“If It’s Not Femicide,It’s Still Murder”: Contestations Over Femicide in Nicaragua

A Chronicle of Femicidio Foretold

Femicidio was codified in Nicaragua in 2012 as part of Ley Integral contra La Violencia hacia las Mujeres (Law 779), a comprehensive piece of legislation whose passage was due in large part to sustained feminist activism and financial support by European cooperation agencies (Jubb, 2014). As feminist mobilization ramped up, the government formed its own inter-agency commission, underwritten by the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AECID). The commission’s stated goal was “to create a normative body [of law], which, in accordance with international legislation, would provide greater protection to women victims of violence.” ³ The reference to international legislation highlighted the Nicaraguan government’s intent to incorporate principles of two key supranational instruments relevant to women’s rights: the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the 1994 Belém do Pará Convention. Supreme Court Chief Justice Alba Luz Ramos and Sandinista legislator Carlos Emilio López both played crucial roles in the development of the legislation and its eventual passage in 2012 (Ramos, 2010). Law 779 officially went into effect on June 22, 2012.

The law’s content was noteworthy for numerous reasons, including its emphasis on the “unequal power relations between men and women” and its articulation of the state’s obligation to protect women’s right to a life free of violence, consistent with the Belém do Pará Convention. Although Law 779 contained several important provisions related to the prevention and punishment of gendered violence, here I focus solely on the issue of femicidio for analytical clarity. Article IX of Law 779 defined femicidio as follows: “The crime of femicidio is committed by the man that, in the framework of unequal power relations between men and women, causes the death of a woman in the public or private sphere.” It also delineated the specific circumstances that judges should take into consideration for sentencing in such cases: if the woman’s death was connected to “[an] unsuccessful attempt to establish or re-establish intimacy with the victim,” if there were any kind of familial, work, intimate, educational or guardianship relationship with the victim, if the woman’s death occurred as a result of repeated violence, if the death involved the sexual degradation of the women’s body (e.g., genital mutilation), if the woman’s death demonstrated evidence of misogyny, if the woman’s death was a result of a group ritual/gang activity, or if the act was committed in the presence of the victim’s children. Femicide cases would be investigated and tried by specialized prosecutors (members of the Unidad Especializada de Delitos contra la Violencia de Género, or Specialized Unit for Gender Violence Crimes) in newly established “Specialized Courts for Violence Against Women” (Juzgados Especializados de Violencia contra la Mujer). ⁴ The penalty for femicidio committed in the “public sphere” was 15-20 years in prison; for femicidio committed in the “private sphere,” the penalty was 20-25 years in prison. If the femicidio occurred with two or more of the aforementioned conditions, the maximum penalty would apply (30 years in prison).

Despite the seeming widespread consensus on the need to address the killing of women in a systematic way, Law 779 faced numerous obstacles. The immediate problem was financial. In June 2012, the Attorney General expressed concern that there was no budget to implement the law; he said, “The Supreme Court is already creating its [new] courts, but it has a constitutional budget. We don’t have resources. What are we going to do?” In July 2012, Judge Manuel Martinez commented, “Every law is like the birth of a premature child, especially in this country which lacks the resources to implement things the way they should be. So, the beginning is hard, but we have to have faith in [Law 779]” (Poder Judicial, 2012). These comments highlight two common themes in the reactions of state officials early on in the law’s implementation. On the one hand, officials claimed to be acting with good intentions, but simply did not have the resources to realize the lofty goals of the legislation. In the second example, the Judge highlights the need to “have faith” that eventually the budgetary issues would be resolved rather than indicate any concrete plan to address these deficiencies. The emphasis on faith is part of the Ortega government’s broader political discourse of “faith, family, and community” which figured prominently on brightly colored pink and yellow billboards throughout Managua during my fieldwork. Throughout the summer and fall of 2012, as feminists demanded that the state invest greater resources in training police and hiring new special prosecutors, state officials issued repeated calls for patience and understanding, or pointed to narrow examples of success, such as convictions in a limited number of sexual violence cases.

