Argentina's femicide crisis deepens as two teen girls murdered amid policy rollbacks

Argentina buried two teenage girls last week, and the country is asking why. Agostina Vega, fourteen, was found strangled and dismembered in a field outside Córdoba on a Saturday in late May. Dulce Candia, seventeen, turned up five days later in a septic tank at an abandoned construction site in Misiones province, also dead from strangulation. The discoveries came just two days apart, and they landed like a second blow to a nation already reeling from its femicide crisis—a crisis that the government insists is shrinking, even as the bodies keep appearing.

Agostina left home on the night of May 23rd to visit a family friend, a 33-year-old man named Claudio Barrelier. A taxi driver saw her go in. Security footage confirmed it. No footage showed her leaving. Police arrested Barrelier after the driver came forward; he denies the murder, but he was already tangled in another case—a 2025 kidnapping allegation that had landed him in custody for twenty days before he was released on bail. The case is being investigated as femicide: the killing of a woman or girl because of her gender. Dulce's death followed a similar pattern. She had been missing for twelve days when they found her. A 47-year-old taxi driver was arrested; authorities say she had been in a romantic relationship with him, a man thirty years her senior.

Agostina's father, Gabriel Vega, stood before cameras on Wednesday evening and spoke the kind of words that haunt a country. "Just like they murdered my daughter, there are going to be loads of Agostinas, and this can't happen again," he said. He also pushed back against the noise online—people posting pictures of his daughter dancing, questioning her choices, as if her movements on a Saturday night had anything to do with her death. "Why don't they post photos of her going to school?" he asked.

The timing of these murders was brutal in another way: they arrived just before the eleventh annual Ni Una Menos march, the "Not a single woman less" protest that has become the spine of feminist organizing across Latin America. The first march happened in 2015, after a fourteen-year-old named Chiara Páez was murdered by her boyfriend. This year's march was scheduled for Wednesday—the same day Agostina's father spoke to the press.

What made the moment even sharper was the government's response to the crisis. Javier Milei, Argentina's far-right president, has been in office for two and a half years. In that time, his administration has shuttered the ministry of women, genders and diversity. It has cut support for women fleeing gender-based violence. It is moving to remove femicide as a distinct crime from the criminal code, treating it instead as ordinary murder. The government's argument is straightforward: economic reforms create stability, stability reduces violence, and therefore state intervention is unnecessary. The numbers, they say, prove it. Femicides fell from 250 in 2023 to 200 in 2025.

Feminist lawyers and human rights researchers say the numbers are a mirage. Lucía de la Vega, who coordinates work on violence against women at the Center for Legal and Social Studies, put it plainly: much of the apparent decline comes from fewer femicides being properly registered. The entities that gathered statistics have been eliminated. The places where women could report violence have been shuttered. The one jurisdiction seeing a genuine drop is Buenos Aires province—which is controlled by the opposition and still maintains its own ministry of women and diversity. Meanwhile, a senator aligned with the government has been pushing legislation that would impose harsher penalties for false rape accusations, even though the public prosecutor's office found that just 0.09 percent of gender-based violence reports are false. An estimated 77 percent of all crimes go unreported.

Soledad Deza, a feminist lawyer, described the feeling as "a great sense of powerlessness." "Given what we feminists have been warning of all along, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy," she said. The prophecy kept unfolding. While the country was still processing Agostina and Dulce, news broke of a third killing: a 30-year-old woman named Noelia Romero, murdered on the outskirts of Buenos Aires by her boyfriend, Tomás Adrián Núñez. She had called the police and told them he was holding her hostage. Officers arrived but spent hours waiting for a warrant while she was killed inside. Núñez had been reported for gender-based violence before—by Romero and by a former partner. He attempted suicide after the murder and was taken to hospital under police custody.

Argentina is watching its femicide crisis deepen even as its government claims victory over it. The Ni Una Menos march will happen. The funerals will happen. And the question Gabriel Vega asked—why don't they post photos of her going to school?—will echo through a country that seems to have decided that economic policy matters more than the lives of its daughters.