JALAPA, Guatemala — They climbed the terraced hillside in single file, their machetes tapping the stones along the darkened footpath.

Gehovany Ramirez, 17, led his brother and another accomplice to his ex-girlfriend’s home. He struck the wooden door with his machete, sending splinters into the air.

His girlfriend, Lubia Sasvin Pérez, had left him a month earlier, fleeing his violent temper for her parents’ home here in southeast Guatemala. Five months pregnant, her belly hanging from her tiny 16-year-old frame, she feared losing the child to his rage.

Lubia and her mother slipped outside and begged him to leave, she said. They could smell the sour tang of alcohol on his breath. Unmoved, he raised the blade and struck her mother in the head, killing her.

Hearing a stifled scream, her father rushed outside. Lubia recalled watching in horror as the other men set upon him, splitting his face and leaving her parents splayed on the concrete floor.

For prosecutors, judges and even defense lawyers in Guatemala, the case exemplifies the national scourge of domestic violence, motivated by a deep-seated sense of ownership over women and their place in relationships.

But instead of facing the harsher penalties meant to stop such crimes in Guatemala, Gehovany received only four years in prison, a short sentence even by the country’s lenient standard for minors. More than three years later, now 21, he will be released next spring, perhaps sooner.

And far from being kept from the family he tore apart, under Guatemalan law Gehovany has the right to visit his son upon release, according to legal officials in Guatemala.

The prospect of his return shook the family so thoroughly that Lubia’s father, who survived the attack, sold their home and used the money to pay a smuggler to reach the United States. Now living outside of San Francisco, he is pinning his hopes on winning asylum to safeguard his family. They all are.

But that seems more distant than ever. Two extraordinary legal decisions by the Trump administration have struck at the core of asylum claims rooted in domestic violence or threats against families like Lubia’s — not only casting doubt on their case, but almost certainly on thousands of others as well, immigration lawyers say.

“How can this be justice?” Lubia said before the family fled, sitting under the portico where her mother was killed. “All I did was leave him for beating me and he took my mother from us.”

“What kind of system protects him, and not me?” she said, gathering her son in her lap.

Their case offers a glimpse into the staggering number of Central Americans fleeing violence and dysfunction — and the dogged fight the Trump administration is waging to keep them out.

Across Latin America, a murder epidemic is underway. Most years, more than 100,000 people are killed, largely young men on the periphery of broken societies, where gangs and cartels sometimes take the place of the state.

The turmoil has forced millions to flee the region and seek refuge in the United States, where they confront a system strained by record demand and a bitter fight over whether to accept them.

But violence against women, and domestic violence in particular, is a powerful and often overlooked factor in the migration crisis. Latin America and the Caribbean are home to 14 of the 25 deadliest nations in the world for women, according to available data collected by the Small Arms Survey, which tracks violence globally.

And Central America, the region where most of those seeking asylum in the United States are fleeing, is at the heart of the crisis.

Here in Guatemala, the homicide rate for women is more than three times the global average. In El Salvador, it is nearly six times. In Honduras, it is one of the highest in the world — almost 12 times the global average.

In the most violent pockets of Central America, the United Nations says, the danger is like living in a war zone.

“Despite the risk associated with migration, it is still lower than the risk of being killed at home,” said Angela Me, the chief of research and trend analysis at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The issue is so central to migration that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, eager to advance the Trump administration’s priority of closing the southern border to migrants, issued a decision last year to try to halt victims of domestic violence, among other crimes, from seeking asylum.

To win asylum in the United States, applicants must show specific grounds for their persecution back home, like their race, religion, political affiliation or membership in a particular social group. Lawyers have sometimes pushed successfully for women to qualify as a social group because of the overwhelming violence they face, citing a 2014 case in which a Guatemalan woman fleeing domestic violence was found to be eligible to apply for asylum in the United States.

But Mr. Sessions overruled that precedent, questioning whether women — in particular, women fleeing domestic violence — can be members of a social group. The decision challenged what had become common practice in asylum courts.

