Introduction

For years, Honduras stayed under the radar of international attention, particularly of the US public. This is despite the fact that Honduras has served US interests in Central America in various forms and degrees, playing a key role during the 1980s when it was the staging ground for military operations and training that sustained the wars in that region. However, in recent years, a series of events have thrust Honduras into the limelight, starting with the 2009 coup that ousted the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. This event accelerated and exacerbated a security crisis in Honduras and the northern countries of Central America that has resulted in the destabilization of families, worsening of the economy, and increasing violence.Footnote 1 The woman quoted above is one among thousands of women fleeing such conditions and seeking refuge in the United States. Thus, while the Latin American region as a whole seems to have entered a new era of openness, and many countries have agendas to address inequalities and effect fundamental change, not all countries are aligning with this trend. Some, like Honduras, seem to have stepped back into the 1980s with coups, repression, and political violence that now is almost indistinguishable from “common” crime. Honduras recently had the highest homicide rate in the world. Today that distinction belongs to El Salvador, but these two countries have alternated between the first and second places in the past several years. In Honduras, this rate has steadily gone up with the increased militarization of the state since the 2009 coup d’état.Footnote ² Importantly, in spite of intraregional differences in democratic processes, Latin America as a whole has seen a marked increase in levels of interpersonal violence (PNUD 2013). High levels of violence once again are threatening democracy in the region (Reference Arias and GoldsteinArias and Goldstein 2010).

Increasing exclusion and inequality in Honduras have posed escalating security risks for women in the home and on the streets. Although poverty and marginality affect everyone in the country, these conditions impact women and men differently. Both women and men are robbed, extorted, and killed. However, women suffer qualitatively different and more extreme forms of brutality in the form of feminicide and various other forms of gender violence. In this article, we examine gender-based violence against women, the everyday acts that can result in their deaths, but not as solely interpersonal acts or by linking them primarily to economic deprivation. Rather, we examine the actions and inactions of the state that have served to amplify violence in the lives of Honduran women. While we expose women’s poverty-related vulnerabilities, our approach moves beyond income disparities to highlight inequalities in citizenship rights where the state is a key player in perpetuating and reinforcing unequal access to justice and rights. We point to the confluence of factors that facilitate violent conditions for women that can ultimately culminate in their killings, and in doing so we reveal processes by which structural inequality translates into unequal access to safety and justice for Honduran women.Footnote ³

Before we embark on our discussion, a note about terminology is necessary. Killings of women are often referred to as “femicide,” that is, the killings of women because they are women (Reference Radford and RussellRadford and Russell 1992). We prefer the term “feminicide” because embedded in this term is the role the state plays in these killings. In contexts of impunity such as Honduras, the brutal killings of women denote the complicity of the state through its unwillingness or inability to provide prevention and response mechanisms (see Reference Lagarde, Fregoso and BejaranoLagarde 2010). The state also plays a more direct role in violence used to silence women in the political arena. State agents have committed sexualized violence and participated directly in injuring or killing women. This situation compounds inequality, as women become more afraid to engage in public life, which deeply curtails their citizenship rights. Honduras is characterized by Guillermo O’Donnell’s conceptualization of “brown areas,” that is, areas where the legal state is absent, resulting in a compromised rule of law. In these areas, “whatever formally sanctioned law exists is applied intermittently, if at all” by subnational systems of power (e.g., patrimonial or even gangster-like), with informal legal systems that coexist with national regimes that have formal legal systems and are nominally democratic (Reference O’DonnellO’Donnell 2004, 38–39).

We distinguish between the state’s acts of omission and acts of commission in order to identify the political responsibility and failures of the state that create a fertile ground for these killings (see also Reference Sanford, Stefanos, Salvi, Sanford, Stefanos and SalviSanford, Stefanos, and Salvi 2016). Omission (or inaction) includes indirect mechanisms such as failure to provide prevention, protection, and prosecution. It can also include failure to implement laws to protect women, as when a negligent state “averts its gaze” (Reference Scheper-HughesScheper-Hughes 1992) and simply looks the other way. Commission (or action) includes direct actions, such as sexual violence, threats, and the targeting of women leaders for persecution and police harassment.Footnote ⁴ Both types of acts have roots in the same social context that normalizes and sustains violence as well as in profound gender inequalities. This context also shapes the lens through which state actors assess information, justify acts, and implement laws. Decoupling the role of the state into commission and omission allows us to analyze the responsibility of the government in the surge of killings before and after the coup.

