Women's rights are backsliding left and right in Latin America
Right- and left-wing governments in Latin America are taking away the rights of women and transgender people
Originally published on Global Voices
This is an extract from an article by Argentine journalist Luciana Peker published in Muy Waso, a Bolivian media partner of Global Voices.
The Argentine government closed the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity. It closed it. It did not downgrade it, or merely modify its organizational chart. President Javier Milei took office in December 2023 and kept his promise to eliminate it. He then opened the Sub-Secretariat of Protection against Gender Violence, under the Ministry of Human Capital.
At the end of May, this agency was transferred to the Ministry of Justice. It was headed by Claudia Barcia, who resigned on June 6 when she found out — by WhatsApp — that the executive branch had dissolved the area of help for women victims of gender violence.
The charges against former Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez — who is accused of committing violence against his wife and former First Lady Fabiola Yáñez — show that those who are in favor of policies against gender-based violence are capable of exercising it. Those who are against these policies, like Milei, are capable of keeping their promises. Without polarization, both are united to stop helping victims.
In response to the charges against Fernandez, the presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni declared that the Argentinian hotline for victims of abuse was still working. But it suffered a 25 percent budget cut, according to Argentinian women's rights organization ELA‘s Latin American Gender and Justice Team. On top of that, the budget allocated to the state program “Acompañar”, which grants a minimum wage for half a year to women who have faced violence and sexual abuse, was slashed by 80 percent. Activist and lawyer Lala Pasquinelli says:
Las líneas de ayuda sufrieron una reducción de personal del 38 por ciento, quedaron dos trabajadoras por turno. La 137 (violencia sexual) no existe más. El programa Acompañar pasó de ayudar a 34.000 víctimas a 430.
The helplines suffered a personnel reduction of 38 percent, leaving two workers per shift. The 137 line (against sexual violence) no longer exists. The accompanying program went from helping 34,000 victims to 430.
Cuts to women's rights in Argentina
Lala Pasquinelli, the creator of the feminist project “Mujeres que no fueron tapa” (“Women who were not a cover”) and author of the book “La Estafa de la feminidad” (“The femininity scam”) says that “the setbacks are overwhelming on all fronts: formal, symbolic, and material.”
Argentina's austerity policies affects women, she highlights. “If there are cuts in health, [women] are the ones who wander between hospitals […] The dining rooms remain without food, and they are the ones who roll up their sleeves.”
And it's not only about what's not there anymore, but also what has been demonized. In addition to the budget cuts in public policies, the social sectors are perplexed, isolated, and atomized in the face of the attacks.
Argentina went from being a vanguard country to being the vanguard of attacks against women and sexual diversity. The mirror that had expanded Argentina's green tide for women's reproductive rights to the whole region is now legitimizing a global phenomenon of regression.
Each national or continental context has its own cardinal points, but they coincide in going backwards and generating a false nostalgia about the past. The bans on gender education and human rights frame women and queer movements as the enemy. This “give[s] a supposed ‘cultural battle,’ which is entertainment that covers up the cruelty of hunger,” Pasquinelli explains.
In Argentina, the free distribution of contraceptives was approved in 2002, sex education in 2006, same-sex marriage in 2010, gender identity law in 2012, and legal abortion in 2020. The calendar now looks like “Back to the Future” in reverse.
Milei's government renamed the ungendered “Día de las infancias” (Childhood Day) to “Día del niño” (Child's Day), which uses a gendered term for child that also means boy. Theannoucement read: “Our purpose is that all children grow up in a healthy and safe environment, far from those who promote gender ideology and threaten their integrity.”
A map of regression
In Peru, lawmakers attempted to pathologize trans people. Protestors managed to stop the backlash. In a world of disinformative chaos, accusations towards those who are left at the social fringes impact the streets and culture. It is a latent threat.
The extreme right wants to brand sex education as gender ideology and spur a debate that lights up anti-feminist groups.
Xiomara Castro governs Honduras, but women in power no longer guarantee women's rights. Her win was considered a great victory, as she named several feminists in the government, but Castro “vetoed a law in favor of sexual education for children. Her minister of education, together with an evangelical pastor, broke the guidelines and showed support for the churches. That shows that we are going backwards,” says activist Melissa Cardoza, of the National Network of Human Rights Defenders and the Assembly of Women Fighters of Honduras.
In 2021, Uruguay was a pioneer in approving the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy. Now, lawmakers have presented three bills that go against these hard won rights, such as the draft bill that seeks to repeal Uruguay's law against gender violence. However, in times of false information and disinformation, not repealing it is not enough.
