[Warning This video contains graphic content]
Never thought I would come to see my daughter in this place.
We buried her this morning.
She didn’t deserve to be here
where I am and where she rests.
My heart
feels like it’s been stabbed.
It feels like they killed me when they killed my daughter.
In Honduras, gang violence, poverty and corruption
is fueling a bloody war against women.
Right now, they could be killing another.
They cut their arms.
They peel their skin like vegetables.
This past year alone, a woman has been murdered every 36 hours,
making Honduras the femicide epicenter of Latin America.
As a femicide investigator, I’m shocked.
I ask myself,
what’s going wrong with men?
I have to be the forensic doctor to recover the bodies,
pulling them all the way up this hill.
Here, women die for no reason.
It really hurts, what they did to my daughter.
[Femicide in Honduras]
Her name was Ashley Lilibeth Salinas.
Here is where she lived; this was her room.
This was her bed and her fan.
This was her bed. She lived here.
These were all her things that she kept back there.
She really enjoyed dressing well.
She was very special to us, and she was my youngest daughter.
She went missing on Sunday at 4 pm,
and the missing notice came yesterday.
Just yesterday, on Tuesday, the notice appeared.
We ask the authorities for justice
so that they investigate the case because this cannot go unpunished.
My daughter was an innocent kid.
she was an innocent 14-year-old.
In our country, she isn’t the first, second, or third woman
murdered by criminals.
What do the authorities do?
They do nothing.
We’re doomed to failure.
I think my daughter was raped and strangled.
They took her life. Those ingrates have no heart.
It’s as if they never had a mother or a father
because the pain is ours.
But that’s the situation in our country,
and that’s why we’re really fucked in this country.
The authorities don’t look after anyone.
Citizens are not protected by anyone. No one protects us, no one.
No one, no one.
According to informants we have in this sector,
many women, unfortunately due to the country’s economic situation,
have become involved in working as informants
for the gangs or selling drugs.
There are women who do not want to work for them,
so they force them to work for them, and if they refuse,
the retaliation, the way of instilling respect
of the gangs
is through violence, through homicides,
or the violent deaths against women.
We don’t have the same technology as in the United States,
so identifying people is done purely through human sources.
Purely information from people who want to collaborate.
And this is very difficult due to the fear
that what happened to Ashley could happen again.
According to forensic reports, she was not raped;
she was just executed.
The zone where she was found
is an isolated location, and unpopulated location.
So there aren’t cameras, there aren’t houses,
it’s an agricultural location.
It’s where they cultivate sugar cane,
so there won’t be any eye witnesses.
It’s a question of gang territories.
It could have been the 18th Street gang.
We hope in a few hours, no longer than 72 hours, to have captured
the people responsible for the death of this woman.
Weeks later, there were no further investigations made on Ashley’s case.
Ninety five percent of crimes against women in Honduras
aren’t even investigated.
But a group of women are taking action.
MOMUCLAA, an organization created by a group of women in 1992,
has been actively working to combat femicides.
We work to defend women’s rights.
When women suffer domestic violence,
attempted murder also,
then we are here to support them.
We play the role of psychologist, of doctor, everything.
I have to be the forensic doctor to recover the bodies,
pulling them all the way up this hill
along with everyone in our team, and it’s all volunteer work.
Melania risks it all to save women’s lives.
Over the years, she's developed a rapport with the gangs.
We’ve known the high ranks since they were kids,
their mothers, fathers, and brothers.
And that’s why they respect us. “Ah, it’s just the MOMUCLAA.”
Despite her relationships with them, cases are flooding into her office.
This past week alone, she’s had dozens of women come to her for help.
They include women like Elsa.
I have a partner; we are married.
I have two children.
Drinking too much has ruined him,
and now he thinks that I am cheating on him,
which is not true because I go out to work every day.
He has threatened me with a knife and saying he will kill me.
So, I went to the court in Choloma to report him,
and he got a restraining order for six months, and he hasn’t honored it.