To be sure, the Honduran government before the coup engaged in actions that disregarded gender-based violence against women and did not take effective steps in addressing it, thus committing acts of omission. These failures have worsened with the post-coup government, which has taken more direct measures that have escalated acts of omission as well as commission in systematically persecuting women leaders and physically and sexually assaulting women. This is perhaps best exemplified by the assassination of environmental activists, such as the killing of indigenous leader Berta Cáceres, who was murdered in March 2016 after receiving multiple threats following her opposition to the construction of a hydroelectric dam. Yet the police alleged her murder had taken place in connection with a robbery. Even if the government is not killing women directly, acts of commission and omission create conditions that promote impunity and increase risks of victimization by normalizing the targeting of women for violence, at home and in the streets. Though acts of omission may not directly involve the state in the killings, inaction can also lead to such killings. Thus, through direct and indirect mechanisms, the post-coup government has exacerbated the context within which women are killed, and impunity is widespread.

Honduras has ratified regional and international conventions and has laws on the books criminalizing intrafamilial violence, rape, and killings of women. However, the police and courts have undermined the aims of these laws by failing to implement them effectively or even by directly assaulting women. We argue that these government actions and inactions are linked to intersections among political, social, and economic exclusion that are a consequence and a cause of gendered inequality, creating a particularly violent context for women. In our conceptualization, the same context that creates conditions for extreme forms of violence also impedes justice as it perpetuates unequal access to the justice system on the basis of gender and, in this way, subverts women’s citizenship rights.

The recent spiral of violence in the lives of women and lack of protection can best be understood by examining the political responsibility of the state within a context of multisided violence. This context includes structural, political, symbolic, and everyday violence that reinforces and undergirds the normalization of persistent impunity and violence in the lives of women. This sociopolitical architecture sustains and perpetuates gendered violence and impunity. We argue that the more extreme the context of multisided violence, the higher the probability that states will fail in their responses to violence against women through normalizing and institutionalizing profound gender inequalities and undermining citizenship rights for women. This context is particularly present in Honduras, especially considering the diminishing power of civil society groups and increased political repression after the coup. Past research has linked levels of feminicide to discrimination, poverty, and negative attitudes toward women (Reference Prieto-Carrón, Thomson and MacDonaldPrieto-Carrón, Thomson, and MacDonald 2007). We move past these associations to reveal more systematically how structural and institutional violence creates a context of violence that cannot be reduced to violent individuals; it is embedded in the broader social order, gender inequality, the perpetuation of violence, impunity, and women’s diminished rights.

We focus on how broader structures of inequality conjoin with political forces to maintain these structures and intensify their impact. This approach allows us to identify root causes of the wide (and widening) gap between laws on the books—which have been passed mostly to satisfy international and domestic organizations pushing for change—and laws in action, that is, implementation on the ground. This gap diminishes women’s citizenship rights and enables the rise of feminicides. A law on the books may not be enough to address an issue if contextual factors do not align with the aims of the law (Reference EisenbergEisenberg 2011). And although we focus on Honduras, we note similar experiences of extreme violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and other countries in the Latin American region (Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres 2012; Reference HumeHume 2009; Reference MenjívarMenjívar 2011; UN 2011; Reference WalshWalsh 2008).

Theoretical Framework

To understand how the state responds (or fails to respond) to violence against women in Honduras, we use an analytic perspective that permits us to factor in the social and structural conditions that shape gender violence and within which laws are written and interpreted. A lens of multisided violence includes aspects of structural, symbolic, and political violence that intersect with gender violence (Reference Walsh and MenjívarWalsh and Menjívar 2016; Reference MenjívarMenjívar 2011; Reference Menjívar and WalshMenjívar and Walsh 2016). The layered and interconnected nature of these forms of violence contributes to their normalization and the internalization of frames through which individuals understand and make sense of the social world (Reference MenjívarMenjívar 2011). A multilayered, normalized context of violence shapes the views, frameworks, and cognitive frames through which individuals (including justice system personnel) view violence, and in this way forms a sociopolitical architecture that orders life and shapes frames of reference. Thus, those who perpetrate violent acts and those in charge of implementing the law to address such acts draw their frameworks, viewpoints, and attitudes about gender roles, women, and violence from the same social “order of things” (see Reference Kleinman, Das, Kleinman, Ramphele and ReynoldsKleinman 2000). The intersection of various forms of violence results in the kind of increased gender violence and impunity that has become a crisis in Honduras.

