In May 2015, the body of Chiara Paez, a 14-year-old teenager living in the Argentine city of Rufino, was found buried in the garden of her boyfriend’s house. Chiara, who was pregnant and had refused to have an abortion, was beaten to death. The horror caused by the discovery of her body prompted Argentine women to take to the streets to shout their anger, which was the origin of the feminist movement Ni Una Menos and established June 3 as a day of protest against gender-based violence. Eleven years later, the murder of another 14-year-old teenager shocks the country again in the days leading up to the mobilization.
After a week of searching, the dissected remains of Agostina Vega’s body were found last Saturday in a wasteland in the province of Córdoba, about 700 kilometers from Buenos Aires, and the investigation points to Claudio Barrelier, a 33-year-old man known to her family circle.
The teenager left her home on Saturday, May 23, the day she was captured by security cameras entering Claudio Barrelier’s house, who has been detained since Wednesday. According to the taxi driver who took her to the place, located in a different neighborhood from hers, the teenager was alone and when he asked where she was going, she explained that she was going to meet her mother’s boyfriend “to prepare a surprise for him.” “When she arrived, she got out with total confidence, walking as if they were very close acquaintances,” he added.
Vega’s family reported her disappearance on Sunday morning, but it became a national issue more than three days later, when the “Sofía alert” was triggered, an urgent search system for children and teenagers whose lives are considered in imminent danger. According to feminist organizations, at first, as often happens in these cases, the prosecution focused on the closest circle and the hypothesis that Agostina could be “with a boyfriend.”
Finally, Agostina’s remains were found in a wasteland located in the Ampliación Ferreyra area, south of the city of Córdoba, where a search operation was underway with 200 police officers and firefighters, dogs, drones, kayaks, and divers. Investigators began the search tasks after detecting that Barrelier’s phone had connected to the area’s cell towers.
According to local media, preliminary autopsy data indicate that she died by strangulation and may have been sexually abused. They pointed out that the scientific work is complicated by the state of the body, which appears to have been dismembered with a “sharp object.”
Barrelier had a criminal record. In 2025, he was reported for illegal deprivation of liberty by a woman who ran out of his house naked and asking for help. For that episode, the man was detained last May for 20 days but was released after paying bail. In recent hours, the victim spoke publicly for the first time about that episode and said that after entering Barrelier’s home, the man took a weapon and demanded that she sit on the bed and take off her clothes. He tied her feet, hands, and covered her mouth, but she was able to escape because her feet were not properly tied.
After the discovery of Agostina Vega’s remains, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation held a press conference in which he stated that “we are facing a homicide.” Héctor Garzón suggested that the case will soon change to include the aggravation of the crime due to gender violence and assured that there are still “circumstances that must be investigated.”
Read more A Bluetooth named “bomba” forces a flight from the United States to Spain to turn back
According to a report from the Gender Violence Observatory Ahora Que Sí Nos Ven, carried out in collaboration with the National University of the Delta, between January 1 and May 24, 2026, there were 99 lethal victims of gender-based violence: 83 femicides, 8 linked femicides, 4 instigations to suicide, and 4 murders of transgender people.
According to the National Registry of Femicides of the Argentine justice system, 200 victims were recorded in 2025, which would indicate a 12.3% reduction compared to the previous year, but feminist organizations questioned the methodology, which would imply underreporting of cases. The Latin American Team for Justice and Gender (ELA) warned that an annual variation is not enough to establish a consolidated trend and that the increase in attempted femicides requires analyzing other indicators beyond completed deaths.
Dulce María Beatriz Candia is another of the most recent victims: she was 17 years old and had been missing since May 17 in El Dorado, Misiones, in the far northeast of Argentina. Her body was found in an abandoned building after almost two weeks of disappearance. The autopsy confirmed that she was murdered by asphyxiation, and strong criticism arose in the community due to the delay and lack of state responses to her disappearance.
“Like Agostina and Dulce, 22% of young women under 17 years old who were victims of femicides in these 11 years after Ni Una Menos had previously been missing. And 19% suffered attacks against their sexual integrity. Behind these figures is a web of violence, vulnerabilities, and institutional failures that continue to put the lives of girls and teenagers at risk,” the Observatory stated.
In this context, the new Ni Una Menos march — which will take place this June 3 throughout the country and will have the National Congress in Buenos Aires as its epicenter — will raise a demand that not only remains relevant but urgent. “We are fed up, we can’t stand living in this reality anymore. This Wednesday we also take to the streets for Agostina,” called the Argentine Actresses collective. Some members of the collective, such as filmmaker Dolores Fonzi, also expressed themselves personally: “The horror doesn’t stop. Ni Una Menos is an urgent cry to ‘go too far’ until they stop killing us. This 3J we’ll see each other in the streets!” she wrote on her social networks. The reference alludes to the accusation made against feminisms after the rightward shift represented by Javier Milei’s arrival in government, pointing them out for having been too intense in their demands (having “gone too far”) and generating a reaction in the opposite direction.
Between that first inaugural Ni Una Menos march and today, La Casa del Encuentro has counted 3,424 women murdered. Of those murders, 3,073 were femicides and linked femicides, that is, when a man kills one or more people with the purpose of causing suffering, punishing, or psychologically destroying a woman. In these eleven years, a woman was murdered every 30 hours.
Meanwhile, as part of his program to shrink the state and his “cultural battle,” Javier Milei’s government dismantled the state structure dedicated to gender policies. First, it downgraded and then closed the Ministry of Women and the Undersecretariat for Protection against Gender Violence, froze the budget of the Acompañar program — which provided economic assistance to victims of violence — eliminated or reduced support programs for women and diversities, closed agencies such as INADI, banned inclusive language in the public administration, and withdrew initiatives related to gender equality and violence prevention.
Read more Carlsen can still win the Norway Chess chess tournament with three rounds remaining
