Impunity and multisided violence in the lives of Latin American women: El Salvador in comparative perspective

Abstract

Women in El Salvador experience some of the highest levels of violence in the world in the form of feminicides: killings of women in a context of impunity. This trend is widespread, and this article contributes to a broader explanation of it through a case study of El Salvador in comparison to other Latin American countries. Although El Salvador has created institutions and laws to combat these crimes and ratified the 1994 Convention of Belém do Pará, crimes against women have continued undiminished. The authors argue that impunity and violence in El Salvador are deeply intertwined, with roots in multisided violence – a potent combination of structural, symbolic, political, gender and gendered, and everyday forms of violence. While much previous research has focused on individual acts of aggression, the authors advance an analysis of the extrapersonal structures that create and exacerbate the conditions that permit violent acts and impunity to persist.