Background and Country Conditions: Foundations for Feminicide

According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Honduras has one of the highest feminicide rates in the world (see Figure 1 for the trend in 2002–2013). The number of women murdered in Honduras has been rising steadily but spiked after 2010. Within Latin America, Honduras recently ranked third in feminicide rates behind El Salvador (the highest in the world today) and Guatemala (the second highest in Latin America), and had higher rates than Colombia and Bolivia (Reference Alvazzi del FrateAlvazzi del Frate 2011).Footnote ⁶ (See Figure 2 for a comparison of homicide rates in Central and North America, showing a rising rate in Honduras from 2006, which began to exceed murder rates in all other neighboring countries in 2009.)

Figure 1 Number of feminicides in Honduras, 2002–2013. Adapted from Memoria Foro Femicidios 2014, 8.

Figure 2 Overall homicide rates in Central and North America. Adapted from Memoria Foro Femicidios 2014, 8.

While the murder rate for women is lower than that for men, the rate for women has been consistently increasing since 2005, when there have been some periods of decline in the murders of men (Memoria Foro Femicidios 2014, 8). As Incháustegui Romero et al. (Reference Incháustegui Romero2012) observed for feminicide cases in Mexico, the murders of men show more elasticity than those of women, as the murders of men tend to respond to events or conditions with which they are associated, such as increases or decreases in organized crime, while the murders of women occur independently of specific contextual events. And whereas the killings of Honduran women before the coup showed an upward trend, the trend accelerated following the coup, demonstrating that propitious structural conditions for women’s killings already existed pre-coup but were exacerbated post-coup. We argue that the state’s actions played a key role.

Under pressure from domestic groups and international organizations, pre-coup Honduran governments passed a series of laws that offered measures protecting women from violence and discrimination, including a law against domestic violence (1997) and a law of equal opportunities for women (2000). The post-coup de facto government also passed a femicide law with stronger penalties for the killings of women (2013) (see Table 1). Thus, even though Honduras had laws to address violence against women before the coup, they were not effectively implemented. However, implementation has declined further in the post-coup era, even as rates of violence against women have continued to rise. Normalized views and structures that devalue women’s lives and sustain violence against them existed before the coup, but state actions after the coup have amplified these conditions and deepened inequalities.

Table 1 Honduran laws addressing forms of violence against women.

*International or regional convention.

**Domestic legislation.

Thus, despite international recognition of the growing incidence of violence against women in Honduras, over 96 percent of feminicides go unpunished (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2011). This impunity, an expression of symbolic and gender violence, sends a powerful message that women’s lives are expendable and unimportant, as unresponsive justice system institutions fall short in implementing the law on the books. Forty percent of the women interviewed for the UNHCR study (2015) who fled the country due to violence did not report abuses to the police because they thought it would be useless.

In the 1980s, the United States used Honduras as a staging ground for the Contra War in Nicaragua and a base for US training of Salvadoran troops to fight against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. During this time, US funding for the Honduran military increased dramatically. While domestic political tensions rose, disappearances and murders became commonplace (Reference Booth, Wade and WalkerBooth, Wade, and Walker 2010). Honduras became what scholars call a democradura: “a nominally democratic government that is really under military rule” (Reference Mateo, Bruneau, Dammert and SkinnerMateo 2011, 90). The country started experiencing a crime wave in the 1990s, after the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment programs increased inequality and repression (Reference Booth, Wade and WalkerBooth, Wade, and Walker 2010). Wages stagnated through the 1980s and 1990s, and the destruction in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch amplified existing poverty and unemployment trends (Reference Booth, Wade and WalkerBooth, Wade, and Walker 2010). Neoliberal economic reforms exacerbated environmental degradation and prompted migration to urban areas, attracted by the increasing presence of maquila industry employment (Reference Booth, Wade and WalkerBooth, Wade, and Walker 2010; Reference Boyer and PellBoyer and Pell 1999), as well as migration to the United States. Today, more than half of Hondurans live below the poverty line (Reference Mateo, Bruneau, Dammert and SkinnerMateo 2011).

