Argentina reels after two teenage girls are murdered, escalating femicide crisis

Argentina has erupted in fury after the bodies of two murdered teenage girls were found just two days apart. The latest killings highlight the enduring femicide crisis in the South American nation, despite years of feminist activism, and have raised alarms over cuts to support for victims of gender violence under the government of far-right President Javier Milei.

Police found the remains of Agostina Vega, 14, on Saturday (May 31) in a field on the outskirts of Córdoba. Local media reports say she was strangled to death and her body dismembered. Vega left home on the evening of Saturday, May 23, and took a taxi to the home of Claudio Barrelier, 33, a family friend. Barrelier was arrested after a taxi driver told police he had taken Vega to an intersection matching the location of Barrelier's house. Security camera footage showed her entering his house, but no sign of her leaving. The case is being investigated as femicide: the killing of women or girls because of their gender. Barrelier is in pretrial detention and denies the murder.

“It's like they killed my daughter, there will be many more Agostinas, and this cannot happen again,” Vega's father, Gabriel Vega, said at a press conference on Wednesday evening (June 4). He also questioned social media speculation about his daughter's lifestyle. “People post photos of her out dancing. Why don't they post photos of her at school?” he said. Barrelier had previously been involved in a lawsuit accusing him of kidnapping a woman in 2025. He was jailed for 20 days in that case before being released on bail.

The body of Dulce Candia, 17, was found in a cesspool at an abandoned construction site in the town of Eldorado, Misiones province, on May 28. She had been missing for 12 days, and pathologists believe she had been dead for five or six days. Like Vega, the cause of death was strangulation. A 47-year-old taxi driver was arrested on suspicion of her murder. Raúl Maslowski, general director of security for the Misiones provincial police, told local channel 6 that Candia had a “romantic relationship” with the man, who was 30 years her senior.

The two teenagers were found just days before the 11th annual Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) march against femicide on Wednesday (June 4). The protest, which became the core of a new wave of feminist activism across Latin America, was first held on June 3, 2015, after 14-year-old Chiara Páez was killed by her boyfriend.

This year's march comes after two and a half years of Milei's presidency. His government has shut down the women, gender and diversity ministry, cut support for women fleeing gender violence, and proposed removing the crime of femicide (distinct from ordinary homicide) from the national criminal code. Supreme Court data shows the femicide rate fell from 250 cases in 2023—the last year of the previous administration—to 200 cases in 2025. The government argues its economic reforms create a stronger, more stable economy, which leads to lower violence rates without state intervention.

Feminist activists dismiss that argument. They say much of the decline is due to fewer femicides being properly registered. Moreover, the main judicial district apparently seeing a real decline is populous Buenos Aires province—but that province is controlled by the opposition and, unlike the national government, still has a provincial women and diversity ministry. “The drop that the government is claiming, which is false, is linked to the refusal to register a crime as femicide,” said Lucía de la Vega, coordinator of work on violence against women at the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a human rights nonprofit. “It's also linked to the elimination of the places and organizations that collect statistics and register violence against women.”

Senator Carolina Losada, from the government-allied Juntos por el Cambio party, has pushed a draft law imposing harsher penalties for false accusations of rape and other sexual crimes. However, a recent prosecutor's office analysis found only 0.09% of gender violence reports are false. Meanwhile, an estimated 77% of all crimes go unreported. Feminist lawyer Soledad Deza said the bill and similar projects have not passed yet, but as support for survivors is withdrawn, such discourses make it harder for them to seek justice. Upon hearing the news about Agostina and Dulce, Deza felt “an overwhelming sense of powerlessness,” she added: “In the face of what we feminists have long warned about, it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Amid the wave of outrage over Vega and Candia's deaths, news emerged of the murder of a 30-year-old woman on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Noelia Romero called police saying her boyfriend, Tomás Adrián Núñez, was holding her hostage. Officers arrived at the home, but while they waited hours for a search warrant, Romero was killed. Soon after, Núñez attempted suicide, according to local media. He was taken to hospital, charged with murder and formally placed under police custody. Núñez had previously been denounced for gender violence by both Romero and an ex-girlfriend.