Civil Group: Five Women Killed per Day in Mexico

An average of five women were murdered every day in Mexico between 2012 and 2013, a non-governmental organization said Wednesday, highlighting the country's persistent problem of violence against women.

The number of murders of females "could be much higher due to the lack of registries" for these crimes, said Maria de la Luz Estrada, executive coordinator of the National Citizens Observatory Against Femicide.

Only 16 percent of the 3,892 murders have been investigated as "femicides," according to the group.

Femicide became a legal category of crime in all but one of Mexico's 32 states following a wave of killings of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, the city bordering the United States, in the 1990s.

Estrada warned that the lack of political will to tackle the problem is turning the Mexico City suburb of Ecatepec "into the new Ciudad Juarez."

A massive amount of bones found in the canals of the suburb of 1.6 million people last month may belong to some of the 1,000 females reported missing in the past year, Estrada said.

But officials in the State of Mexico say that most of the bones are animal remains, and only two belong to humans.

Between 2005 and 2010, around 60 percent of women killed in the populous State of Mexico, which surrounds the country's capital, have been found in empty lots, dirt roads and storm drains, according to the observatory.