The crime wave that began in the 1990s became a major theme of the 2001 elections (Reference Booth, Wade and WalkerBooth, Wade, and Walker 2010), as the rhetoric of being tough on crime has been used for political gain in Honduras (as well as in other countries in the region) (Reference HollandHolland 2013; Reference KrauseKrause 2014). While the Honduran government has blamed gangs for high murder rates, it is difficult to disaggregate gang activity from other sources of crime, as both are entwined with insecurity, weak and corrupt public institutions, persistent impunity, growing drug trade activity throughout the region, increasing militarization that undermines community ties, widening inequality, and oppressive conditions of poverty (see Reference Mateo, Bruneau, Dammert and SkinnerMateo 2011, 92, 96). It is also hard to distinguish between common crime, social crime, and political crime in a context of lack of rule of law, corruption, and targeted violence against those identified as resistance members (Reference HermannsdorferHermannsdorfer 2012, 16). All these varied forms of violence coalesce and are expressed in state actions to produce a context that normalizes violence and reproduces inequalities that undermine women’s rights.

In 2009, President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by a right-wing military coup led by Porfirio Lobo, following Zelaya’s referendum to propose a constitutional reform. Under the Zelaya government, there were modest advances for women’s rights and potential for gains, but these were stunted with the coup. The proposed constitutional changes promoted by women’s organizations included equal rights and opportunities, sexual and reproductive health and rights, the right to a life free of violence, sex education in schools, and political participation with the reinforcement of quotas for equitable and just representation in legislative units (Reference RonderosRonderos 2011, 5–6). Ronderos notes, “With the chance to reform the Constitution, women’s civil society organizations self-organized in order to agree on a common agenda that would also ensure their participation in national policy debates and consultations” (Reference Ronderos2011, 4).

Before the coup, there was a core group of progressive women within the National Congress who had the potential to call on the state to be accountable for rights violations, but most of these representatives resigned after the coup (Reference GellGell 2012, 1). Many other women’s advocates have been removed from their posts in state institutions. Also before the coup, women successfully lobbied the National Congress in 2008 to create specialized policing units to investigate cases of killings of women. Under the post-coup de facto government, these police units were relocated within a year of their creation to attend to general street crime, leading to “a much less favourable context for women” (Reference RonderosRonderos 2011, 6). Thus, the coup deepened divisions between an increasingly militarized state and much of civil society that had been mobilizing to resist it. The reallocation of specialized services represents the state’s acts of omission and commission that sustain women’s marginalization through institutional failures to respond to violence against women.

Post-coup Honduras also has been characterized by a heightened context of structural violence for women, who are disproportionately poor and face even more constrained opportunities in the job market and increased levels of poverty, conditions that harm especially indigenous and Afro-descendant populations (UNDP 2010). Honduras’s 2013 Gender Inequality Index ranking of 129 (out of 187 countries worldwide) places the loss in potential human development due to gender inequality at 48.2 percent in 2013. Structural conditions commingle with political conditions (in the form of the state’s actions and inactions). Concomitantly, gender and gendered violence in post-coup Honduras permeate institutions charged with providing security. While the post-coup era has been characterized by political setbacks and obstacles for women’s rights, it has also launched a new wave of violence and state-led repression.

Laws Addressing Domestic Violence in Honduras and Latin America

The laws that have been passed in Honduras to address violence against women are similar to those created throughout Latin America and suffer from similar problems in their formulation. The 1994 Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women (Convention Belém do Pará) established that violence against women constitutes a human rights violation.

