Over 3,400 women go missing in Peru

More than 3,400 women missing without a trace in Peru,  between January and April of this year,  the Ombudsman’s Office reported on Saturday.

In the office’s report  titled “What happened to them?”  the first four months of 2023 saw 3,406 complaints of missing women filed.

Isabel Ortiz, the Deputy Secretary of the Ombudsman’s Office, stated that “the situation regarding disappearances in the country is classified as a state of imminent danger.”

“the state is not taking measures to prevent these recurring phenomena” annually in the country located in the Andes Mountains, with a population of 33 million people, She added.

Last year, more than 5,380 women, mostly girls and teenagers, were reported missing, which is a decrease of 9.7% compared to the year 2021.

The police and the prosecutor’s office do not sufficiently investigate many cases because they believe that the women fled voluntarily, according to various feminist NGOs.