Eduardo González
An official delegation from El Salvador and Peru carried out a technical mission in Madrid this week to exchange information, experiences, good practices and solutions for the eradication of femicide and violence against women with Spanish authorities.
The mission was part of the triangular cooperation initiative launched in 2017 by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and the cooperation agencies of Peru (APCI) and El Salvador (ESCO) to consolidate an information and analysis system of the phenomenon of feminicidal violence in El Salvador, based on the experience of the Peruvian model of the Public Ministry’s Crime Observatory and with the support of the Spanish Cooperation.
“Tackling the serious problem of femicide and ensuring a life free of violence for all women is one of the priority objectives shared by Spain, Peru and El Salvador,” stated AECID in a press release. “One of the first steps to tackle this scourge is to have data, information and accurate knowledge applied to public policies to prevent and combat feminicidal violence,” it continued.
In the first phase, the Salvadoran institutions involved in the protection of women’s rights – the Attorney General’s Office, the Ministry of Justice, the National Civil Police and the Institute of Forensic Medicine – developed, under the leadership of the Salvadoran Institute for the Development of Women, their technical and technological capacities for the coordination, standardization and analysis of information and to have a single registry of victims and other tools to better understand the problem.
In the second phase, which began in 2021 and is still ongoing, the participating institutions have gone a step further and, after reviewing the model developed by the Crime Observatory of the Peruvian Attorney General’s Office, agreed to move towards a knowledge management system with a view to implementing effective public policies that contribute to eradicating femicide and gender-based violence crimes, also drawing on the experience of Spain’s efforts and progress in this area.
“This project, carried out under the triangular cooperation modality between Peru, El Salvador and Spain, is an example of peer-to-peer learning,” according to AECID. Through an effort structured around eight exchange missions and six years of joint work, the participating entities from the three countries have been able to learn in depth how the model works in the different realities, contributing to its development, mutual learning and continuous improvement as an added value of this horizontal cooperation.
Between Monday and Thursday of this week, the eighth Technical Mission took place in Madrid, made up of representatives of the Salvadoran and Peruvian institutions involved, as well as the Cooperation Agencies of the three countries. The delegation visited and held working meetings with the Observatories of the General Council of the Judiciary and the Government Delegation on Gender Violence, the Andalusian Women’s Institute and the VIOGEN System of the Ministry of the Interior, to exchange information, experiences, good practices and solutions for the effective protection and guarantee of women’s right to a life free of violence.