Subsequent laws throughout the region were ostensibly created to harmonize local laws with international norms. However, proposals for laws focusing on violence against women were often met with resistance at the national level. With rare exceptions, governments only passed these laws after redefining the focus from the international norm of protecting women from violence to addressing “intrafamily” violence.Footnote ⁸ This legal move undermined the goal of challenging gender hierarchies (Reference FriedmanFriedman 2009, 349–351) and did so by “implying that family members are ‘equally likely to be perpetrators and victims’” (Reference Craske, Chant and CraskeCraske 2003, 37). In addition, most Latin American countries prosecute offenders in civil or family courts rather than criminal courts and insist on reconciliation or mediation as a first step in legal proceedings (Reference MacaulayMacaulay 2006, 104).Footnote 9 In reconciliation or mediation proceedings, women are often pressured to tolerate or cope with violent situations rather than obtain help to escape them (Reference Jubb and IzuminoJubb and Pasinato Izumino 2002; Reference Jubb, Camacho, D’Angelo, Hernández, Macassi, Meléndez, Molina, Pasinato, Redrobán, Rosas and YáñezJubb et al. 2010). Significantly, these measures are not recommended by the international organizations (IACHR 2007, 16, as noted in Reference FriedmanFriedman 2009) or by regional and local advocates. Allowing mediation is one way that these legal frameworks and procedures undermine advocates’ intent of protecting women. It should also be noted that while the Honduran laws and some practices today resemble broader regional patterns, levels of violence and lack of implementation are much more severe in Honduras given the extreme forms of normalized, structural, symbolic, and gender violence, in conjunction with the failure of appropriate state actions.

Consequently, Honduran laws regarding domestic violence, rape, and feminicide have serious limitations. The 1997 Law against Domestic Violence passed by Congress established a mechanism for abused women to obtain a protective order against an abuser (Reference HermannsdorferHermannsdorfer 2012, 20). This law has the status of a “special law,” part of neither the civil nor criminal code. However, the way it is written reinforces the normalization of violence in women’s lives and the devaluation of their lives and rights, which undermines implementation. For a first offense of domestic abuse, the only legal sanctions are community service and twenty-four-hour preventive detention if the violator is caught in the act (Bureau of Democracy 2012, 15). The maximum sentence for disobeying a restraining order connected with the crime of intrafamilial violence is three years’ imprisonment (Bureau of Democracy 2012, 15). Reflecting social expectations of gendered behavior, the law criminalizes rape as a public crime but does not grant the same status to spousal rape (see Reference Menjívar, Yllö and TorresMenjívar 2016), which is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. In cases of nonspousal rape, a perpetrator can be prosecuted even if the victim does not press charges (Bureau of Democracy 2011). On February 21, 2013, Congress reformed the Criminal Code and added Article 118 A, establishing femicide as a crime for “men who kill women for reasons of gender, with hatred and disdain toward them as women.” However, the law seems to be set up to fail, as it is technically challenging to provide legal evidence of hatred and disdain in the minds of perpetrators as a motive even when these feelings exist. Furthermore, the law establishes that one of the following four circumstances must also be met: “sentimental relationship, history of acts of violence, persecution of any kind, or commission with malice” (IACHR 2013, 388), which carries such a heavy burden of evidence that it is almost impossible to apply.

Institutional mechanisms and bureaucratic units have been created to implement laws, but these institutions are generally underfunded and understaffed, reflecting the symbolic and gender violence in the law as it ignores women’s lives and suffering. After the Domestic Violence Law was passed, a Special Women’s Public Prosecutors Office was created within the Public Ministry in order to enforce it. However, the office had “little power when it came to prosecuting perpetrators of domestic violence” (UNFPA 2009, 39). In 1999, the National Women’s Institute was established as the “government agency responsible for the protection and advancement of Honduran women” (Research Directorate 2010, 3). Additional institutions include the Office of the National Human Rights Commissioner and the Interagency Commission on the Law against Domestic Violence (Research Directorate 2010, 3). However, since the coup, many of these agencies have been weakened or dismantled altogether, exacerbating existing trends. And regarding international agreements, Honduras often fails to submit required reports to monitoring bodies, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Follow-up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention (MESECVI) (Reference HermannsdorferHermannsdorfer 2012: 20). While it is arguably better to have weak and underfunded institutions than none at all, implementation and responsiveness to violence against women have been lagging, nonexistent, or even unenforced by state institutions. The views of women seeking asylum in the United States show that this can have an insidious effect, as they may conclude that their lives do not matter when laws exist but are ignored (UNHCR 2015). As these asylum seekers explain, women do not turn to authorities charged with implementing laws and protecting them, since state officials will ignore them. With institutional doors closed, women have nowhere to turn and those who can leave the country in search of security. Having laws on the books is necessary but not sufficient for protection. Obstacles to implementation, which we attribute to a context of multisided and normalized violence in which the police and judiciary operate, is the focus of the upcoming section.