Then, last month, the new attorney general, William P. Barr, went further. Breaking with decades of precedent, he issued a decision making it harder for families, like Lubia’s, to qualify as social groups also.

Violence against women in the region is so prevalent that 18 countries have passed laws to protect them, creating a class of homicide known as femicide, which adds tougher penalties and greater law enforcement attention to the issue.

And yet, despite that broad effort, the new laws have failed to reduce the killings of girls and women in the region, the United Nations says.

That reflects how deep the gender gap runs. For the new laws to make a difference, experts say, they must go far beyond punishment to change education, political discourse, social norms and basic family dynamics.

Though gangs and cartels in the region play a role in the violence, most women are killed by lovers, family members, husbands or partners — men angered by women acting independently, enraged by jealousy or, like Gehovany, driven by a deeply ingrained sense of control over women’s lives.

“Men end up thinking they can dispose of women as they wish,” said Adriana Quiñones, the United Nations Women’s country representative in Guatemala.

A vast majority of female homicides in the region are never solved. In Guatemala, only about 6 percent result in convictions, researchers say. And in the rare occasions when they do, as in Lubia’s case, they are not always prosecuted vigorously.

Even defense attorneys believe Gehovany should have been charged with femicide, which would have put him in prison a couple of years longer. The fact that he was not, some Guatemalan officials acknowledge, underscores the many ways in which the nation’s legal system, even when set up to protect women, continues to fail them.

In the courtroom, Lubia’s father, Romeo de Jesus Sasvin Dominguez, spoke up just once.

It didn’t make sense, he told the judge, shaking his head. A long white scar ran over the bridge of his nose, a relic of the attack. How could the laws of Guatemala favor the man who killed his wife, who hurt his daughter?

“We had a life together,” he told the judge, nearly in tears. “And he came and took that away from us just because my daughter didn’t want to be in an abusive relationship.”

“I just don’t understand,” he said.

‘It’s like our daily bread’

Lubia’s son crawled with purpose, clutching a toy truck he had just relieved of its back wheel.

The family watched in grateful distraction. Years after the murder, they still lived like prisoners, trapped between mourning and fear. A rust-colored stain blotted the floor where Lubia’s mother died. The dimpled doorjamb, hacked by the machete, had not been repaired. Lubia’s three younger sisters refused even to set foot in the bedroom where they hid during the attack.

Santiago Ramirez, Gehovany’s brother, never went to prison, spared because of a mental illness. Neighbors often saw him walking the village streets.

Soon, Gehovany would be, too. The family worried the men would come back, to finish what they started.

“There’s not much we can do,” said Mr. Sasvin Dominguez, sending Lubia’s son on his way with the toy truck. “We don’t have the law in our hands.”

He had no money to move and owned nothing but the house, which the family clung to but could hardly bear. His two sons lived in the United States and had families of their own to support. He hadn’t seen them in years.

“I’m raising my daughters on my own now, four of them,” he said.

He woke each morning at 3 a.m., hiking into the mountains to work as a farm hand. The girls, whose high cheekbones and raven-colored hair resembled their mother’s, no longer went to school. With the loss of her income from selling knickknacks on the street, they couldn’t afford to pay for it.

His youngest daughter especially loved classes: the routine, the books, the chance to escape her circumscribed world. But even she had resigned herself to voluntary confinement. The stares and whispers of classmates — and the teasing of especially cruel ones — had grown unbearable. In town, some residents openly blamed Lubia for what happened. Even her own aunts did.

“There’s no justice here,” said Lubia, who added that she wanted to share her story with the public for that very reason. Her father did, too.

In her area, Jalapa, a region of rippled hills, rutted roads and a cowboy culture, men go around on horseback with holstered pistols, their faces shaded by wide-brimmed hats. Though relatively peaceful for Guatemala, with a lower homicide rate than most areas, it is very dangerous for women.

Insulated from Guatemala’s larger cities, Jalapa is a concentrated version of the gender inequality that fuels the femicide crisis, experts say.

