Feminicides in Peru and Colombia: the role of legal and illegal capitalist relations

Latin America has been at the centre of the global challenge of feminicides, but not all countries experience similar levels of violence against women. For example, during the same period that Colombia witnessed almost 4000 killings, Peru saw just over 700 – related to the size of their populations, Colombia experienced more than double the rate of feminicides than Peru. We submit that an understanding of the differences between Colombia and Peru necessitates the integration of capitalist globalisation and the power and influence of transnational organised crime in our analyses. Through a most similar comparative analysis of the two countries, we find that the substantially greater size, presence and influence of transnational criminal networks in Colombia has been central to their different rates. Capitalist globalisation (its legal and illegal manifestations) is a gendered phenomenon where structural violence associated with globalisation reinforces the economic and social subordination of women and, thus, feminicide. Given the global existence of such networks throughout the developing world, our analysis is not only relevant to the issue of feminicides in Latin America but also applies to other regions where such actors have integrated a criminal social order within informal networks of capitalist globalisation.