Pre- and Post-Coup Political Responsibility for Feminicide: State’s Acts of Omission

Political responsibility for feminicide operated primarily through omission in the pre-coup era, with some exceptions where the government took direct action to target women. In this section we illustrate the inaction of the police and courts in the pre-coup era, which laid the foundation for a surge in gender-based violence against women, including feminicides, and a post-coup escalation of failures in policing. We then focus on direct acts of post-coup violence initiated or facilitated by the police and courts that have embroiled Honduras in a feminicide crisis today. (See Table 2 for differences between pre-coup and post-coup acts of omission and commission.) We separate the time periods for analytical purposes, but in reality both stem from the same context that normalizes gender inequalities and shapes the cognitive frames of state actors in charge of writing, passing, and implementing laws.

Table 2 Honduras: Political responsibility for exacerbating violence against women and impunity.

Post-Coup Political Responsibility for Feminicide: Increased Acts of Omission and Commission

In the post-coup era, political responsibility for feminicide through omission has intensified, and the government began to more systematically target women and more openly and directly commit acts of violence against them. In addition, increased government inaction to respond to violence against women deteriorated an already acute situation. Together, action and inaction in the context of heightened levels of various forms of violence (e.g., structural, political, everyday, gender) have created a “perfect storm” of structural conditions that sustains government responsibility for creating an environment that not only tolerates routine violence in the lives of women but condones it through its own example. These factors, taken together, help explain the upward spiral in violence against women in the post-coup era.

Violence against women intensified in post-coup Honduras in the context of deteriorating rule of law, escalating repression, and amplified gender-based, state-led violence that has targeted women (Reference KellyKelly 2011; Reference MoralesMorales 2011; Nobel Women’s Initiative 2012). At the same time, generalized violence has increased and there is evidence of linkages between the state and armed drug cartels (IACHR 2013, 29). According to the Women’s Tribune against Feminicides, state responsiveness to violence against women has weakened, in part because “not only did the administrators of justice fail to respond to human rights violations reported by women, the police themselves actually became the agents of repression and violators of women’s rights” (Reference MoralesMorales 2011). Ten percent of the women interviewed for the UNHCR study (2015) reported that the police or other authorities were directly implicated in harming them. And in the month following the coup, Oxfam Honduras reported that there was “a 60% rise in the number of feminicides, with the bodies of more than 50 women found in the two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The Oxfam report accuses the Lobo government, voted in three months after the coup, of inaction and complicity in the growing wave of murders” (quoted in Reference KellyKelly 2011). It was also post-coup when the UN reported that Honduras had the highest per capita homicide rate in the world as of 2012 (Nobel Women’s Initiative 2012, 10).

In addition to feminicides, “numerous cases of sexual violence have been documented during forced evictions, which are rarely reported for fear of retaliation and due to the rampant impunity in situations of violence against women throughout the country” (Reference JonesJones 2012, 1). This statement is congruent with the women’s own voices in the UNHCR (2015) report. Rochelle Jones, of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), also notes that the violence is more serious post-coup against women human rights defenders, who also face public accusations that they are going against traditional roles assigned to women, and they are “threatened with death and sexual violence and are criminalized” (Reference JonesJones 2012, 1). Alicia Reyes, a journalist with Radio Progreso in Honduras, emphasizes how the post-coup military posed a direct threat to women who were considering collective action against the new regime: “From the first day the police and army sent the women a clear warning: ‘You’ll see what happens to you if you go to the streets’” (Reference ReyesReyes 2009, 2).

One form of state omission has been gender-inimical budgeting, which is rooted in the symbolic violence in women’s lives, and has been amplified in the post-coup era. The post-coup government has spent a much higher proportion of the national budget on the military and has failed to allocate funding to the justice sector and women’s institutions. This symbolic violence serves to normalize a militarized “order of things” and sends a message to women that there are other more important issues to address. Honduras is not only failing to invest in public security for women but has weakened and even reversed the institutionalization of security for women.Footnote ¹⁰ In 2012, 11.9 percent of the budget was allocated to Defense and Public Security, while only 0.1 percent went to the National Institute of Women and 1.1 percent to the Public Prosecutor’s Office (Memoria Foro Femicidios 2014, 57). Greater militarization and armaments signal an absence of a gender perspective regarding the problem of public security and swells the number of armed men on the streets. Increasing armaments is a direct threat to women, as firearms have been the principal instrument for their killings, constituting 334 murders in 2013 (75 percent of the total).Footnote ¹¹

