Dulce María Was 17 and Agostina Was 14 and Their Deaths Are the Latest Evidence That Argentina Has a Femicide Problem It Has Not Solved

Dulce María Was 17 and Agostina Was 14 and Their Deaths Are the Latest Evidence That Argentina Has a Femicide Problem It Has Not Solved

Dulce María Beatriz Candia was 17 years old and Agostina Vega was 14. Their bodies were found days apart in different parts of Argentina, each having been reported missing before the worst was confirmed, and the circumstances surrounding their deaths have shaken the country and reignited a conversation about femicide that Argentina has been having for years without arriving at the structural change that advocates say is necessary to stop it.

According to Argentina’s National Femicide Registry, compiled by the Supreme Court’s Women’s Office, 200 direct femicide victims were recorded in 2025, along with 19 linked femicide victims, a rate equivalent to one femicide every 44 hours. Sixteen percent of those direct victims were girls or adolescents under the age of 18, and in 83 percent of cases there was a prior relationship between the victim and the perpetrator.

What Happened to Dulce in Misiones

Dulce was last seen on May 17th in Eldorado, Misiones, after leaving her home to walk to a nearby church while her mother was accompanying her hospitalized father. She did not return. The disappearance report was filed several days later, triggering search protocols that continued for weeks until a neighbor in the El Tucán neighborhood alerted police to a strong odor coming from an abandoned construction site. Officers found Dulce’s body inside a septic tank at the rear of the property. Initial forensic findings indicated she had been dead for several days, and a piece of knotted sheet was found around her neck, leading investigators to consider strangulation as a possible cause of death. Authorities are awaiting autopsy results to confirm the cause and date of death.

What Happened to Agostina in Córdoba

Agostina Vega had been missing for a week when her body was found on a Saturday in a large open field in Ampliación Ferreyra, south of the provincial capital of Córdoba, after an area of over 200 hectares had been searched for over 24 hours. The primary suspect in her death is Claudio Barrelier, a 32-year-old man who is currently in custody and who had a prior relationship with Agostina’s family, having previously been her mother’s partner.

Security camera footage recorded Barrelier entering his home in the Cofico neighborhood with Agostina on May 23rd, the last time she was seen alive. Investigators believe he lured her there under the pretext of looking for a gift for her mother. The primary line of investigation points to a possible sexual assault followed by a violent attack. In the hours after Agostina was last seen, the suspect reportedly asked to borrow money and a car, and authorities are investigating whether that vehicle was used to transport her body to the location where it was eventually found.

A Crisis That One Year of Data Cannot Resolve

The deaths of Dulce and Agostina have renewed public pressure around violence against women, girls and adolescents in Argentina at a moment when some officials have pointed to a reduction in the total femicide count compared to 2024 as evidence of progress. Specialists in gender violence reject that interpretation. Natalia Gherardi, executive director of the Latin American Team for Justice and Gender, argued that describing gender violence as no longer a problem based on a single year’s variation is misleading and that the structural conditions driving it remain in place.

Gherardi also pointed to a pattern that makes official statistics an incomplete picture of the actual scale of the problem. Between 73 and 87 percent of women killed in femicides had never filed a prior complaint with judicial authorities, meaning the most lethal violence was occurring entirely outside the reach of state systems designed to intervene before a situation turns fatal.

The families of Dulce and Agostina are waiting for judicial answers in Misiones and Córdoba, and Argentina is once again confronting the question that surfaces every time a girl disappears and is found dead: what failed before it was too late.

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