“Where’s mom?,” asks Sgt. Roberto Mercado at the doorway of the light green house, located in the La Fuente neighborhood, in the town of Florida.
Behind the window, a 2-year-old boy responds by looking down at the floor next to him.
“For me, it was a sign that his mom was dead,” says the Puerto Rico Police negotiator about the femicide that he had to handle on the afternoon of June 30, 2018.
Emmanuel Córdova Vendrell had shot and killed his partner, Loren Figueroa Quiñones, 30, in front of her youngest son after hours of holding her hostage. The woman’s 8-year-old son had escaped the house during the argument. After carrying out the crime, the murderer committed suicide. Everything happened in front of the young child, who — with his feet soaked in his mother’s blood, dressed in shorts and shirtless — opened the door to the agents. Mercado carried him, while he wept, and handed him over to his maternal grandmother.
Nineteen days later, in the early morning of July 19, 2018, in Cabo Rojo, in the southwest coast, a 9-year-old girl saw her mother’s partner, Jonathan García Rosa, stab her mother in the back. Her sister, 11, and her brother, 6, were sleeping in the same house. The girl and her older sister, who woke up to the screams for help, have an unforgettable image of her mother, Annette García Arroyo, 31, trying to call for help.
Loren and Annette are two of the 71 women victims of intimate feminicides — the murders of women perpetrated by partners or ex-partners — registered in Puerto Rico since Hurricane María hit the archipelago on September 20, 2017, according to studies by non-governmental organizations Kilómetro 0, Proyecto Matria and the Gender Equity Observatory.
Official data on the murders of women in Puerto Rico are not reliable. Consequently, there are no figures that correctly reflect the impact of gender violence on surviving families, especially the children of murdered women who were mothers.
Of these 71 women counted by the three NGO, an investigation by the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, in Spanish) and digital media Todas after reviewing Police reports, press releases, and data collected by the organizations, showed that at least 49 had children and at least 101 people lost their mother. An estimated 55 were minors. They are children and teens who have also survived long periods of instability due to