Thousands protest on International Women\'s Day in Buenos Aires

ROUGH CUT - NO REPORTER NARRATION Thousands of women took to the streets of Buenos Aires on Friday (March 8), calling for an end to femicides.

One woman is killed every 30 hours in Argentina, according to La Casa del Encuentro, with violence driven by Latin America's "macho" culture, which tends to blame women for the violence inflicted on them and to condone it.

One of the protesters told Reuters she came to the protest "because we are being killed every day, a different girl in any part of the country.

There is a femicide every 18 hours and we have to go out on the street.

It's the only way we can be heard." More than a dozen countries in Latin America have passed laws in recent years that define and punish femicide as a specific crime, including El Salvador, Mexico and Colombia.

Women's rights campaigners, dressed in green, also called for a right to legal abortion.

Abortion in Argentina is only allowed when pregnancy is the result of rape, or when the mother's health is at risk.

Protesters, of all ages, marched up to the Casa Rosada Presidential Palace, where woman demanded equality.

The majority Catholic region of Latin America and the Caribbean has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, while a handful of countries, mostly in Central America, ban abortion under any circumstances.