Another form of post-coup omission has been the government’s systematic concealment of statistical information. The Observatory of Violence at the National Autonomous University of Honduras has denounced the government for concealing statistics and information about the homicide rate.Footnote ¹² Between January and June 2013, the Observatory counted 3,547 cases of homicide, but the Secretary of Security only reported 2,629, a difference of 918.Footnote ¹³

During the Cold War, Honduras implemented a National Security Doctrine marked by political intolerance, which left at least 179 people disappeared from 1980 to 1993.Footnote 14 Forced disappearances were linked to illegal detentions and torture on the part of the police and military. In the post-coup era, these actions appear to be more systematic. From 2008 until 2015, there has been a 281 percent increase in reports of women disappearing, and 697 reports of disappearances were made to the public prosecutor’s office between January and September 2014.Footnote ¹⁵ Political violence in Honduras normalizes its gendered forms and fosters impunity, as state agents commit and fail to mitigate the violence.

Since the coup, the military has been increasingly incorporated into the police, and they have used sexual violence as a form of repression (Reference Menjívar, Santamaría and CareyMenjívar 2017). Thus, the government does not merely turn the other way in the face of gender violence through inaction but becomes an active participant in harming women. Women’s rights advocates have criticized the post-coup government’s hostility toward women, which includes using rape as a weapon. The popular feminist slogan in Honduras following the 2009 coup was “Ni golpes de estado, ni golpes a las mujeres” (No coups, and no abuse of women), highlighting the close links between political violence and violence against women (Reference PinePine 2013, 5–6). But the post-coup militarization behind the escalation of police violence in general also involves collaboration of state actors with members of criminal groups in violent acts against women in particular (see UNHCR 2015). This is how symbolic, political, and enduring state terror as well as gender and gendered violence commingle in the lives of Honduran women today.

In response to the repression against women in the post-coup era, women have created legal statutes for the new opposition party, the National Resistance Front, and have been playing a stronger role in the post-coup resistance movement (Reference GellGell 2012, 1). Indeed, it is the investigations by women in the resistance movement that have brought to light grotesque uses of force against women by an increasingly militarized state: “Their investigations documented hundreds of women’s testimonies relating to numerous forms of post-coup related sexual assaults that included groping and beatings of breasts and vaginas, threats of sexual violence, intimidation tactics with explicit sexist insults, as well as gang rapes by soldiers and police during post-protest detentions, curfew sweeps and night raids” (Reference Gervais and EstevezGervais and Estevez 2011, 10).

Militarized acts of violence against the resistance have involved sexualized and chauvinistic forms of violence against women. During demonstrations, security forces have verbally abused women participants, insulting them as “whores” and saying, “What they want is for us to rape them,” and “Go take care of your children.”Footnote 16 Some security agents have been reported to have raped women with their police batons and raped women after they were detained for participating in protests.Footnote 17

Meanwhile, the murders of most women have remained unpunished. Some are reported to have been committed by government actors. For example, Margarita Murillo was a member of the National Popular Resistance Front and one of the founders of the National Center of Farmworkers (CNTC). The National Forum of Women for Life reports that she was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by a death squad.Footnote ¹⁸ She was shot in the back on August 27, 2014, and her case remains in impunity.Footnote ¹⁹ And murder investigations seldom produce results. In March 2016, the indigenous activist leader Berta Cáceres was murdered in what the police alleged was a robbery. In October 2016 her case files were stolen from a Supreme Court justice, almost ensuring that the investigation will be dropped. And in July 2016, the body of Lesbia Janeth Urquía, a member of Cáceres’s organization, was found brutally assaulted in a garbage dump west of Tegucigalpa. According to police, the motive for the murder was a robbery—of her bicycle. Such declarations (disseminated in the press) trivialize the lives, work, and deaths of these activist women, sending a powerful message to all women that normalizes their socially expected roles and diminishes their contributions to public life and to social justice.

