The team of women that records all femicides in Colombia

Carol Rojas and Estefanía Rivera Guzmán are dedicated to counting deaths. Deaths of women killed by men, specifically. They are two of the four women behind the Colombian Observatory of Femicides, an information system that, based on the local, regional and national press, tracks cases of sexist violence in the country. Last year it recorded 511 femicides, more than one per day. “Psychologically, things are not easy,” Rojas confesses while she relaxes on the terrace of Café Ruda in the center of Medellín, which she opened with the feminist association that finances the Observatory – the Antimilitarist Feminist Network. “This job doesn't work for me every day, I get a lot of anxiety,” she says. She faces that anxiety with a clear goal in mind: “Let the violence stop.”

When you sit down to talk to them, you don't notice that their lives revolve around tragedy. They are smiling, talkative. Rivera, the coordinator of the Observatory, is 37 years old. She is short, with curly hair and is from the La Estrella village, a town in the municipality of Yarumal, located about three hours north of the capital of Antioquia. She describes it as a violent place, “that generates pure little stars,” and she bursts out laughing.

On his left side is Rojas, his boss. The director of the Antimilitarist Feminist Network is much taller, she is 35 years old and dresses completely in black, even the sunglasses. She grew up in Doce de Octubre, a neighborhood high in the hills of Medellín that a taxi driver in the city describes as “ugly.” Together they have put together an important project.

They publish monthly bulletins of seventy pages that they call “feminist analysis” of violence in Colombia. They participate in the tables on gender violence held by the governments of Medellin and Antioquia. They organize talks, workshops, mobilizations and protection and victim care circles in Medellín, the capital of one of the most conservative departments in the country. “In this very right-wing territory, we resist,” Rivera declares.

All this work is summarized in his Dynamic Report of Femicides, a visual and interactive report that is available on its website. With a quick glance and a few clicks, this tool paints a fairly complete look at femicides in Colombia. It offers information on 18 different categories about the murders: femicides by department – the largest number in 2023 occurred in Antioquia -, the age range of the victim – the vast majority are between 20 and 39 years old -, the relationship with the feminicide, the use of the murdered woman, the weapon used and even the method of disposal of the body.

From local to national

The Observatory was born in 2012 when they realized that “they were killing many women in the center of Medellín.” They began to collect data on the femicides that occurred in commune 10, the historic Candelaria. Then, they were just two members of the Antimilitarist Feminist Network managing “a rudimental excel.” But the project grew.

They began to record information about the entire city, then about the Aburrá Valley, a region that surrounds Medellín and includes nine more municipalities. Finally, in 2017 it became a national observatory. Now, the project has so much prestige that when this newspaper asked the Attorney General's Office for this story for the figures on femicides in 2023, it responded with data from the Observatory.

Rivera and Rojas are perhaps the people who know the most about femicides in Colombia. They spend hours and hours reviewing the press, reading about the murders. It is exhausting, difficult work. Both say they go to therapy regularly: “We have to take care of our mental health.” Sometimes they have to take two or three days off because the violence overwhelms them. Sometimes, they are so involved in the cases that they even manage to identify patterns that not even the Prosecutor's Office takes into account.

Rivera narrates that in 2019 exactly that happened. She was in charge of documenting femicides in the Aburrá Valley when she became aware of several very similar cases. In a period of 160 days, five women had been murdered in the municipality of Bello, in the suburbs of Medellín, near the Madera and Bello Metro stations. They were all mothers who had left home on their way to work in the early hours of the morning. All of them had been murdered with a sharp weapon and found half-naked in wooded areas. She had to be a serial femicide, she thought.

The alarm sounded and, together with her colleagues, they wrote a special report to alert the population of the region. Serial killers. The Case of Bello-Antioquia was published in September 2019. Two and a half years later, in March 2023, the Medellín Prosecutor's Office accused Carlos Andrés Rivera Ruiz of the death of three women between 2019 and 2020, two of them found dead in the bed of the Medellin River.

The investigating entity offered 200 million pesos (about $50,000) “for information that would allow us to locate the feminicide,” but so far he remains a fugitive. One of the women he allegedly murdered, Ruth Estella Álvares, appears in that special Observatory report. Rivera and Rojas are sure that he is the serial femicide they were warning about.

A perpetual problem

Despite all the work of the Observatory, it is not entirely clear how many femicides occur in Colombia. It never has been. The Government does not have an official information system on the subject. For years, the Prosecutor's Office, the Observatory and several other organizations have offered different figures. Historically, those of the Prosecutor's Office have been much lower than those of the Observatory, sometimes up to almost half.

Rivera and Rojas attribute this t
o the fact that they have a broader definition of the term feminicide. They speak of the “murder of a woman who has a message of power”, while the Prosecutor's Office refers in a more technical and legal way to “the death of a woman due to her condition of being a woman or for reasons of the gender identity of she”. Even so, last year the Prosecutor's Office and the Observatory offered almost equal figures for the first time: both reported more than 500.

Under unusual heat in Medellín, the city of eternal spring, the two women define their work as data activism. They work for peace, they say, for “a Colombia where women have different living conditions.” With her beer almost gone, Rivera admits there are many challenges ahead.

For now, both hope that their data and the mobilizations they carry out can generate changes and “make the invisible visible.” They do not know exactly what the solution is to the high rate of femicides in Colombia. It is a multifaceted problem, rooted in years of machismo, poverty, and a culture of crime and violence. But they are more than sure of one thing: “It cannot be resolved simply by putting the feminicides in jail.”

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