‘I can’t face how much she suffered’: Argentina femicides at record high
he evening before 21-year-old Micaela García disappeared, she spoke to her mother on the phone. Their conversations were always easy and meandering – that Friday, they spoke about groceries, Micaela’s studies and a gift they were sewing for a friend’s baby.
It would be the last time Andrea Lescano would hear her daughter’s voice.
On 1 April 2017, García was followed home from a nightclub in Gualeguay, 140 miles north of Buenos Aires, raped and killed. Within a week, her decomposed and naked body was found in a field on the outskirts of the town.
“It is a heartbreaking pain,” Lescano says. “It is still hard for me to understand that she is gone.”
Sebastián José Luis Wagner – who had served time for raping two women in 2010 – was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of García in the “context of gender violence”.
“I still can’t face how much she suffered before he took her life, I know she must have fought,” Lescano says. “In the mornings I would always write Micaela a message saying ‘Good morning my daughter, I love you very much’. It has taken me a long time to get used to not sending her these texts.”
Argentina reported 322 femicides in 2023. The term is used to refer to the misogynist killing of women, or, as feminist Diana Russell has said, “the killing of females by males because they are female”.
The figure is a record high and marks a 33% increase from 2022, when 242 died, according to a new report by the National Ombudsman’s Office.
