Latin America | El Salvador | Crimes

Violence Against Women in El Salvador Is Driving Them to Suicide — Or to the U.S. Border

It’s hard to grasp the scale of El Salvador’s problem with gender violence. In the Central American country of just six million people, one woman was the victim of a femicide — a man murdering of a woman or girl because of her gender — every 24 hours in 2018. That’s one of the worst rates of femicide in the world, according to the United Nations. Sixty-seven percent of Salvadoran women have suffered some form of violence in their lifetime, including sexual assault, intimate partner violence and abuse by family members, a 2017 national survey found. But only 6% of victims had re

Latin America | El Salvador | Health

El Salvador Advises Women to Delay Pregnancies Due to Virus

Source: ABC News

Public health officials in El Salvador are advising women to put off pregnancies for the next two years to avoid passing on complications from the mosquito-borne Zika virus. Vice-minister of public health Eduardo Espinoza said Thursday women who are already pregnant should stay covered outdoors to reduce the risk of mosquito bites. There are 96 suspected cases of pregnant women with the virus in El Salvador. Some countries with Zika, such as Brazil, have seen spikes in the number of cases of microcephaly, a rare brain defect in babies. The infants tend to have smaller than normal heads a

Latin America | El Salvador | Activism

Offering Protection to the Women of El Salvador

Source: Huffington Post

Over the weekend Kuros!™ has been establishing pepper spray distribution networks across El Salvador, and distributing cans to different communities across the country. Currently in the midst of an extremely violent gang situation, pepper spray distribution in El Salvador is a very delicate balancing act, and one that Kuros!™ approached very carefully. In the past few weeks, the country has seen a record setting spike in violence; seeing between 35-45 reported murders per day in a country with roughly the same population as Chicago. All this in a country where many people live on less than

Latin America | El Salvador | Crimes

Patricia Valdivieso’s Proposal: Chemical castration for sex offenders in El Salvador

Source: Pangea Today

Patricia Valdivieso, a lawyer and a member of the neo-liberal conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance in El Salvador, started a controversial debate when she presented two draft amendments to the law for chemical castration. The changes specify that sex offenders would be required to undergo special medical treatment to decrease their libido. Valdivieso argues that the aim of the amendments is to “include an additional penalty for crimes against sexual freedom and to protect victims by stopping offenders through lowering levels of testosterone.”

Latin America | El Salvador | Corruption

In El Salvador, women thrown in jail for miscarriages and stillbirths

Source: telegram.com

When Guadalupe Vasquez became pregnant at 17 after being raped by a neighbor of the house where she worked as a maid, she decided she wanted the baby. She even picked out a name: Gabriel. Then, on a day in late 2007, pain shot through her back and abdomen. Vasquez says she started bleeding, but her employer wouldnâ€™t let her leave the house to get medical care. Sick in her room and alone, she went into labor. She heard the baby cry briefly, and then he was dead. Only then did the employer send her to the hospital, saying she did not want to â€œdeal with two dead in my house,