The femicide of 14-year-old Chiara Paez, by her boyfriend, in May 2015 provoked national outrage in Argentina. “Are we not going to do anything?” asked journalist Marcela Ojeda. And we did something. On 3 June, the first Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) women’s march against femicide took place.
The march awakened a new global awareness in the fight against gender violence. The Ni Una Menos movement was replicated in Peru, Uruguay, Italy and Germany, among other places. In Brazil and Mexico, protests and the hashtag #MiPrimerAcoso (“my first harassment”) took off.
The west followed suit. In 2017, #MeToo exploded, two years after Ni Una Menos. Argentina’s “revolution of the daughters” learned its own resistance from the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, their search for their children and grandchildren who were kidnapped by the dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, and their fight for human rights against that regime. Many of those women were forced to flee Argentina and discovered that they’d have to fight for their rights in Europe, too.
But the country that led the struggle for women’s rights in Latin America has now suffered an extreme, misogynistic setback, and I, too, feel I have been forced to leave my country. Ever since Javier Milei took office in December 2023, his government has deployed a shocking strategy that plunders natural resources, attacks social justice, dismantles the state and erodes the rights of women and sexual diversity. The attacks on feminism that this environment enables are a huge problem for Argentina. It is also a very serious problem for Latin America and for women in the west, however distant it may feel to them.
The great virtue of feminism is not merely its promotion of sexual freedom, campaigning against the wage gap and stopping sexist violence. The power of feminism lies in its ability to transform the political landscape of a world drowning in resignation. It is not just about what is achieved, but showing that collective action does achieve things. Feminism transforms, unifies and revitalises. Feminism is hope – and that makes it the enemy of neo-fascism, which divides, individualises and crushes.
And so, less than a month after taking power, Milei’s government closed the ministry of women, gender and diversity, seemingly reducing policies against gender violence to mere bureaucratic decoration, and has put at risk the right to legal, safe and free abortion, which was won in 2020. Milei has spoken out against feminism, and has been verbally abusive to women, to the point that one female journalist walked off a live TV programme after he said: “I could take a 9mm [gun] and put it to your head.”
Of course, Latin women continue to learn from those in the west. The Argentinian nightmare seems like a real-life version of the apocalyptic British TV series Years and Years, with a woman – in Argentina’s case, the anti-abortion vice-president, Victoria Villarruel – at the helm to soften the image of the kind of regressive authoritarianism also seen in El Salvador, Italy and Hungary.
It also reminds me of Laura Bates’s brave book Men Who Hate Women, which exactly describes the strategies that Milei applied to captivate the angry young men who played an important role in his electoral victory. Such men have declared anyone denouncing abuse, rape, harassment and discomfort their enemy. As a result, the journalists, writers and feminist activists who spoke out have become targets of their attacks. Nearly three-quarters of female journalists around the world who responded to a Unesco survey in 2020 had experienced online violence – including death threats, image-based harassment and threats of sexual violence. They want us dead or silent.
Feminism in Argentina hasn’t been stamped out, but it’s under attack. That’s why I have had to leave the country, after threats, censorship, silencing and the suffocation of my work and income by Milei’s supporters. “You deserve to be next,” someone commented on my Instagram post, when I shared my article on the control weapons due to femicide. I have not left to be silenced, but to continue writing. And I have not left for ever. It’s not personal – it’s political.
Women in Latin America need women in the west to work with us to put an end to this violent oppression. Read the work of Latin authors, activists, writers and journalists, follow them on social media, share their content and support our women’s words, so that violence does not silence us and economic suffocation does not steal our voices again. Our freedom cannot be pushed back. Neither can our words.
Luciana Peker is an author, journalist and activist from Argentina. This article was translated by Uki Goñi
