QUITO | Hundreds of women protested Saturday against femicides in Ecuador, which an NGO said have claimed 206 victims since the beginning of the year, including a lawyer murdered at a police academy in Quito.
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They held up signs that read, “Look at me carefully, I could be the next victim.”
And with the cry “We want to live”, demonstrators marched through the streets of the capital and other Ecuadorian cities under the motto “United against the femicide state”.
The country was rocked by the murder of lawyer Maria Belen Bernal, 34, by her husband, Lieutenant German Caceres.
She disappeared on September 11 after entering the École Supérieure de Police (ESP), an officer training school on the outskirts of the capital, to visit her husband, the prime suspect in the murder, who is on the run.
His body was found four days later on a hill near ESP.
In connection with this case, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso ordered the dismissal of two generals and Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo.
Demonstrators gathered outside the police headquarters in north Quito threw eggs and spray-painted walls red and yellow.
According to an NGO that monitors gender-based violence, 206 murders of women have been recorded in Ecuador since the beginning of the year.
The attorney general’s office says there have been 573 murders of women since 2014, a crime punishable by up to 26 years in prison.
According to official statistics, 65 out of 100 women between the ages of 15 and 49 in Ecuador, a country of 18 million people, have experienced some form of violence.