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First Ladies Compete to Become Argentina's New Evita. [Argentina] From Evita Peron onward, the Peronist movement has excelled at
using women to try to mobilize its faithful. General
Juan Domingo Peron deployed his wife, during her life and after her early death, as his
link to the masses. M ore recently Carlos Saul Menem, the former Argentine president, even
married a former Miss Universe, supposedly with an eye to reviving his flagging political
fortunes. But Argentina's dominant
party may have outdone itself this time. Acting
as proxies in their husbands' struggle for control of the party apparatus, the current
first lady and her predecessor are facing each other in a bitter fight for a Senate seat. |
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Protect Guatemala's Women. [Guatemala] For the last five years, Guatemala has suffered an
epidemic of gruesome killings of women that are as mysterious as they are brutal. Typically, a young woman in Guatemala City vanishes,
and her body turns up a few days later in a garbage bag or in an open field. Many of the women's faces and bodies have been
mutilated, and many have been tortured sexually or otherwise. Some of the bodies have messages, like "death
to bitches," scrawled on them. In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a pattern
of hundreds of killings of this type has drawn international condemnation. But aside from reports by Amnesty International and
the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Guatemalan women's deaths have received
very little attention. At least a thousand
women have been victims in the past five years, and only three killers are in prison. The police do not even investigate a vast majority
of cases. Guatemala does not keep
reliable statistics. But it is clear that a
pattern of these killings was first seen in 2000, and the reported numbers have risen
since then. Last year, there were 590 such
killings of women, and the murders have grown more grisly.
Many of the women were victims of gang warfare. Others were killed by husbands or boyfriends. But there are also cases of college students or
shop workers who had no links to crime and simply disappeared - until their bodies were
found. |