However, Law 779 also faced strong social and legal opposition from conservative and religious sectors of Nicaraguan society (Jubb, 2014). Early critiques of Law 779 were not directed at femicidio per se, but rather to the law’s potential to undermine so-called “family unity” given its prohibition of extra-judicial agreements (also known as mediation). Such agreements had been frequently used by police in the past to “resolve” gendered violence cases without going through a formal investigation or trial. In July 2012, a local group of attorneys (ADANIC) challenged the constitutionality of Law 779 with the Supreme Court, arguing that it violated the constitutional principle of equality under the law (La Prensa, 2013). These lawyers contended that Law 779 was discriminatory against men because it created a presumption of guilt through the increased latitude for the use of protective orders. They also argued that the law violated another legal principle in Nicaragua known as the “principle of opportunity” by prohibiting mediation as an option for conflict resolution in gender violence cases. Evangelical leaders echoed these arguments, calling the law an attack against men and marriage and urged its immediate reform’ one pastor went as far as to call Law 779 “the new number of the beast”.

However, Justice Ramos and Sandinista Deputy Carlos Emilio López, a member of the legislative commission involved in the creation of the law, publicly defended its constitutionality. In Deputy López’s words, Law 779 would “create respectful marriages, strong united families that develop loving harmonious relationships. The Law, if it is...applied correctly will produce strong families, strong communities, and a solid society” (Martínez, 2013). Throughout 2012 and early 2013, Justice Ramos also encouraged feminist activists to stay vigilant in their defense of the law, and rebuked her colleagues on the bench for publicly taking sides on the law’s constitutionality. In a speech for International Women’s Day 2013, she said: “The law has many adversaries, even within the judicial branch, not only outside, and there are people who have claimed the law is unconstitutional, and there are judges who have spoken out without an in-depth understanding of the law and without having read the complaints [against it]” (Vásquez, 2013).

In August 2013, the Supreme Court upheld Law 779 as constitutional, but ordered the National Assembly to reform it to re-introduce the option of mediation. Responding to ongoing pressure from conservative and religious groups, the National Assembly quickly passed the required reform, once again permitting mediation for first time and minor offenses. Surprisingly, Justice Ramos and Deputy López both defended these reforms, despite their support for the original law. However, feminists, supranational actors, and international human rights organizations publicly denounced the 2013 reform of the law. In May 2014, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) urged the Nicaraguan delegation to reconsider the amendments to Law 779 in order to comply with CEDAW (UNGA, 2014). However, the Ortega administration did little to heed the HRC’s concerns.

During the summer of 2014, the anniversary of Law 779’s passage sparked renewed media coverage about its effectiveness. In assessing the state’s progress to address gendered violence, officials made various and sometimes contradictory statements. For example, Adda Benicia Vanegas Ramos, president of the Specialized Appeals Court for Violence, discussing the rising numbers of women placing legal complaints, commented: “The statistical increase is due to the fact that women are no longer afraid to denounce [violence] and claim their rights. The law itself has made the problem of violence in society visible.” Yet this visibility had not translated into justice for many women. For example, data collected by the Gender Violence Observatory of the RMCV showed that 39% of femicidios committed from January to June 2014 remained unresolved, which some state officials attributed to the high numbers of fugitives who fled the country (García, 2014a, 2014b). “The judicial authorities don’t have anything to do with these criminals fleeing from the law.” Supreme Court Chief Justice Alba Luz Ramos said, absolving authorities of responsibility for the lack of justice in these cases. “No one can say there is disinterest in handling these cases [femicidios],” she added (García, 2014a, 2014b).