Attacks and disinformation
There are attacks that have tangible effects. Therefore, they cannot be underestimated. There are others that are intercepted, but spread their poison regardless. Something fundamental is that attacks are not isolated.
The current information models work in a bubble. It's not even about what kind of media each person reads, but rather what a person's algorithm feeds them on a plate. Everyone has their own bubble and believes, or ends up believing, that their bubble is the world. We must see the bigger picture, more than the GPS, and not miss the forest for the trees.
In Uruguay, they sought to repeal their gender violence law and create a domestic violence law. What is domestic is once again the center of what's considered feminine and the only place where — supposedly — women could be helped. A girl who goes out partying and is abused would not be a victim. But a wife who stays at home would be a victim.
Above all, the idea of gender violence would be crossed out and replaced with an obsolete term that was used when we first started spelling out the problem: family violence. The family. The holy family. Even the violent family. Not the diverse family. They want to get rid of the limits of what can, and can't, be done within a family. But no means no, in families too.
Demirdjian highlights:
No es casual que se ponga en cuestión la voz de las mujeres y la violencia de género. Son proyectos regresivos que dejarían desprotegidas a las mujeres que denuncian, pero que existan los proyectos y que el tema esté en debate es un retroceso.
It is no coincidence that the voice of women, and [the existence of] gender violence, are being put into question. These are regressive projects that would leave women who report unprotected, but the fact that the draft bill exists and that the issue is under discussion is [already] a step backward.
Creating a villain to go against sexual diversity
The Plata River stretches throughout South America. Apart from electoral results, no one along the river wants to swim against the current. Women have to guard what they won, on one end, and on the other, they have to cry for what they lost. Everywhere, women are accused of lying, and lying itself becomes a way to speak without any basis.
The Southern Cone can become a cone of silence. In Paraguay, on August 22, 2023, the Senate Committee on Family, Childhood, Adolescence, and Youth approved a bill on the prohibition of teaching gender ideology in educational institutions.
It is not a pandemic, nor a virus that spreads. “Gender ideology,” poetically painted as a villain, sneaks across borders. It's not an exception; it's an international orchestration.
In El Salvador, at the end of February 2024, President Nayib Bukele lashed out against gender education and decided not to include it in public education. Education Minister José Mauricio Pineda posted: “Fact-checked: We have removed all traces of gender ideology from public schools.”
Bukele made the decision after meeting with Trump and Milei in the United States at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In the 1970s, the Condor Plan commanded military coups in South America from the United States. Their collaboration is no longer to fly over, but to silence.
Peru's president is a woman who was not elected and is destroying policies for women, even without any electoral support. Yet, international treaties that are above national constitutions and national laws guarantee that, beyond electoral ups and downs, public policies for women and queer rights cannot be eliminated.
Different types of government, the same strategies
In Latin America, there are many elected and non-elected governments, democracies with left- or right-wing authoritarianism, and none respect the rule of law and the right of women to a life free of violence.
They all use the same old strategies. Removing organizations against gender violence is in the album of almost every country. The project of Dina Boluarte is to cancel the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (MIMP). She justifies it by saying that it will be “unified” with the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion (MIDIS).
Amid the crisis of corruption and human rights violations that Peru is experiencing, feminist lawyer Parwa Oblitas says:
Fusionar el Ministerio de las Mujeres sería un grave retroceso, ya que lleva más de 30 años y ha promovido políticas que, si bien no alcanzan, combaten la desigualdad de género en el país.
Merging the Ministry of Women would be a serious setback since it has been in existence for more than 30 years and has promoted policies that, although not enough, combat gender inequality in the country.
Activist, poet, and teacher Violeta Barrientos connects the dots:
Están con la moda Milei y quieren fusionar ministerios para invisibilizar. Por eso se propuso poner el Ministerio de la Mujer dentro de otro: para diluirlo. Era muy escandaloso convertirlo en Ministerio de la Familia.
They are following Milei's footsteps and want to merge ministries to invisibilize [women]. That's why they wanted to put the Ministry of Women inside another one: to dilute it. It was very scandalous to turn it into the Ministry of the Family.
Barrientos also explains that current Peruvian politics are conservative and far-right. “It seeks to favor illegal mining, destroy our institutions, concentrate their power in Congress and take over the courts, just like in Venezuela, to tie the country's hands before the 2026 elections.” She also highlights that, before this happened, the population had repudiated these measures in the streets.
This backslide is not a news headline, but a constant. It does not happen in one place, but in many. Latin America is going against progress and backtracking after decades of moving forward.