The cruel murder of three young girls shakes Argentina.

Buenos AiresThe brutal murder of three girls near Buenos Aires has shaken the country's society and even brought it to the streets. The lifeless bodies of Morena Verdi, Brenda del Castillo (20), and Lara Gutiérrez (15) were found by police last Wednesday, buried in the garden of a house in the Florencio Varela municipality, in southern Buenos Aires. The girls were invited to a private party on Friday night and never returned. Police have confirmed that they were tortured and mutilated before being murdered, dismembered, and dumped in plastic bags.

Twelve people have been arrested, allegedly linked to a drug trafficking and prostitution ring. The leader of the gang is 23 years old, nicknamed "Little J," and remains at large. According to police investigations, the murder was broadcast live on Instagram to a closed group of 45 people, and the motive for the crime was allegedly disciplinary: "That's what happens to someone who steals my drugs," the leader reportedly said, according to Javier Alonso, Minister of Security of the province of Buenos Aires.

Outrage ignited the streets the very day the three girls were found. The families, along with the municipality's residents, and later the feminist collective Ni Una Menos, took to the streets demanding justice for Brenda, Morena, and Lara. The case highlights a deeper, multifactorial issue: the precariousness experienced by some neighborhoods and municipalities in Argentina, in this case on the outskirts of the capital—the Greater Buenos Aires–, coupled with a lack of public policies to guarantee young people future options that don't involve sex work or drug trafficking.

In short, it's an abandonment by the state and institutions that has led Argentina to experience an atypical case of gender-based violence. "We've always had femicides, but not with this level of cruelty and morbidity," explains Sabina Federic, an anthropologist and expert in Crime and Violence, and former Minister of National Security (2019-2021), in an interview with ARA.

Federic first points to the rise in informal employment: according to official data, 43% of Argentina's working population works in the informal sector, an increase of 10% in the last ten years. Of these nine million people, 60% are young people under 30, the majority of whom are women. "In the long term, this means generations and generations are excluded from access to education, who end up resorting to selling drugs or their bodies," explains Federic, who, along the same lines, refuses to blame families for the lack of care or attention. While acknowledging that these problems "are not new" in Argentina, she also points out that Javier Milei's government has "exacerbated" them. The most problematic aspect, she says, is that "it was precisely these poor young people to whom Milei had made so many promises for the future and who probably voted for him." For the expert, it's not that the state is absent, but that it has become "increasingly a policing force rather than a caretaker."

Also critical of state management, Esteban Rodríguez Alzueta, researcher at the National University of Quilmes and author of the book The world is corrupt, He agrees that "the state works in an uncoordinated and fragmented manner," he says in the ARA. He regrets that Milei has relaunched "a new < >, a purely electoralist policy that has already failed across the continent and that will not only continue to worsen health problems, but will also add to the violence."

A crime exploited by politics

Both Milei and the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, have chosen to point the finger at the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Peronist Axel Kicillof, as responsible for the triple murder and its causes. The minister even denied that it was a femicide: "We're not going to get into the politicization that it's a gender issue," she said in an interview on Radio Mitre. "In that case, there are three women, but it could have been three men; it's a mafia-style methodology," she argued.

An analysis with which feminist movements, which mobilized across the country this Saturday, strongly disagree. The demonstration in Buenos Aires was massive, on a rainy afternoon, well into spring. The march, led by the families of Brenda, Morena, and Lara, was marked by solemnity, but also by rage and indignation.In the neighborhoods we don't want any more dead girls.", read a banner;"Stop killing us – the state denies gender violence while there is a femicide every 26 hours", said another.

"We feel like our lives, women's lives, are worthless," Noelia tells ARA, overwhelmed and with tears in her eyes. "Men need to start debating among themselves, because we can't be the ones who suffer the consequences of this violence and, furthermore, the ones who need to educate; no, we're tired."