Prosecutor Ruby Ann Lacayo also expressed her concern about impunity rates, noting that “You can’t allow impunity, because if you leave these crimes in impunity it sends a negative message, that you can keep exercising violence” (Vásquez, 2014a). Yet the state continued to face accusations that it was not taking femicidio and other forms of gendered violence seriously, particularly in terms of education and prevention. In response, the Vice-Minister of Education Norma Irías defended the government’s policies, pointing to efforts to educate students about violence and to change cultural norms. In a statement to El Nuevo Diario (2014), she said, “As we continue to discuss the issue of security in the schools, we are going to eradicate violence and instill a new culture of living in harmony and teamwork.” Notably, Irías’ remarks made no mention of gendered violence specifically, but rather referred to more general matters like “harmony” and “teamwork.”

The state’s rhetorical shift away from discussions of gendered violence and toward “family harmony” was a harbinger of things to come. Several weeks later, a dispute among the justices of the Nicaraguan Supreme Court about what constitutes femicidio became public. The President of the National Assembly, René Núñez, subsequently opined that femicidio was “correctly defined in the law” and that it was the job of judges to apply it (Carranza, 2014). Shortly thereafter, Police Commissioner Francisco Díaz announced that there were many fewer femicidios than feminist organizations claimed because, in his view, femicidio could only be committed in the context of a pre-existing relationship (Membreño, 2014). Díaz’s statement explicitly contradicted the original textual definition of femicidio in Law 779 which encompassed murders of women committed by either known or unknown actors. Despite this, Supreme Court Justice Rafael Solís immediately declared his support for the police chief’s position: “if there is no relationship [relación de pareja], there is no femicidio” (Vásquez, 2014b).

Just days after these new legal controversies came to light, President Ortega signed an executive order (Decreto 42-2014) on July 31, 2014 that weakened Law 779 in a number of ways, including by delimiting the statutory definition of femicidio to match the statements of Justice Solís and Commissioner Díaz. The decree redefined the law’s objective as “to strengthen Nicaraguan families...[and] a culture of familial harmony” (Decreto 42-2014, Article I). It also reconceptualized femicidio as a “crime committed by a man in the framework of interpersonal relations [emphasis mine] that results in the death of a woman.” The decree stipulated that “interpersonal relations” were limited to specific affective relationships: partner, husband, ex-husband, boyfriend, and ex-boyfriend. The murder of a woman by a man who did not fall into one of those categories would no longer be considered a femicidio according to the law but would rather be classified as homicide or murder, depending on the specific circumstances of the case. Surprisingly, even Chief Justice Ramos, one of the earliest proponents of Law 779, supported altering the definition of femicidio, arguing that the change was irrelevant because crimes not prosecuted as femicides would still proceed under the charge of murder, which carried just as severe of a penalty. In her words, “A dead woman is a dead woman. In the end it doesn’t matter what it’s called” (Poder Judicial, 2014).

Justice Rafael Solís also defended the decree as entirely legal and in compliance with international conventions; he said, “the regulations [in the decree] don’t modify the law, they don’t go against international agreements, every country should apply them in accordance with their own customs and values” (Vásquez & Romero, 2014). Solís’ remarks contain echoes of a common argument historically made by some state actors when it comes to complying with certain human rights agreements—that is, that these agreements fail to respect local customs and traditions (Merry, 2006). However, the use of this type of argument with regard to femicidio is arguably specious. The killing of women is hardly a matter to which appeals to “cultural difference” should merit serious consideration or debate. Even if Solis’ comments were intended only to address other portions of the executive order dealing with the formation of a neighborhood family counseling system, they still reflect a clear disregard for the well-established connections between other forms of gendered violence and femicidio.