He followed her with a knife several times.
And because she ran away and his in the neighbor’s house,
he wasn’t able to kill her.
I’d like help because he’s my children’s father,
but I don’t want him to hurt me
because the way he thinks is wrong.
I want him to go to jail,
and there he can be kept away from me, and I can lead my life.
Here in Choloma, women get murdered during the day, not at night.
They cut their arms.
They peel their skin like vegetables,
take off their flesh, the head there, the arms over there, everywhere.
Many gangs are there now too, like MS-13,
18th Street gang, Los Rumberos.
Many people have come,
many young men who lack opportunities
are here now.
They're by the side where I live,
right by the community, and that area is dangerous.
The way they think is,
“If I’m going to jail, I may as well kill her.”
Here are some women who’ve been beaten.
They come here and tell me how they kick them.
He was grabbing her with a knife.
He told her if he couldn’t have her, no one could.
He told her he was going to tear her to pieces.
So...
So she called us, and we were able to rescue her.
We were able to save her from this guy.
We had two young girls, one of them was 13,
the other was 16.
So I had to go and identify the body of the girl who was 13,
and that had a big impact on me.
It was intense to go with her mother, see her in a sack,
and to get her out of the sack to recognize her.
I’m a mother, and it was very painful for me to see
our own young men killing our young women for the lack of opportunities
we have.
We hope this doesn’t keep happening.
It’s hard when there’s no opportunity to move forward.
No chance to get work.
People are under the social violence we have in the country.
There’s no security, no health programs. It’s a complete mess.
And of course, the young girls look for alternatives,
and the ones they find are not positive
but are negative.
We are talking about 11, 13. 15-year-old girls.
They have to sell their bodies.
They can’t say no to be in networks in order to survive.
Donaira Haylock has been working as the head of the femicide unit
for six years.
She’s dealt with hundreds of femicide cases
throughout the country.
As the femicide unit of the DPI [National Police of Honduras]
we have never stopped investigating femicide cases.
We go to one after another.
It’s not easy to be in femicide investigations.
All around you, male chauvinism is common.
For example, as a woman in my job,
there’s more men than women.
The men often say,
“Why are we going to bring the old ladies?
Oh, you are women, the weaker sex.”
I say, “Fine,” and end up competing against them.
I feel pleased when I’m working on a case, take it to trial,
and come out winning.
I would like to make a comment about a 20-year-old girl.
She was murdered here in Rivera Hernandez.
She had a boyfriend who belonged to a local criminal network.
They were separated, and after a while, they got back together.
One day, he asked her to come here.
I’ll never forget; it was December 5th, 2016.
One day later, on the 6th, we found her beheaded.
Her head was on a tree.
She was completely naked under the tree.
She had been sexually abused and beaten.
The family was destroyed when they saw this situation,
the mother, the father, you have no idea.
So we ended up investigating the case for nearly a year.
As an investigator of women’s deaths, I’m shocked.
I ask myself,
what’s going wrong with men?
Honduras is one of the most violent countries.
I really can’t say what needs to be done
to stop femicides, women’s deaths,
or abuse towards women.
Right here is the place where a girl was found dismembered,
and this area is very dark and dangerous.
So we are looking for places
we can reclaim to improve the communities we live in.
Here we have the highest rate of domestic violence.
Girls are assaulted and raped.
Their human rights are not respected.
We gather here to share with the young girls, boys,
young people, boys lacking opportunities,
women, and men who ask themselves
why are there so many dead women?
So we decided to speak to them directly
because people end up feeling tense and scared to go outside
because they are afraid of being raped or assaulted.
So we have to start this ongoing process and support our communities.
The feminist organizations are the ones pushing
to achieve change and transformation
and for justice to be served.
Just as the victims have a first and last name,
the aggressors also have a first and last name.
That’s the reason we fight.
We’re here for justice because
here we are killed as if they were cutting a tree branch,
and we are all human beings.