Reports

There is a gap between the written laws found in books and the legislations and their enforcement,
meaning how these laws work in practice, practically in all the legal systems around the world. When
law addresses security issues, such as violence against women, a lack of execution can result in slow or
ineffective police responses to domestic violence calls. However, in more extreme situations, it can
entail an increased vulnerability to become a murder victim when the legal system fails to protect
victims or reprimand aggressors consistently. For example, in many Latin American countries, male
attackers continue to face exemptions in the courts, even when comprehensive laws are in place, they

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are frequently ignored, misapplied, or even undermined .
Costa Rica does not have the high murder rates as its Central American neighbours or other Latin

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American countries do . However, murders of women continue to be persistent in Costa Rica, and
killing an intimate partner is still referred as a “crime of passion” by some, implying that a man’s
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emotional condition is still considered a sufficient explanation or motive for murdering women .
Although femicides are not novel, they had received increased national media attention in Costa Rica
since March 2018, when then-President Luis Guillermo Sols expressed concern about a “wave of
femicides” in the month when three women were murdered, President Carlos Alvarado’s

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administration proclaimed violence against women as a national emergency in May 2018 . Femicides
continue to garner media attention, as evidenced by a high-profile case from March 8, 2019, in which a
man in the San José suburb of Desamparados stabbed his wife, Gladys Maria Garcia Pereira, multiple
times in front of their children before being beaten and killed by a mob of neighbours, also received a

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lot of media attention . Garcia Pereira and six other women were murdered in the first four months of 2021.