A Feminist Defense of the Femicidio Framework

The shift in state discourse and policy to conflate femicidio with other crimes like homicide or murder, and to delimit its juridical scope, provoked a renewed round of feminist strategizing and public demonstrations defending Law 779. One of the most important of these events was an open press conference-cum-workshop hosted by a coalition of feminist organizations and targeted at journalists entitled “Light and Shadows of Law 779” held in August 2014. Participating organizations included the Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres (Autonomous Women’s Movement), Movimiento Feminista de Nicaragua (Feminist Movement of Nicaragua), Colectivo 8 de Marzo (March 8^th Collective), and Red de Mujeres contra la Violencia (Women’s Network against Violence), the latter of which is an umbrella organization which represents many other grassroots women’s groups. At this event, feminist leaders responded directly to the claims of state officials like Supreme Court Justice Ramos, and laid out their main arguments against the president’s executive order (specifically with regard to the more delimited definition of femicide). The analysis of Nicaraguan feminist arguments about femicidio that follows is drawn primarily from this event due to the comprehensive content of the material presented therein, which is consistent with other events I attended throughout my fieldwork.

Feminists’ arguments about the changes to Law 779 as they relate to femicidio fell into two main categories: juridical and theoretical. Within the juridical category, feminist organizations marshalled a number of both procedural and substantive arguments. On a procedural level, feminists argued that President Ortega’s use of an executive decree to reform the law, not merely clarify its implementation, was a blatant usurpation of power that rightfully belonged to the legislative branch (García, 2014a, 2014b). As Luz Marina Torres, director of the Women’s Collective 8 de marzo, put it, “this reform erases the juridical order. The legislative and judicial powers have been superceded ….This is how machismo and authoritarianism manifest themselves in the presidency. Above the constitution, international conventions, the national laws and institutional commitments” (fieldnotes 8/2014). Torres’ remarks emphasized the breakdown of both the national and international legal order, pointing to the collapse of the separation of powers as well as the president’s disregard for the tenets of international agreements to which Nicaragua is a signatory.

Feminist attorney Juanita Jimenez echoed these arguments and built upon them, stating that, “Our constitutional norms establish that equality should be absolute between men and women and the state has an obligation to eliminate any obstacles that impede this equality.” Jimenez’s comments moved beyond procedural complaints to address the substantive issues raised by the executive order, particularly the state’s constitutional responsibility to eliminate “any obstacles” to gender equality. Clearly, one of the gravest obstacles to gender equality is the normalization of violence against women, as reflected in the impunity with which such crimes are treated. Jimenez contended that the president’s executive order not only abdicated on the state’s constitutional responsibility to punish such crimes appropriately, but was also inconsistent with the definition of violence against women established by the Belém do Pará Convention. Here it is worth quoting Jimenez at length to understand the importance of this convention as a legal foundation for Nicaraguan feminists’ arguments about gendered violence:

“We need to rescue this Convention [Belém do Pará] because it contains a conceptualization of how we should understand violence….violence does not only take place in the private sphere, but in the public sphere as well...when we talk about violence in the law, it’s important to recognize both the family sphere as well as the public sphere...it’s not just in the street that rights should be respected, but also in the home, in family relationships, in the community, in labor relationships, and also in relationship with the state itself.”

Jimenez’s remarks underscore the importance of the linkages between gendered violence in the public and private spheres, an artificial dichotomy that has historically been used to invisibilize women’s experiences of violence in the home. In this instance, however, the Nicaraguan state sought to do the opposite of its typical pattern in two ways. First, it aimed to erase the gendered dimensions of the killing of women in the public sphere by treating such violence as unconnected from equivalent acts that took place in the home. Second, it assumed that the killing of women by strangers could not be motivated by the same misogynistic motives underlying femicidios committed by intimate partners. Nicaraguan feminists identified both of these stances of the state as inconsistent with key principles set forth in the Belém do Pará Convention, including its comprehensive definition of violence against women, its emphasis on the power relationships sustaining such violence, and its articulation of the state’s responsibility to address it. Therefore, for feminists, Law 779’s validity rested on its consistency with Nicaragua’s constitution and international instruments. As Jimenez put it: “These two instruments and the constitution are the fundamental foundation of the legal framework that sustains the integral law against violence toward women [Law 779].”

