By Carlos Gutiérrez. Reporting collaboration by Federico Ruiz.
When the World Cup kicked off in Mexico, the historic Azteca Stadium was filled with music and celebration. Outside, a different scene unfolded. Groups of protesters raised issues the Mexican state has long minimized or ignored, among them, collectives of mothers searching for the disappeared, who faced police lines trying to silence their calls for justice for more than 130,000 missing people. Images of the standoff circled the globe.
On social media, the campaign “Violence against women is not part of the game” gained traction, drawing attention to Mexico’s soaring femicide rates. Some 43.9% of Mexican women have suffered abuse at the hands of their partners—violence that typically spikes during major sporting events, as the National Shelter Network has documented. The problem cuts across all of Latin America.
One week before the tournament began, thousands took to the streets in Argentina to protest the femicide of Agostina Vega, a 14-year-old whose body was found in an open lot in the city of Córdoba. The killing of two more women deepened the public outrage. Yet Argentina’s National Femicide Registry reported a contested 12.3% drop in cases during 2025. “Faced with events of this gravity, the state cannot look the other way,” said Mariela Belski, executive director of Amnesty International Argentina. “Recognizing femicide is essential to understanding that these are not ordinary homicides, but structural violence that demands specific public policies.”
The statements of Córdoba prosecutor Raúl Garzón, who is handling the Vega case, only sharpened public anger: he declined to classify the crime as femicide and then praised the search dogs that found the girl’s remains. “We should give them a medal of distinction,” he said. Former city councillor Laura Vilches shot back that what he was doing was “a farce.”
For Aimée Zambrano, coordinator of the Utopix Femicide Monitor, based in Venezuela, Vega’s death was the last straw in Argentina’s mounting crisis of gender violence. She draws a parallel to the 2015 femicide of Chiara Páez — another 14-year-old — whose case gave rise to the Ni Una Menos movement. Prosecutor Garzón’s conduct, she adds, “is an indicator of the type of government and the type of ideas now present in Argentina, ideas that go hand in hand with denying women’s rights, denying the existence of a patriarchal state, and denying that there is a differential treatment from the masculine toward the feminine.”
The Milei administration has cut the budget for gender-based violence prevention by nearly 90%, while eliminating the Acompañar program and the Undersecretariat for Protection Against Gender Violence. The Spanish newspaper El País wrote: “the libertarian government chose to defund and suppress, ignoring the fact that the programs it dismantled were the result of a long history and emerged to address a structural problem that persists and demands a state response.”
María Elena Martin, a researcher at the National University of Misiones, says the Milei government has “practically dismantled all public gender equality policies and observatories. Only the Supreme Court’s registry remains.” Civil society oversight, she notes, has not been so easily erased.
On June 10, Congressman Esteban Paulón introduced a bill to declare a “national public emergency on gender-based violence against women and diverse communities for two years.” So far this year, Argentina has recorded a femicide attempt every 26 hours. “In the face of a system that guarantees impunity and pursues a policy of denialism, defunding, and total dismantling of prevention measures,” Paulón argued.
El 10 de junio, el diputado Esteban Paulón presentó un proyecto de ley para declarar “emergencia pública nacional en materia social por violencia de género contra las mujeres y diversidades por el término de dos años”. Y es que, en lo que va del año, se registra un intento de feminicidio en ese país cada 26 horas. Ello, “frente a un sistema que garantiza impunidad y que tiene una política de negacionismo, desfinanciamiento y desmantelamiento total de las políticas para prevenir esta situación”, argumentó el legislador.
The Franco-Argentine civil association MundoSur, in its 2025 annual report, shows Argentina has seen “a slight but sustained increase over the past three years” in femicide rates. The regional picture is grimmer still: more than 3,700 women and girls were violently killed for gender-related reasons across Latin America in 2025, an 18% rise over 2024. The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) notes that 14 of the 25 countries with the highest femicide rates in the world are in the region. The highest rates in 2025 were recorded in Puerto Rico, Honduras, and Ecuador.