“It’s stark,” said Mynor Carrera, who served as dean of the Jalapa campus of the nation’s largest university for 25 years. “The woman is treated often like a child in the home. And violence against them is accepted.”

Domestic abuse is the most common crime here. Of the several dozen complaints the Jalapa authorities receive each week, about half involve violence against women.

“It’s like our daily bread,” said Dora Elizabeth Monson, the prosecutor for women’s issues in Jalapa. “Women receive it morning, afternoon and night.”

At the courthouse, Judge Eduardo Alfonso Campos Paz maintains a docket filled with such cases. The most striking part, he said, is that most men struggle to understand what they’ve done wrong.

The problem is not easily erased by legislation or enforcement, he said, because of a mind-set ingrained in boys early on and reinforced throughout their lives.

“When I was born, my mom or sister brought me food and drink,” the judge said. “My sister cleaned up after me and washed my clothes. If I wanted water, she would get up from wherever she was and get it for me.”

“We are molded to be served, and when that isn’t accomplished, the violence begins,” he said.

Across Guatemala, complaints of domestic violence have skyrocketed as more women come forward to report abuse. Every week, it seems, a new, gruesome case emerges in newspapers, of a woman tortured, mutilated or dehumanized. It is an echo of the systematic rape and torture women endured during the nation’s 36-year civil war, which left an indelible mark on Guatemalan society.

But today, the countries with the highest rates of femicide in the region, like Guatemala, also suffer the highest homicide rates overall — often leaving the killing of women overlooked or dismissed as private domestic matters, with few national implications.

The result is more disparity. While murders in Guatemala have dropped remarkably over the last decade, there is a notable difference by gender: Homicides of men have fallen by 57 percent, while killings of women have declined more slowly, by about 39 percent, according to government data.

“The policy is to investigate violence that has more political interest,” said Jorge Granados, the head of the science and technology department at Guatemala’s National Institute of Forensic Sciences. “The public policy is simply not focused on the murder of women.”

The femicide law required every region in the nation to install a specialized court focused on violence against women. But more than a decade later, only 13 of 22 are in operation.

“The abuse usually happens in the home, in a private context,” said Evelyn Espinoza, the coordinator of the Observatory on Violence at Diálogos, a Guatemalan research group. “And the state doesn’t involve itself in the home.”

In Lubia’s case, she fell in love with Gehovany in the fast, unstoppable way that teenagers do. By the time they moved in together, she was already pregnant.

But Gehovany’s drinking, abuse and stultifying expectations quickly became clear. He wanted her home at all times, even when he was out, she said. He told her not to visit her family.

She knew Gehovany would consider her leaving a betrayal, especially being pregnant with his child. She knew society might, too. But she had to go, for the baby’s sake, and was relieved to be free of him.

Until the night of Nov. 1, 2015, at around 9 p.m., when he came to reclaim her.

The New York Times tried to reach Gehovany, who fled after the killing and later turned himself in. But because he was a minor at the time of the murder, officials said, they could not arrange an interview or comment on the case.

His oldest brother, Robert Ramirez, argued that Gehovany had acted in self-defense and killed Lubia’s mother accidentally.

Still, Mr. Ramirez defended his brother’s decision to confront Lubia’s family that night, citing a widely held view of a woman’s place in Jalapa.

“He was right to go back and try to claim her,” he said. “She shouldn’t have left him.”

He looked toward his own house, etched into a clay hillside, a thread of smoke from a small fire curling through the doorway.

“I’d never allow my wife to leave me,” he said.

The smugglers’ road north

Mr. Sasvin Dominguez woke suddenly, startled by an idea.

He rushed to town in the dark, insects thrumming, a dense fog filling the mountains. In a single day, it was all arranged. He would sell his home and use the proceeds to flee to the United States.

The $6,500 was enough to buy passage for him and his youngest daughter, then 12. Traveling with a young child was cheaper, and often meant better treatment by American officials. At least, that’s what the smuggler said.

He hoped to reach his sons in California. With luck, he could find work, support the girls back home — and get asylum for the entire family.

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