In addition to feminists’ general legal arguments about the validity of Law 779, they also made other theoretical arguments defending the importance of the terms femicidio and/or feminicidio as a framework for categorizing and documenting the killing of women. Their arguments highlight the relationship between power, discourse (understood as the use of language for political ends), and visibility. Specifically, feminists argued that maintaining femicidio as a category of social, political, and legal analysis was imperative because such language enabled the violent consequences of the unequal relationship between men and women to become increasingly visible. Power differentials between men and women cannot be changed without tangible evidence of the violent mechanisms by which men maintain power and control over women, the most extreme manifestation of which is femicidio. As one feminist put it, “With this [executive order], the state is normalizing violence, ignoring its importance as a social problem.” The presenters also gave several examples of murders of women which had occurred during the previous year which did not involve pre-existing affective relationships but nevertheless involved circumstances that clearly indicated gender-related motives for the killings. ⁵

Nicaraguan feminists used several interrelated arguments to counter state discourses minimizing the importance of femicidio. First, they argued that the use of the term femicidio calls attention to the disproportionate numbers of women killed because of their gender in a way that other terms utilized to categorize criminal deaths do not. As Juanita Jimenez put it, “femicidio is recovering the violent ways that women’s lives are extinguished because they are women. It has to do with this way that men feel they have the right to control the lives of women...the appropriation of the life, the body of women.” In other words, feminists contended that femicidio is not a “common death, but rather a death that is linked to being a woman,” and the greater social vulnerability that comes with being a woman. In short, femicidio is death predicated upon and reflective of the gendered division of resources and power in society.

Second, Nicaraguan feminists argued that using de-gendered language (e.g., referring to femicidio as homicide or murder) makes women invisible because such language, although apparently neutral, in fact upholds patriarchal ideologies that construct men as the “somatic norm” (Puwar, 2004). In the absence of gender-specific terminology, the tendency is to revert back to older concepts like “family violence” or “interpersonal violence” which fail to mark the ways in which violence in both public and private spaces is gendered. According to Nicaraguan feminists, “the problem [with the executive order] is that it contradicts the objective of the law. It’s not about the protection of the woman, but rather the family, which makes women invisible as a subject of rights and a human being. It’s trying to….make the circumstances of murder irrelevant, which is an atrocity” (fieldnotes, 8/2014). In other words, without gender-specific language to capture the specificity of violence, women’s experiences are swallowed up and their rights ignored. ⁶

Implications: What Difference Does Femicidio Make?

State actors claimed that altering the definition of femicidio would make no difference in how the killings of women were treated; however, this turned out to be false. The president’s executive order had real, tangible consequences for the way that femicidios subsequently were documented in Nicaragua. Government statistics reported a decline in the number of crimes classified as femicidios based on its more limited definition. For example, in 2015, the Public Prosecutor’s Office reported that out of 71 women murdered, 19 cases were charged as femicidio, 25 as murder (asesinato), 20 as homicide (homicidio), and 7 as parricide (parricidio). In 2016, the Public Prosecutor’s Office reported 49 women murdered; of these, 10 cases were charged as femicidio, 16 as murder, 21 as homicide, and two as parricide (Ministerio Público de Nicaragua, 2016). Meanwhile, feminist organizations including the Red de Mujeres Contra la Violencia (Network of Women against Violence, RMCV) and the Nicaraguan chapter of Católicas por el Derecho de Decidir (Catholics for the Right to Decide, CDD) continue to report substantially higher numbers of femicidios based on their own data collection using of the original definition of the crime in Law 779. For example, in 2016, the police’s annual report stated that there were 11 femicides, whereas CDD reported 49 (El Nuevo Diario, 2017).

