Why do some countries use “femicide” and not “feminicide”, or vice versa? What are the roots of these voices?

According to him Spanish dictionary, the names femicide and femicide are valid to refer to the ‘murder of a woman at the hands of a man due to machismo or misogyny’.

The roots of femicide and femicide are related to the English term femicide, with the Latin voice female (female, woman) and with the suffix –cide (shortening of homicide, act of killing).

The two voices have spread in different Latin American areas; they even appear in the texts of legislation. For example, Ecuador, Chile and Panama use femicide in their criminal law documents, according to the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Legal Spanish. And the word femicide is recorded in some documents from Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, as recorded in the Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI.

From the plane of language, the two terms can be used interchangeably; however, there are extra-linguistic issues (political, legal, domestic violence, etc.) that establish semantic differences between these words and determine that femicide is preferred in some countries and femicide in others.

So the book femicide (2016), of the State Attorney General’s Office, says that “the difference between femicide and feminicide is that the second contains the element of impunity as a result of the omission or inappropriate action incurred by the State to the detriment of the right to the lives of women and their indispensable protection. This work also indicates that “within the Ecuadorian legal system, the Comprehensive Criminal Organic Code typifies the crime of femicide and not the crime of feminicide.” (F)

Sources:

Spanish dictionary, Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Legal Spanish Y Corpus of XXI Century Spanish (electronic versions), from the Royal Spanish Academy. femicide, Penological Analysis 2014-2015, of the State Attorney General’s Office (digital edition).