Annie Kelly » Featured

Honduran police turn a blind eye to soaring number of ‘femicides’

Annie Kelly — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:48:09 +0000

According to those who loved her, Grace González was a hard-working, happy woman who liked to laugh too loudly and dress too brightly. Her enchiladas, she declared, were the best in the barrio. Last month, neighbours watched in silence as her bloodstained body was wheeled out of the front door of the small house she shared with her two daughters on the outskirts of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.

Hours earlier, a man had come into her house and tried to rape her 15-year-old daughter, Rosa. When Grace tried to protect her child, he held her down and slit her throat. Almost a month after she buried her mother, Rosa says she doesn’t expect justice. What she does expect is for her mother’s murderer to come back and kill her too.

“I told the police that I knew the man and saw him kill my mother, but since then they have done nothing. There is no investigation. They tell me that he has left Honduras but I don’t believe them,” she says.

“Now this man knows I went to the police so he will come back and kill me too. There is nobody who will stop him. Women die here all the time and nobody does anything.”

Women are being killed in Honduras at a rate of one a day in a wave of gender-based murders – or “femicide”. Gender-based violence is now the second highest cause of death for women of reproductive age in this tiny Central American country. Human rights campaigners say that more than 2,000 women like Grace have been killed in the past five years.

A report launched by Oxfam Honduras and a Honduran NGO, the Tribunal of Women Against Femicide, says that women are dying because of a deadly mixture of gun crime, political instability and the “systematic indifference” of the police. Convictions for these crimes are rare – between 2008 and 2010, there were 1,110 reported cases of femicide, yet only 211 made it to court. Only 4.2% of these cases resulted in a conviction.

The report says the number of women being killed in Honduras has dramatically spiked since a rightwing military coup deposed President Manuel Zelaya in July 2009. Yesterday, Zelaya returned to the country after two years in exile, in a move that sparked nationwide celebration and hopes for a return to order.

But in the month after the coup, there was a 60% rise in the number of femicides, with the bodies of more than 50 women found in the two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula.

The report also accuses the new government of Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, voted in three months after the coup, of inaction and complicity in the growing wave of murders.

“Since the coup in July 2009, we’ve seen a sharp rise in gender-based killings, with many of these crimes simply going unreported,” says Maritza Gallardo of Oxfam Honduras. “We don’t even really know just how many women are being killed because families of victims are afraid to report violence and murders because they realise the legal system gives impunity to those responsible for the killings.”

A surge in violent crime is also claiming the lives of hundreds of Honduran women as Central America’s notorious Mara gangs extend their power.

“In many cases the women who die are not directly involved in gangs, drug-dealing or commercial sex work. In most cases they are the victims of vengeance attacks, carried out to send a message to male family members,” says Gallardo. “In other cases, family members have identified members of the police as the executors of these murders, killing women as retaliation for gang attacks on police officers. The lives of these women are simply seen as collateral damage as gang violence gets worse.”

For many women the only chance of survival is to flee the country. Luisa Silva, 21, spoke to the Observer from an immigration lawyer’s office in San Antonio, Texas. She says she was raped, beaten and threatened over a two-year period after she spurned the advances of an influential businessman.

“After he beat and raped me for the second time, I went to the police, who said they would do nothing and that I should do what the man wanted,” she says. “After that the violence got worse. He threatened to kill my family. There was nobody to protect me or help me, so the only option I had was to run.”

She was recently granted asylum by an American judge. “There are many women with the same story as me in Honduras, but most of them die,” she says. “If I had stayed, I’d be dead too.”

This article first appeared in The Observer on 29 May 2011

Peru declares state of emergency amid plunging temperatures

Annie Kelly — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 23:49:23 +0000

Photograph: Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters

Peru has declared a state of emergency after hundreds of children died from freezing conditions that have seen temperatures across much of the South American country plummet to a 50-year low. In 16 of Peru’s 25 regions, temperatures have fallen below -24C.

Reports from the country say 409 people, most of them children, have already died from the cold, with temperatures predicted to fall further in coming weeks.

Worst hit are Peru’s poorest and most isolated communities, which are already living on the edge of survival in remote Andean mountain villages more than 3,000 metres above sea level.

Although those living at such high-altitude would expect temperatures to drop below zero at this time of year, NGOs and government officials say many are unable to withstand the extreme cold which they are now experiencing.

“Over the past three or four years we have seen temperatures during the winter months get lower, and people are unable to survive this,” said Silvia Noble, from Plan Peru, an NGO. “This cold weather is now extending into areas that never saw these low temperatures before and children and elderly people are especially at risk as they are not physically strong enough to last month after month of sub-zero conditions.”

Last December, Observer reporters visited farming communities living at more than 3,000 metres above sea level in Huancavelica – one of the areas worst hit by the current cold snap – to find families already struggling with rising child mortality fuelled by malnutrition, poverty and what they say are increasingly erratic and unreliable weather patterns.

Seven months on, local NGOs say these mountain villages are now racked with pneumonia, chronic respiratory illnesses and hunger.

The freeze is also killing hundreds of alpaca. Farmers are struggling to keep livestock alive due to frozen water points and a lack of food, which could have severe repercussions on the ability of families to see out the winter.

The declaration of a state of emergency means authorities in affected states can get emergency funds to provide medicine, blankets and shelter to those most at risk.

