Six women murdered Wednesday in Guatemala
Some indigenous women stand in front of a sign for a realtor company in Antigua, Guatemala. In Guatemala, a tiny percentage of the population still owns the majority of the land, despite peace accord stipulations promising to fix this problem.
Six women were killed on Wednesday in separate incidents in Guatemala, including three minors, report authorities.
The victims include a 12-year-old and a 6-year-old, whose strangled bodies were found dumped on the street in Guatemala City on Wednesday, still wearing sleeping pajamas, writes the BBC.
Read more from GlobalPost: Tomb of Mayan queen found in Guatemala (VIDEO)
AFP reports that nearby, the body of a 35-year-old woman was found shot in the face, and another body was found soon afterwards.
Meanwhile, a mother and her 16-year-old daughter were shot and killed outside of a school in La Unión.
Read more from GlobalPost: GHI targets chronic malnutrition in Guatemala
In a separate incident, the mayor of the Guatemalan town of Jutiapa was shot dead on Tuesday while he waited at the barber's office, writes the BBC.
Despite these horrifying incidents, the murder rate actually declined by 9 percent in Guatemala in 2012, according to the Christian Science Monitor, with 5,174 murders.
According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, 700 of those murdered in 2012 were women, a decline from 2011, when 834 were killed.
Guatemala has grappled with an unusually high murder rate for women for years, grabbing it unwanted publicity as a hub of gender-based violence and "femicide."