Venezuela registered eight infanticides between March and July 2024

At least eight infants under one year of age were murdered in Venezuela from March 1 to the end of July of this year, according to records from the Network for the Human Rights of Children and Adolescents (Redhnna), which published this Monday a report on infanticide and the violation of children’s rights in the country.

In six of the cases – the NGO details – the perpetrators were the relatives of the minors and on another occasion it was a neighbor who hit a pregnant woman, while the document does not offer details of the eighth record.

The total number of deaths of minors during that period was 128, 68 of which were accidents, 17 were caused by “failures in the care that the health system should provide”, 14 homicides, 10 femicides, 6 for cruel treatment, 3 suicides and 2 for “police action.”

The organization highlights that in the state of Delta Amacuro (northeast), 14 children of the Warao ethnic group died in April, “as a result of an unknown condition that caused stiffness and pain in the neck, severe headaches and nausea.”

It also documented a dozen deaths due to gender-based violence, which represents “one feminicide (of minors) every 15 days,” and highlighted that in 70% of these cases the aggressors are people from the victims’ intimate environment.

In the last five years, non-governmental organizations have warned of the increase in complaints about violence against minors, a problem that the Prosecutor’s Office and the justice system try to contain with differentiated attention to the cases, without the scope of these initiatives being known for now..