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MEXICAN STATE JAILS 5 MEN FOR 697 YEARS EACH IN HISTORIC SENTENCE FOR FEMICIDE
29 July 2015 - Five men in northern Mexico have been
sentenced to an unprecedented 697 years in prison for the gender-driven killing
of 11 women.
The sentencing occurred in the state of Chihuahua
where hundreds of young women have been murdered since 1990.
It was the longest-ever given for a femicide (the
killing of a woman due to her gender) and was based on scientific evidence,
said an official at the attorney-general's office in Chihuahua.
"They used ploys to recruit young women into
prostitution and drug distribution," the attorney-general's office said in
a statement.
"Then, when they were no longer 'useful,' they
took their lives and threw their bodies in the Navajo Arroyo, in the Valley of
Juarez."
In addition to prison time of nearly 700 years each,
those sentenced also have to pay a total of 9 million pesos ($752,907) in
damages to the families of the victims, whose bodies were found in 2012.
Authorities have prosecuted some of the cases but have
not always handed down long prison sentences due to the ambiguity around
declaring femicides, and also to the overall high rate of impunity in the
country, where many crimes go unpunished.
Mexico's Supreme Court in March for the first time
ordered that a case be probed as a femicide after prosecutors in the state of
Mexico initially labelled it a suicide, based on an investigation seen as
plagued by anomalies.
The National Citizen Femicide Observatory, a coalition
of human rights groups, believes that some 3,892 women were murdered in Mexico
between 2012 and 2013, but only 16 per cent of cases were investigated as
femicides.
Chihuahua is home to the border city of Ciudad Juarez, which in 2008 recorded one woman missing each day.