Honduras is among the world’s worst, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, with most killings “perpetrated by organized crime” and a large share classified as “undetermined.” The Center for Women’s Rights in Honduras reported 111 women killed in just the first five months of this year—one femicide every 32 hours. The country “faces alarming impunity rates,” the organization said in a statement responding to a penal code reform that raised sentences for aggravated femicide to 60 years.
Stiffer sentences, the group argues, are not enough. “Deficient criminal investigation, the absence of a gender perspective among justice system operators, and the institutional re-victimization of women who file complaints mean that the main obstacle is not insufficient penalties, it is the near-zero probability that perpetrators will actually be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted.”
🚨⚠️#ATENCION~ Grupos feministas hicieron un plantón en la Corte Suprema de Justicia para exigir justicia ante los femicidios registrados a diario en Honduras.
Durante el 01 de enero al 30 de abril de 2026, el Centro de Derechos de Mujeres registró 87 muertes violentas de… pic.twitter.com/QtTAQ1NvqI
— Criterio.hn (@criteriohn) May 27, 2026
Regional figures, however, understate the true scale of the problem: more than half of the countries lack publicly available data. The absence of consolidated statistics remains one of the field’s greatest challenges. MundoSur relies primarily on digital press coverage to compile its annual regional femicide map, which has been published since 2019.
Imperfect as that source is, journalism becomes “an invaluable tool for keeping the need for state accountability on the agenda,” says Eugenia D’Angelo, MundoSur’s executive director and founder. The problem is compounded by the lack of a shared legal definition of femicide across countries, and by wide gaps in institutional capacity to record, systematize, and publish data.
In late May, the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), the Ibero-American Initiative to Prevent and Eliminate Violence Against Women, and the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean released a report titled “Measuring to Transform: The Cost of Violence Against Women in Ibero-America.” It flags severe underreporting across the region. In Mexico, only 13.6% of cases are formally reported; in Ecuador, just 5%. Between 44% and 50% of incidents occur in the home. “This means that all available cost estimates are necessarily conservative and that the real economic cost of violence against women in the region is higher than published figures suggest,” SEGIB warned.
The report also quantifies the economic toll: in countries such as Paraguay and Ecuador, violence against women costs up to 5% of GDP, factoring in healthcare and justice expenditures, the collapse of micro-enterprises, and lost productivity among survivor-workers. “It has a very significant cost — and not only economic,” says Azul Picón, prevention coordinator at Grow – Género y Trabajo, a civil society organization specializing in gender in the workplace. “It has a human and social impact. It affects health, women’s autonomy, and their participation in the labor market.”
MundoSur’s 2025 report warns of growing political regression across the region and the weakening of organizations that have historically tracked femicides independently. It denounces a “growing backlash against women’s rights,” visible in budget cuts, institutional dismantling, and anti-rights rhetoric. Argentine feminist outlet Latfem traces the trend to far-right governments that have gained power since 2019. Chile’s new president, José Antonio Kast, is a particular concern, given his anti-rights agenda on gender issues.
D’Angelo acknowledges that Latin America presents a mixed picture. Some countries have developed meaningful legal and institutional frameworks to protect women’s rights. “But advanced legislation does not by itself guarantee effective protection. A law on the books does not mean the right is real, or that people can actually exercise it.”
A further, equally troubling factor is at play. “There is an alignment with the United States government, which has a clear anti-feminist, anti-rights agenda,” says D’Angelo, a jurist with a doctorate in human rights. She also points to the particular vulnerability of Indigenous women, Afro-descendant women, migrants, rural women, women with disabilities, and trans people as evidence that “femicidal violence remains an extreme expression of structural inequalities that have not been resolved in the region.”
International legal frameworks exist; the most advanced is ILO Convention 190, which focuses on prevention rather than punishment. The problem is implementation. “In Argentina, for instance, it has been ratified, but there is no one enforcing compliance,” says Picón.
Against this backdrop, experts agree that for many women the World Cup is not a cause for celebration but a source of dread, an event that reinforces patriarchal norms. Like SEGIB, they insist that results will come only through sustained government prevention policies. Those policies would not only reduce economic costs—they would protect rights and, above all, save thousands of lives across the continent.