Police discovered the remains of Agostina Vega, 14, on Saturday in a field near Córdoba. She had been fatally strangled and her body dismembered, local media reported. Vega had left home on May 23 and taken a taxi to the home of Claudio Barrelier, 33, a family friend. Barrelier was arrested after a taxi driver informed police he had taken Vega to an intersection matching the location of Barrelier’s house. CCTV footage showed her entering the house but not leaving. The case is being investigated as femicide: the killing of a woman or girl because of her gender. Barrelier is in custody and denies murder.

Outrage Over Lifestyle Speculation

Agostina’s father, Gabriel Vega, expressed his anguish during a press conference on Wednesday evening. “Just like they murdered my daughter, there are going to be loads of Agostinas, and this can’t happen again,” he said. He also criticized online speculation about her lifestyle, noting, “People are posting photos of her when she went out dancing. Why don’t they post photos of her going to school?”

Barrelier was previously involved in a legal case for allegedly kidnapping a woman in 2025. He was held for 20 days in that case before being released on bail.

Second Victim Found in Misiones

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

The two girls were found just days before feminist activists held the 11th annual Ni Una Menos (Not a single woman less) anti-femicide march on Wednesday. The protest, which began in 2015 after the murder of 14-year-old Chiara Páez, became the nucleus of a new wave of feminist activism across Latin America.

Government Policies and Femicide Data

This year’s march took place two and a half years into the presidency of Javier Milei, a far-right economist whose government has shuttered the ministry of women, genders, and diversity and axed support for women fleeing gender-based violence. The government has also moved to remove the crime of femicide from the criminal code. Data from the supreme court indicates that rates of femicide have fallen from 250 in 2023 – the final year of the previous government – to 200 in 2025. The government attributes this decline to its economic reforms, which they claim create a stronger and more stable economy, leading to lower rates of violence without the need for state intervention.

Feminist campaigners have rejected this narrative. They argue that much of the decline is due to fewer femicides being properly registered. Also, the main jurisdiction showing a genuine drop in cases is the populous province of Buenos Aires – a region controlled by the opposition and still equipped with a provincial ministry of women and diversity.

“This decline that the government is claiming, which isn’t true, has to do with refusals to register a crime as a femicide,” said Lucía de la Vega, who coordinates work on violence against women at the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a human rights non-profit. “It also has to do with the elimination of places and entities that gathered statistics and registered violence against women.”

Senator Carolina Losada, of the government-aligned Juntos por el Cambio party, has pushed a draft law that would introduce harsher punishments for false accusations of rape and other sexual crimes. However, a recent analysis by the public prosecutor’s office showed that just 0.09% of gender-based violence reports were false. Meanwhile, an estimated 77% of all crimes are never reported.

The bill, and similar projects, have not been approved at present but, as support for survivors is withdrawn, such discourse makes it even harder for them to seek justice, said feminist lawyer Soledad Deza. When she heard of Agostina and Dulce’s cases, Deza felt “a great sense of powerlessness.”

“Given what we feminists have been warning of all along, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she added.

Amid the outcry over the deaths of Vega and Candia, news broke of the killing of a 30-year-old woman on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Noelia Romero had called the police and told them that her boyfriend, Tomás Adrián Núñez, was holding her hostage. Officers went to the house but spent hours waiting to be granted a warrant while Romero was murdered. Immediately afterwards, Núñez attempted to take his own life, according to local media. He was taken to hospital and formally placed in police custody. Núñez had previously been reported for gender-based violence by both Romero and a former partner.