, calling attention to the growing crime of femicide.

The Clarin newspaper printed the list to mark the five-year anniversary of the South American country's first "Not One Less" march held in protest of the rising femicide rate. Argentina has recently seen a surge in femicides, with the number of women killed reaching a 10-year high under coronavirus lockdown last month, according to a leading rights group.

"Behind the statistics of femicides are the stories of women and girls who are murdered daily because of their gender in Argentina," the paper wrote in an editorial. The list features more than 300 names, including transgender women, who were victims of femicide in the last year.

Accompanying each name was a description of the crime, such as "she was beaten to death by her partner." "It's a way of making (the issue) visible ... by giving entity to these femicides that aren't just a number," said Ada Rico, president of local feminist group La Casa del Encuentro, which compiled the list of killings published by Clarin.

"They are women who were killed who had a history, who had sons, who had daughters," Rico told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The obituaries were published in conjunction with the Spotlight Initiative, a joint project of the United Nations and the European Union to combat violence against women. It published a similar obituary in Uruguay in 2018.

"Seeing all the names of the victims of femicides ... and transfemicides together affects you, it hurts," the United Nations wrote on Twitter. "It forces us to reflect. These obituaries should not have been written." Latin America is home to 14 of the 25 countries with the highest rates of femicide in the world, with the region seeing some 12 femicides a day, according to the U.N.

The crime has worsened since the outbreak of the coronavirus, data shows. At least 49 women were killed between March 20 and May 14 in Argentina this year, according to La Casa del Encuentro.

That's an increase of nearly a third compared with the same period in 2018 and up from 40 killings last year.

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