In the week before her murder, Fernanda Soledad Yramain lay awake at night listening as a motorbike circled the house where she was hiding. “She kept saying ‘it’s him’,” remembers Daniella Viscarra, Soledad’s sister-in-law with whom she had sought refuge in the Tucumán countryside. “She was scared all of the time.”

A month earlier, in September 2024, 29-year-old Soledad had ended a relationship with her boyfriend, Francisco Timoteo Saldaño. They had been together since she was 14 and he was 35, and shared three children. In the final year of their relationship, Saldaño had turned violent.

“She started coming round with bruises on her arms, crying. He held a knife to her throat and said he would kill her,” says Sandra Yramain, Soledad’s aunt.

Together, Sandra and Soledad went to the police station to request protection. “They said that ‘these things take time’,” Sandra says. “But nobody ever called.”

Over the ensuing week, Soledad returned to the police station three more times. “She was certain he would kill her,” says Daniella. “So she kept trying.”

Less than a day after her fourth – and final – visit to beg the police to protect her, Saldaño stabbed Soledad to death with a butcher’s knife, before killing himself.

“Soledad did everything she was meant to do,” says Sandra. “But, because the police did not care, she was cut in half.”

While Argentina was once celebrated as a bastion for women’s rights in Latin America, now, amid a rise in populism under far-right leader Javier Milei, protections for women are quickly being eroded. Women’s rights groups warn that more women like Soledad could die as a result.

Soon after taking power in December 2023, Milei dissolved the undersecretariat for protection against gender violence and closed the ministry of women. “For the first time in nearly 40 years, Argentina has no dedicated institution to prevent, punish and eradicate gender-based violence,” says Mariela Belski, executive director of Amnesty International Argentina.

The administration has also slashed funding for programmes aimed at combating gender violence. The Acompañar programme, which provided financial and psychological assistance for victims of gender-based violence, has been drastically defunded, while the 144 emergency hotline lost 42% of its staff by July 2024.

“The government is turning its back on women facing violence,” says Belski.

In November, Argentina was the only country to vote against a UN general assembly resolution to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls. Two months later, Milei’s administration went further, pledging to strike the aggravating factor of femicide, defined as when a woman dies at the hands of a man on the basis of her gender, from the penal code – a move that drew swift condemnation from human rights groups.

Belski says removing the legal definition would “weaken the state’s ability to prevent and punish such crimes”.

Now, human rights experts warn that Milei’s rhetoric is gaining traction nationwide.

In Tucumán, a conservative province, lawyers and advocates say that legal protections for women are already being dismantled.

“Tucumán is one of the places where the situation is worsening,” says Myriam Bregman, a socialist leader. “It follows the political line of the national government, of cutting women’s rights protection programmes, which were already very scarce.”

Soledad Deza, the Tucumán lawyer supporting Yramain’s family and the president of Fundación Mujeres Por Mujeres (Women for Women Foundation), shared data showing a sharp drop in court-issued protection orders since Milei took office.

Between January and September 2024, according to information obtained from the authorities by Deza and shared with the Guardian, family courts in Tucumán issued 4,856 protection orders, while criminal courts issued 754. By comparison, across the whole of 2023, those figures were 7,549 and 2,448 respectively.

Deza says that women in the province have struggled to access support because of funding cuts, and that the justice system is failing to investigate their reports.

Law enforcement agencies have also been slow to respond, says Sofia Quiroga, of international women’s rights organisation Equality Now. “Worryingly, the police in Tucumán have stopped investigating why protection orders are needed in the first place,” she says.

Luciana Belén Gramaglio, a feminist lawyer from Tucumán, says that the provincial government had embraced, “the regressive and stifling policies promoted by Milei”. At the start of 2025, she says, the Tucumán government reduced the number of prosecutorial offices dedicated to investigating cases of gender-based violence and sexual abuse from seven to four.

Gramaglio suggests almost half of the cases that enter the judicial system are linked to violence against women. “How then, is the reduction in prosecutorial offices justified?”

The weekend that Soledad was killed, two other women in the Tucumán province were murdered; both cases officially classified as femicides. Official data from the National Ombudsman’s office found that 295 cases of femicide were reported nationally between 1 January and 31 December 2024, or one every 30 hours. The MuMaLá women’s organisation reported a 15% increase in femicides in the first four months of 2025, compared with the same period a year earlier.

Lawyers and advocates also warn of a growing narrative that women are fabricating claims of gender-based violence. In 2024, senator Carolina Losada, with the support of national justice minister Mariano Cúneo Libarona, introduced a bill to increase penalties for false accusations of gender-based violence.

“The credibility of the victims is being challenged by the narratives of the Milei administration. These narratives have unlocked a whole spectrum of hatred and obstacles,” says Deza. “This is simply an indirect threat, to discourage women from reporting crimes.”

Mariela Labozzetta, head of the specialised prosecutorial unit on violence against women, says that despite funding cuts, the justice system and the public prosecutor’s offices across Argentina continue to function. But, she adds that “to prevent the risks faced by victims from worsening, support programmes are necessary, and these have been eliminated”.

Deza says that because Argentina “has stripped away gender violence prevention programmes” women are left with little recourse but to remain “hypervigilant”. She has filed a complaint against the police in Tucumán regarding Soledad’s case, and hopes that the criminal justice system investigates why her calls for help went unanswered.

The Tucumán state and police did not reply to requests for comment, nor did the Milei administration.

For Soledad’s family, the government’s proposal to eliminate femicide from the penal code came as a fresh shock. “I only hope that her death was not in vain,” says Sandra. “And that no other woman is killed because the authorities didn’t take control.”