Based on the new legal definition, the government limited its count to those cases which involved a pre-existing affective relationship and took place in the private sphere (the home), counting all other murders of women as homicides or parricides (La Prensa 2015, 5 January). However, data collected by the CDD between 2012 and 2017 suggests that there are a significant number of femicides in Nicaragua committed by individuals who are not the current or former partner of the victim (see Table 3). Most recently, of the 71 Nicaraguan women murdered in 2020, CDD reported that 29 were committed by partners/ex-partners, 10 by male family members (e.g., son and step-father), 15 by other male acquaintances, 15 by male strangers and two unknown (La Vanguardia, 4 January 2021). Cases of femicide committed outside the context of pre-existing relationships are also ubiquitous in other parts of Latin America, particularly Mexico (Monárrez, 2002).

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Table 3.

Relationship of Perpetrators to Femicide Victims in Nicaragua, 2012-2017 (Source: CDD).

	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Partner/ex-partner	25	24	29	18	14	27
Other individual known to the victim	18	14	22	15	10	12
Stranger	25	19	15	23	16	10
Total	68	57	66	56	40	49

Why does it matter how these cases are counted? One of the most important reasons is because legal definitions can be used to emphasize or erase women’s experiences of violence. While feminists insisted on counting femicidios according to the original legal standard to bear witness to these crimes, state officials dismissed the debate over terminology as insignificant as a matter of law (particularly with regard to punishment). By arguing for the juridical equivalence between terms like homicide and femicidio, the Nicaraguan state sought to depoliticize the killing of women by relegating femicidio to the private sphere. Moreover, the government’s own data from 2013 to 2018 provides little information on if or how the murders of women were ultimately investigated and prosecuted. In my review of the Public Prosecutor’s annual reports from 2013 to 2016, I found just two mentions of the number of cases of femicide in which charges were filed ⁷ ; meanwhile, the word femicidio does not appear in the judicial system’s annual reports at all between 2012 and 2018. ⁸

The foregoing analysis raises additional questions concerning the state’s motivations with respect to femicidio. For example, one might ask why the Supreme Court reversed its position and ultimately defended the president’s changes to the law. Much of the Supreme Court’s actions are incomprehensible without a broader understanding of both (a) the collapse of the separation of powers in Nicaragua and (b) the president’s longstanding alliance with conservative religious leaders, both Catholic and evangelical (Kampwirth, 2011; Puig, 2010). President Ortega’s course reversal on femicidio is the inevitable result of his increasing embrace of a patrimonial discourse that minimizes the entire spectrum of violent acts committed against women. This discourse has been adopted by other branches of government like the Supreme Court (which is now comprised of a majority of justices loyal to Ortega). For example, in August 2014, Supreme Court Justice Solís stated publicly: “There are 2,890 men detained for violence against women – that represents 36% of the 8,000 detained individuals nationally. It’s worth noting that there are almost 2,000 detained for situations that could be resolved with mediation; the man didn’t do anything serious, and yet he’s in jail” (Vásquez & Romero, 2014). Although remarks like these do not specifically mention femicide, they do serve to minimize the seriousness of gender-based violence in general, which in turn contributes to the normalization of such acts. Additionally, the Nicaraguan government took concrete steps to make the investigation and prosecution of gender-based violence cases more difficult by closing most of the country’s women’s police stations between 2016 and 2019 (Romero, 2016).

The state’s attempt to minimize femicidio may also be tied to its interest in preserving the country’s image as the “safest in Central America.” For example, Vilma Núñez of the Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos (Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, Cenidh) expressed the following: “What they [the state] are interested in is selling an image of Nicaragua as a secure country. Saying that every 4 days a woman is killed due to extreme violence would shock the international community, and that is what they don’t want” (Vásquez, 2014c). Still others find the government’s lack of serious attention to femicidio and other forms of gendered violence to be indicative of a clear gendered hierarchy in budget and policy priorities. For example, Reyna Rodriguez, the National Coordinator of the RMCV in 2014, put it this way: “Governments continue to arm themselves, requesting more funds to combat drugs and for social policy, but they don’t ask for funds to guarantee the security of women.” Within the state’s construction of policy priorities, the safety of women is treated as a secondary matter, unconnected to the broader project of public citizen security, which is focused mainly on drug trafficking and gang activity.