The coup in Honduras exacerbated a context of multisided violence in part by increasing political violence and state terror in ways that amplified gendered and gender violence. Through acts of commission and omission, the state has been responsible for intensifying a multilayered context of violence resulting in increased violence and abuses, and where killings remain suspended in impunity. The coup took what was already a dangerous place for women and escalated the danger further, creating a context where women credibly fear violence not only in their homes and in the streets but also from the very institutions and state agents charged with protecting them.

Conclusion

Multisided violence encompasses structural, symbolic, political, gender, and gendered forms. We have argued that a context of multisided violence creates conditions for states to fail in their responses to violence against women through normalizing and institutionalizing profound gender inequalities. The symbolic violence of the state serves as a catalyst for acts of omission and commission by shaping the views and actions of state actors in charge of implementing laws.

While acts of omission were prevalent in the pre-coup era, the commission of violent acts has become widespread in the more extreme context of multisided violence after the coup. State actions in post-coup Honduras help explain the upward spiral of violence that citizens in general are suffering, which are manifested in gendered ways. We have called attention to inequalities that are connected to but move beyond income and poverty, as these are manifested in the unequal citizenship rights of women. In doing so, we underscore the central place of the state in perpetuating gender violence.

Along with other countries in northern Central America, Honduras is falling behind its regional neighbors in Latin America in terms of human development, with high levels of extreme poverty, income inequality, and poor access to services (Reference RonderosRonderos 2011; UNDP 2010), as well as increased “common crime,” corruption, and insecurity. Structural violence places women, especially poor and vulnerable women, at higher risk of institutional mistreatment (in the form of symbolic violence) and of everyday and routinized abuse (in the form of gender violence and gendered violence). As has been the case in post-coup Honduras, this situation deteriorates further with state repression and increased militarization, which undermine the rule of law.

While other countries, such as El Salvador and Guatemala, exhibit extreme levels of multisided violence, they have made relatively more progress than Honduras toward creating specialized services (e.g., Ciudad Mujer in El Salvador, and specialized femicide courts in Guatemala). In Honduras, the coup stunted the development of institutions that aim to address violence against women. Furthermore, post-coup militarization has increased impunity through decreased transparency (as evident in the failure to report statistics on violence against women) and accountability (by failing to hold military personnel and even civilians accountable for violence against women). By contrast, Nicaragua and Costa Rica have relatively lower overall levels of multisided violence and lower levels of feminicide and impunity. Thus, comparatively, the more extreme context of multisided violence in Honduras has resulted in high levels of feminicide and impunity.

Honduran women, as well as those in similar contexts in the region, live in a social milieu where physical and psychological mistreatment become part of the way things are; where women’s “private terrors” (Reference MenjívarMenjívar 2011) are part of life in the home, in the street, and in the workplace. Institutions reinforce and reflect this violent context through neglect and a lack of implementation of the laws. We argue that these are all deeply connected, because those who abuse women, as well as those who write or implement laws, draw on the cognitive frames and lenses through which they view the place of women in society and justify unequal treatment of women from the same social order of things.

Our focus on pre- and post-coup feminicide levels reveals intersections among political, social, and economic exclusion as well as gendered inequality, exacerbating conditions of violence and impunity and culminating in a feminicide crisis in Honduras today. It is the deep-seated symbolic violence in this system that sends a message to women who seek justice in unequal institutions that their lives are not valued and that their complaints are not taken seriously, a message that serves to normalize abuse and gender inequalities but also to silence women. A 2012 study found that less than one-third (29.3 percent) of women told family or friends that they had experienced intimate partner violence in the past year, a low number even compared to El Salvador, where almost two-thirds (66.5 percent) indicated they would share this with family or friends (Reference Bott, Guedes, Goodwin and MendozaBott et al. 2012, 58).

We have demonstrated that passing laws to protect women will not accomplish their goals when this is done without the broader societal changes that could improve conditions for everyone. The content of the laws themselves, the failure to implement them, and the messages that an institutionalized inattention send to women are rooted in a deeply unequal society that devalues women’s lives and those of vulnerable people in general. This is made worse when state actions, far from improving conditions, exacerbate existing trends of gender inequalities that disadvantage women seeking justice. We have moved beyond assessing the impact of economic indicators on women’s inequality to examining inequalities in the form of citizenship rights as women seek justice for the violence they routinely endure. Examining structural inequality is crucial for understanding broader patterns of inequality in Latin America, as it not only impacts poverty levels and access to material resources but also shapes unequal access to safety and justice.