Female journalists who write about gender issues say they are having to deal with a toxic wave of threats against them in Argentina. Some are fighting back, others are lying low and one has gone into self-imposed exile for her safety.
“We are facing a witch-hunt from the ultra-right,” said the author, journalist and activist Luciana Peker, who recently left Argentina for an undisclosed location due to the weight of threats against her.
Argentina became the largest Latin American nation legalise abortion in 2020, but its newly elected far-right libertarian president, Javier Milei, campaigned to overturn the law saying he would call a referendum on it if necessary.
The #NiUnaMenos (“not one less”) movement marches that began in 2015 put Argentina at the forefront in the struggle for women’s and gender rights in Latin America.
But the libertarian movement that helped propel Milei to power last month appeared to deliberately target feminists when it started building its follower base in 2018.
“Feminism in Argentina has been a driving force in the struggle for women’s rights across Latin America, which is why it is so important for the global libertarian ultra-right to try to discipline Argentinian women,” said Peker.
“They were on a crusade similar to the one in several western countries against anything related to progressive movements, with feminism at the head,” added the journalist Giselle Leclercq.
Leclercq, who covered Argentina’s nascent libertarian movement for the independent media company Perfil, suffered hundreds of attacks when she revealed how feminist journalists were being targeted.
“They put my home address online … one libertarian sent me a direct message saying he would come to the newsroom and eat my liver,” Leclercq told the Guardian.
Other female journalists describe similar abuse.
“All feminists are under attack,” said one of Argentina’s most successful authors, Claudia Piñeiro, who said she receives hundreds of threats and abusive messages every time she checks her social media accounts.
“They tell me they know my phone number, that they know my favourite cafe, they send me hundreds of photos of erect penises, they call me a shitty old woman,” she said.
Piñeiro, who was shortlisted for the international Booker prize in 2022, said that the threats against feminists are a targeted campaign. “I’ve had to consult doctors because of the effect on my physical and mental health.”
Leclercq said Milei tapped into a portion of the population that is “very angry with the advance of gender rights, angry with feminism, and schoolboys bitter that their female classmates were suddenly empowered and stood up to them”.
Milei’s voting base was made up in large part by such underemployed young males in a country where a third of the electorate is aged between 16 and 29.
“Young men respond to Milei because he represents them: broken, unbalanced, with the right to instil fear,” Peker said. “My fear does what it always does to women, it shuts me up. Women’s freedom recedes with the advance of machismo – men who flee from women, the men Milei represents, the macho-sphere.”
Before the country’s general election last year, Periodistas Argentinas, a feminist press freedom group of 220 female journalists, issued a statement warning of the “proliferation of hate speech” against them and the “exclusion of our voices” from media companies that tend to elbow out threatened journalists from their staff.
“The question is how to keep reporting while we’re shaking with fear,” said the group’s founder, Claudia Acuña. “No one is going to look after us so we need to walk hand in hand together, think together, engage in collective self-defence.”
