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.
