Pregnant Women Are the Latest Victims of Mexico's Femicide Crisis Andalusia Knoll - VICE News
go to original March 14, 2016

Activists in Mexico are demanding an end to femicide. teleSUR's correspondent, Clayton Conn, reports on demonstrations held last week in Ciudad Juarez. (teleSUR English)

There's a chill in the air in the Mexican city of Puebla, and a dozen people have gathered in front of the local prosecutor's office to lay out candles and photos of a teen with a braces-filled grin printed with the words "Justice for Paulina."

"My sister was my best friend, I could always pick up the phone and talk to her about anything in my life," Rolando Camargo says of Paulina. "That all changed overnight. It is very frustrating. Who can I talk to now?"

Paulina Camargo was four months pregnant when she went missing on August 25 last year.

The 19-year-old was one of six pregnant women murdered or disappeared in the last two years in the state of Puebla, that borders Mexico City. Their cases have channelled latent outrage at the wider issue of a sharp increase in the number of femicides — women killed in part because they are women — that have turned the state into the latest hotspot in a national crisis.

A local NGO called the Citizen's Observatory on Reproductive and Sexual Rights, known as Odesyr, has documented 178 cases of femicide in Puebla since 2013. The group says that these are occurring three times more often today than they did at the turn of the decade.

"It's just one after another after another, after another," says Camargo. "Hardly any time goes by before it happens again. This is almost a massacre."

Read the rest at VICE News

Related: Mexico: Impunity High as Femicide Memorial Remembers Victims (teleSUR)

Related: Mexico Government Agency for Preventing Violence Against Women Unable to Demonstrate Effectiveness (Mexico Voices)

Related: Murdered in Mexico State: The Silent Epidemic of Women Killings in Mexico (VICE News)

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