In the last decade, the violence against women and femicides in Argentina have attracted the attention of a significant portion of civil society, activists, academics, journalists and the public in the region. The number of women murdered on account of their gender in Argentina reached 298 between Jan-uary and December 2020. On 20 March 2020, the government of Argentina imposed a nationwide lockdown due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandem-ic. Argentina registered a 70% increase in phone calls to the family violence helpline during the lockdown of April 2020. In 2019, the National Registry of Femicides by the Argentine Justice Department reported 252 victims in the country, of which 26 were under 18 and 90% knew the perpetrator. Of these, 46% of the killers lived with the victim, and 66% were the partner or former partner of the assassinated; at least 42% of the murdered women had taken their gender violence to court prior to their murders; and the victims had at least 222 dependent children among them.

In addition to the National Registry of Femicides, the civil association La Casa del Encuentro has, since 2009, gathered its own unofficial statistics through the Adriana Marisel Zambrano Femicide Observatory. It reports a relatively higher incidence of cases: approximately 50 more cases per year than the numbers reported by the National Registry, although the growth curve is similar. According to the observatory, from 2008 to 2019, there were 3,251 femicides and trans femicides in Argentina. In 2019 alone, 299 women died for reasons associated with their gender. La Casa del Encuentro reports that in 12 years, 4,058 children were left without mothers due to femicide, of which 2,599 (more than 64%) were minors at the time of their mothers’ assassinations.

We will return to this data later. Let us pause for a moment on the elements that perpetuate the phenomenon in the country. To begin with, the femicides are part of a process to dispossess women and girls of the control of their bodies and identities. Female annihilation thus starts prior to the murders and/or disappearances of the victims and continues after them through a set of mechanisms that often end up in the abandonment of the cases.