Buenos Aires Youth Protest: Thousands Gather Over State Neglect

There are the faces and the names of Brenda del Castillo, Morena value e Lara Gutiérrez on the signs of the thousands of people who showed on Saturday Buenos Aires to ask for justice for their femicide. The march, which crossed the streets of the capital and other cities of Argentina, was called by feminist movements To demand truth and justice for the three girls victims of a crime that is shaking the country. “We are here for them and for every woman who is gone. We continue to take to the streets against gender violence, we are a tide, “he says to Done Carla Martinez From Plaza de Mayo, from where the procession started to reach Plaza del Congreso, where the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate are located. “The anger we feel becomes organization. We do not stop being united and mobilize. “

Brenda del Castillo and Morena Verdi, cousin of twenty years, and Lara Gutiérrez, a 15 -year -old friend of theirs, had left the house on Friday 19 September in the town where they lived, Evita Cityin the province of Buenos Aires. They had risen aboard a van directed to a private party, behind the promise to receive compensation equal to three hundred dollars for their participation in the event. From Saturday 20 September their cell phones had stopped being reachable, but the last report had allowed the police to follow the tracks. Five days after the disappearance, the bodies had been found in plastic bags buried in the garden of a house a Florencio Varelaabout 25 kilometers south of the capital. The autopsy revealed that the three girls had been torturedmutilated and killed with extreme brutality e cruelty. The torture had been transmitted live On a private group on Instagram, to which dozens of users were connected. According to the investigations in progress, it is a crime in the context of drug trafficking. The main hypothesis is that girls have stolen cocaine To a drug trafficker identified in Tony Janzen Valverde Victoriano, 20 years old of Peruvian origin. Known as “Little J“And considered the creator of the murders, he is currently in fugitive: a international capture mandate. They were instead Five people arrestedthree men and two women, considered the material authors of the crime: according to what has been reconstructed, they cleaned up the crime scene using bleach.

Even if Argentina is not used to crimes of this height – which instead often occur in other Latin America countries – the killing of the three girls is part of an already known and documented context. According to theMumalà Observatorywhich fills out and publishes updated data, between 2020 and 2025 they were recorded 196 Femicides related to drug trafficking. In these cases, they underline feminist movements, violence against women takes on further meaning: the body of women is both a target be a booty that criminal gangs use to demonstrate their power. It becomes a means of dissuading, an exchange coin between disputes, is reduced to an object of which you also arrive at spectacularizing death. “They kill us every day. Our voice is a collective cry,” he comments Cristina Lovaiza Roadpsychologist. “When the news of the assassination of Brenda, Morena and Lara came out, some newspapers began to express judgments on their lives and on their choices. They said they prostituted themselves, that “I looked for it“, That the mothers did not protect them enough. They were no longer victims, they were guilty,” he explains. “These deaths cannot be disconnected from the condition of inequality and marginality from which the three girls came, in a context in which the institutions are not there. Their dead are one state responsibility“, conclude.

The organizations that work in the vulnerable neighborhoods have repeatedly alarm on the worsening of living conditions in the so -called Miserias villasthe slums around the big cities. Poverty and the lack of social policies, strongly weakened by the government of Javier Mileiforce a survival strategies who expose women to greater risks and violence. The void left by the state – reported the Catholic realities active in the slums – is creating fertile ground for the expansion and strengthening of drug trafficking. A dynamic that is part of a contest, in which the state programs against violence against women have been deeply weaken by the UltraLolliberist government of Milei: in 2025, for example, the National Plan of Action against Gender Violence It has not been implemented for the first time by its institution in 2017. Not even the Plan Accompany“Accompanying”, which aimed to offer temporary economic support and a psychological accompaniment to the victims of gender -based violence, while the “line 144”, a free telephone service of assistance, orientation and support to women and people LGBT+, has not received a budget for 2025 and has lost over 40% of its staff. “We manifest to have public policies Of prevention Of gender -based violence, “comments Marcela Rajoy from the procession of Buenos Aires.“ For Lara, Brenda, Morena. For all women who no longer have a voice “.