Femicide in Guatemala (2001-2011)

President Otto Perez Molina recently formed a "task force to combat femicide" in Guatemala. Nobel prize winners Rigoberta Menchu and Jody Williams are traveling the region to help bring attention to the intentional killing of women in Guatemala and beyond. And the British Ambassador is organizing human chains around volcanoes. I hope that these three actions are going to help reduce femicide in Guatemala in the region.

In an article for IPS, Danilo Valladares cites statistics from the Presidential Commission Against Racism in Guatemala that indicates femicides increased from 675 in 2010 to 705 in 2011. I think that they are using INACIF numbers which includes murders and other violent deaths but I can't be certain.

However, when one looks at the National Civilian Police's statistics on murder over the last decade one sees that femicide more than doubled from 2001 to 2009 and then has declined in both 2010 and 2011. The increase and then decrease in murders doesn't look at the different from those of men.

This isn't to belittle the murders of Guatemalan women as a problem. It's just to point out that, according to the Guatemalan National Civilian Police's (PNC) murder statistics, the number of women murdered decreased in 2010 and 2011 and that's not even controlling for population increases.