Miss Honduras's killing all too familiar in world's murder capital
The beauty queen's murder by her sister's boyfriend is just a high-profile example of the sort of violence 鈥� particularly against women 鈥� that has given Honduras the worst per capita murder rate outside a war zone.
The beauty queen's murder by her sister's boyfriend is just a high-profile example of the sort of violence 鈥� particularly against women 鈥� that has given Honduras the worst per capita murder rate outside a war zone.
The murder of a Honduran beauty queen and her sister has drawn attention not only to their Central American nation鈥檚 high murder rate, but the scourge of violence against women there.
The bodies of Maria Jose Alvarado and her older sister Sofia were found buried near a river about 240 miles west of Tegucigalpa, the capital, a week after they鈥檇 gone missing. They were found just hours before Ms. Alvarado was to fly to London to represent Honduras in the Miss World pageant.
The sister's boyfriend, Plutarco Ruiz, led investigators to the gravesite this week. Mr. Ruiz allegedly shot the young women at his birthday party in "a fit of jealousy" after Sofia danced with another man, Reuters reports. Alvarado was shot twice in the back.
Much as聽the murder of a former beauty queen in Venezuela in January shone a spotlight on that nation鈥檚 high crime and murder rates, the killing of the Alvardo sisters has brought international scrutiny of a problem all too familiar to many in Honduras. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world outside of a war zone, with 82.1 homicides per 100,000, according to the most recent United Nations data. On top of that, only an estimated 5 percent of murders are solved.
According to The Center for Women鈥檚 Rights in Tegucigalpa, 328 women have been killed in Honduras so far this year.
"The case of Mary Jose and Sofia show clearly the situation of generalized violence against women and the nonexistent response of the Honduran government to prevent, investigate or punish it," the center wrote in a statement.
Poorly trained police and underfunded prosecutors are often unwilling or unable to investigate homicides, reports The New York Times. Furthermore, there's no system in place to track missing people, reports Salvadoran news outlet El Faro. In this case, however, military police were sent on a high-profile search for the missing women.
鈥淢any girls die this way but because they aren鈥檛 famous, nobody pays attention,鈥� Salvador Nasrallah, a TV host and former presidential candidate, told The New York Times.
According to a 2012 story by 海角大神, Latin America has seen聽a spike in reports of violence against women in recent years.
"Femicides in聽Mexico,聽Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador have all shot up in recent years, registering some of the highest rates in the world. The latter has seen the biggest spike in femicide in Latin America, with 637 women murdered in 2011, almost quadruple the rate from a decade ago, says Silvia Juarez, who heads the violence against women program for the Organization of Salvadoran Women for Peace," the Monitor reports.
"We had her gown ready and her traditional dress costumes,"聽Mr. Nasrallah, who employed Alvarado as a model on his TV game show, told The Associated Press.
He added, "This is not a crime of passion; this is machismo."聽