This article was published in The Observer on 1 August 2010

Child refugees risk all to reach South Africa

Annie Kelly — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:42:27 +0000

When 14-year-old Johnson left his village in Zimbabwe he had one goal in mind – to reach South Africa and the World Cup. A few weeks ago he finally made it, struggling through a hole in the barbed-wire border fence. But the horrors he encountered on his journey – the beatings and robbery by armed gangs, the crocodile-infested Limpopo and the screams of girls in the darkness of the bush – will stay with him for ever.

“I had nothing at home and there was no food and I heard there was going to be plenty of work in South Africa, so I decided to come,” he says. “The crossing was very bad. I was travelling with four other children, but only two of us made it across the border.”

Clad in a faded Arsenal T-shirt, he shows wounds on his leg that he claims are from beatings by magumaguma, armed bandits who patrol the bush on either side of the border, extorting money for “safe passage” and raping and robbing with impunity.

“When we crossed the river we came upon the bandits, who hit us with sticks and stole our money,” he says. “They chased some girls and we heard them screaming, but we ran away.”

Despite the scars that bear witness to these attacks, Johnson is one of the lucky ones. Every month some of the estimated 3,000 Zimbabwean children who attempt to make the crossing into South Africa die trying. Now, as World Cup fever sweeps through the African continent, increasing numbers of child migrants trying to move illegally across this and other borders into South Africa are risking their lives and facing robbery, rape and exploitation.

Many are drawn by the allure of the tournament and the promise of a boom in informal and largely unregulated jobs generated by the hundreds of thousands of tourists descending on the country in the coming weeks.

Others are coming simply to see the football. In a soup kitchen run by Save the Children UK close to the border, 17-year-old Raphael says he has been in South Africa for six months and that he has nearly saved the money he needs to get to Johannesburg. “We came to South Africa because of problems in Zimbabwe. There is no money and no work,” he says. “But coming to see the football is one of the reasons we boys now come to South Africa. I am certain I will be able to get a ticket for one of the games.”

“Many come to us in a bad way,” says Nemaranzhe Themba, a government social worker in Musina. “You see the numbers on the streets every night? We just can’t get to them all. The police do pick some up at the border who are naked because their clothes and everything have been stolen or they are bleeding, and much worse things happen to the girls.”

In the past week, there have been almost 50 new arrivals. “They all want to go to Johannesburg, but most don’t even know where it is. Even those we send back, we see them here again in town just a few weeks later.”

Until a few days ago Cecilia, a tiny, shorn-headed 10-year-old, slept and scavenged on the streets before she was picked up by a social worker and brought to a refuge for migrant women and girls. In a faded green dress and cracked flip-flops, she now sits in silence in a corner talking to no one.

Refuge staff think her parents died of cholera last year and since then she has fended for herself. “We’ve seen her before, she comes backwards and forwards across the border trying to make money, but this time she had bad injuries and has obviously suffered a lot, but she still barely says a word and we don’t know what to do with her,” says Babongile Mudau, the refuge manager. “Obviously the risk is that at some point she will just disappear, be picked up by someone or try to get to one of the cities, and we will lose track of her entirely.”

Despite the dangers they face crossing and the hardships they go through trying to survive afterwards, the view of the majority of migrant children here seems to be that a life on the streets in South Africa is still infinitely better than what they have at home.

“At home there is nothing, no food. I want to go to school, but there is no possibility of this in Zimbabwe,” says Memory Gokwe, a pretty 16-year-old from Gwanda, in the south of Zimbabwe. Like many migrant children here in Musina, Memory paid money to a people-smuggler to secure her crossing.

“My sister send a man, a transporter, to my village to bring me here to South Africa,” she says. “He was supposed to bring me across the border in a truck, but instead he passed me to another man who took me and four other children and two grown women through the river Limpopo to get to the border. The man wanted to rape us, but the women said they should be the ones instead of us, so when that happened we ran away.”

In February Unicef, warned that the World Cup would bring a “flood” of child migrants into South Africa. The South African government has put patrols along the 200km barbed-wire border and promised extra shelters in tournament cities. “When you’ve got something like the World Cup going on, it’s difficult to cope with both the increased numbers and keep the pressure on to protect the most vulnerable,” says Rudzani Ramugondo, Save the Children UK’s deputy programme manager in Musina, who lists xenophobia, drug trafficking and exploitation as some of the dangers migrant children could face.

“For example, in the past weeks or months we have simply stopped seeing girls coming across the border, which doesn’t mean they’re not coming, it just means that the people-smugglers are getting better at picking them up or hiding them in containers or trucks where they are transported straight to the cities.”

On the long tarmac road out of Musina cars pass groups of children clad in tattered shorts and gym shoes, hoping to catch a lift for part of the 580km journey to Johannesburg. Those who reach the city usually end up in downtown areas like Hillbrow, where Elliot Hrutlwo, a community worker for the Johannesburg Child Welfare Group, has seen increasing numbers of children on the streets from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi in recent weeks.

“The World Cup could be great for South Africa but bad for these children,” he says. Hrutlwo points to a group of boys aged about 14 or 15 sitting glassy-eyed in a Hillbrow public park. “Those boys, last week they came from Musina,” he says. “They got here and said, where are the jobs? Where are the schools? Already they are sniffing glue. The problem is that after the World Cup they will still be here once the world has forgotten about South Africa again, and then what will happen to them?”

This article appeared in The Observer on 13 June 2010

Lesbian women in South Africa face a rising tide of violence and “corrective rape”

Annie Kelly — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:12:14 +0000