BOGOTÁ (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – In the weeks following her mother’s disappearance, Oriana Romero walked through the streets of the Peruvian town of Sayan, showing her a photo of hers only to locate clues about her whereabouts.
Her mother, Dominga Roman, a 46-year-old housekeeper, left the house in the early morning of January 19 to go to a party. She never came back here.
“We didn’t hear anything about my mom. Someone did something to her,” Romero, 23, a mother of two girls, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the phone.
“My eldest son asks when his grandmother will be back, who raised her until he was 3,” Romero said.
Romero and her sister reported to the police the lack of their mother and, with the words of a policeman, spoke to others at the party her mother and her ex-boyfriends had gone to.
The reports were confusing. Some witnesses said it was noticed that her mother was leaving the party at dawn, while others said she left on a motorcycle taxi.
But since the coronavirus blockade began in Peru in March, Romero has had to avoid the search.
From his poor community on the outskirts of the capital, Lima, he said he was afraid to take the three-hour bus to his mother’s house to speak to local police investigators.
“I’m afraid because of the pandemic. I don’t need to get the virus and threaten to pass it on to my children,” he said.
“I hope to be soon to reactivate the search and review the recordings of my mother’s phone calls to see what happened.”
Prior to the confinement, it was reported that an average of five women did not agree with the day in Peru. That number rose to 8 the lockdown, according to the Ombudsman’s Office, an independent framework that monitors human rights in Peru.
A total of 1,200 women and women have been reported to have disappeared since the lockout began from March 16 to July, according to figures from Peru’s Ministry of Women.
Some may simply be victims of hugging and violent crime such as domestic violence or femicide, sexist killing of a woguy through a man, women’s rights experts say.
Some victims of femicide, who have been reported missing, have been killed at the hands of their existing or former partners.
Since the beginning of the confinement in Peru, 37 femicides have been reported, according to government figures.
A 2018 law brought a national alert formula for deprived women. But without a proper national signal from absentees, it is unknown what happened to the absentees and whether they were discovered dead or alive, women’s rights activists say.
Peru’s new staff leader, Walter Martos, announced measures this week to combat gender-based violence and said a national register of people without people would be put in place in 40 days.
“Violence throughout its bureaucracy continues in the era of social isolation due to the pandemic,” he told Peru’s Congress on Tuesday.
In addition, more will be given to the government hotline committed to the lack of people to deal with cases, he said.
“These movements will mobilize the police at the national point to locate womenArray … as well as to fill the obligatory circle of family members,” Martos said.
Before a woman or woman disappears, there is a history of domestic violence, said Katherine Soto, who heads an aid organization for families of those in need: Missing Women Peru.
“Some deprived women have been abducted through their partners in their own homes and are not allowed to do so with their families,” Soto said.
Of the other 1200 people who lack Peru’s lockout, about two-thirds are girls.
Some lacking teenage women escape abusive families, a challenge that has been highlighted because school closures and coronavirus school closures mean they spend more time at home with the violent circle of family members.
Many Latin American countries, a region known for their higher rates of femicide and violence against women, as well as other countries have reported an increase in domestic violence under the coVID-19 closures.
“In the case of deprived teenage women, many women have been victims of internal violence in their own homes, victims of sexual, physical or other violence, and some of them have fled their homes,” Soto said.
Soto and the Ombudsman’s Office point out that the creation of a national missing cartel will allow further monitoring of the bodies and providing responses to the relatives of the victims.
“We have complaints and alerts issued for missing persons, but we don’t know how many of them have been discovered or are missing and what happened to them,” said Soto, who discovered Missing Women Peru in 2016 following the disappearance of a university. Friend. and discovered dead almost four years later.
The organization has about 30 families whose relatives have disappeared, some of whom disappeared a decade ago, navigate the justice system, monitor research and cross-media cross-examination to locate their loved ones.
Many families are left alone or the instances are passed from one police investigator to another, Soto said.
“Families feel abandoned. They feel their case doesn’t exist. They send me messages that say, “They don’t tell us anything, ” said Soto.” Families do their own research. They’re detectives.
The investigation is more complicated, as some families fear violating the rules of blocking and curfew.
“God only knows what happened. God only knows the truth. There’s no such thing as the best crime. Justice will come faster or later,” he said.
Reporting through Anastasia Moloney; Edited through Ellen Wulfhorst. Please mention the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Thomson Reuters’ charitable arm, which covers the lives of others around the world struggling to live freely or justly. Visit http://news.trust.org
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