Women’s rights are making a comeback left and right in Latin America · Global Voices

This is an excerpt from an article by an Argentinian journalist Luciana Peker published in Muy WasoBolivian media partner of Global Voices.

Argentine government closed Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity. He closed it. He didn’t demote him or just change his organizational chart. President Javier Milei took office in December 2023 and kept his promise to eliminate it. He then opened the Undersecretariat for 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 led by Claudia Barcia, who resigned on June 6 when she found out — via WhatsApp — that the executive dissolve the help zone for women victims of gender violence.

The allegations against former Argentine President Alberto Fernandez — who is accused of committing violence against his wife and former First Lady Fabiola Yáñez—shows that those who favor policies against gender-based violence are capable of exercising it. Those who are against these policies, like Mila, are able to keep their promises. Without polarization, both are united to stop helping the victims.

In response to the allegations against Fernandez, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni said Argentina’s hotline for victims of abuse was still operating. But it suffered a 25 percent budget cut, according to Argentina’s women’s rights group EIALatin American Gender and Justice Team. In addition, the budget allocated to the state program “Acompañar”, which provides half a year’s minimum salary to women who have faced violence and sexual abuse, was reduced by 80 percent. Activist and lawyer Lala Pasquinelli says:

Las líneas de ayuda suffered a staff reduction of 38 per cent, leaving two shift workers. In 137 (sexual violence) there is no más. The Acompañar program went from helping 34,000 victims to 430.

Helplines have experienced a 38 percent reduction in staff, down to two workers per shift. Line 137 (against sexual violence) no longer exists. The accompanying program went from helping 34,000 victims to 430.

Reductions in women’s rights in Argentina

Lala Pasquinelli, creator of the feminist project “Mujeres que no fueron tapa” (“Women Who Were Not a Cover”) and the author of the book “At Estafa de la feminidad“(“The Fraud of Femininity”) says that “the failures are overwhelming on all fronts: formal, symbolic and material”.

Argentina’s austerity policies are affecting women, she points out. “If there are health cuts, (women) are the ones who walk among the hospitals (…) The dining halls run out of food, and they are the ones who roll up their sleeves.”

And it’s not just about what no longer exists, but also about what has been demonized. In addition to budget cuts in public policies, social sectors are perplexed, isolated and atomized in the face of attacks.

Argentina has gone from being a vanguard country to being the vanguard of attacks on women and sexual diversity. The mirror that had expanded The green sea of ​​Argentina for women’s reproductive rights across the region now legitimizes 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 for the past. Bans on gender education and human rights frame women and queer movements as the enemy. This “gives a supposed ‘culture battle,’ which is entertainment that covers up the cruelty of the famine,” Pasquinelli explains.

In Argentina, 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. .

The Government of Mercy renamed Genderless “Día de las infancias” (Children’s Day) to “Día del niño” (Children’s Day), which uses a gender term for child that also means boy. The ad said: “Our goal is for all children to grow up in a healthy and safe environment, away from those who promote gender ideology and threaten their integrity.”

A regression map

In Peru, lawmakers tried to pathologize trans people. The protesters managed to stop the reactions. In a world of disinformation chaos, accusations of the marginalized impact the streets and the culture. It is a latent threat.

The far right wants to brand sex education as a gender ideology and stimulate a debate that enlightens anti-feminist groups.

Xiomara Castro rules Honduras, but women in power no longer guarantee women’s rights. Her victory was considered a great victory because she appointed more feminists to the government, but Castro “vetoed a law in favor of sex education for children. Her minister of education, along with an evangelical minister, broke the guidelines and showed support for the churches. This shows that we are going backwards,” says activist Melissa Cardoza, from The National Network of Human Rights Defenders and the Assembly of Women Fighters of Honduras.

In 2021, Uruguay was a pioneer in approving Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy. Now, lawmakers have introduced three bills that go against these hard-won rights, such as the bill that seeks to repeal Uruguay’s law against gender-based violence. However, in times of misinformation and disinformation, non-repeal is not enough.

Attacks and disinformation

They are attacks that have tangible effects. Therefore, they cannot be underestimated. There are others who are intercepted but spread their poison regardless. Something fundamental is that attacks are not isolated.

Current information models operate 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 comes to believe, that their bubble is the world. We need to see the big picture, more than the GPS, and not miss the forest for the trees.

In Uruguay, they searched to repeal gender violence law and create a domestic violence law. What is domestic is again the center of what is 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 stay-at-home wife would be a victim.

Above all, the idea of ​​gender-based violence would be cut and replaced with an outdated term that was used when we first started to explain the problem: domestic violence. The family. the holy family Even the violent family. Not the diverse family. They want to break free from the boundaries of what can and cannot be done within a family. But it does not mean that not, and in families.

Demirdjian highlights:

It is not by chance that he takes issue with the voice of women and gender-based violence. Son proyectos regressivos, which would already be unprotected in the women they denounce, but that there are projects and the topic under debate is a retroceso.

It is no coincidence that women’s voices and (the existence of) gender-based violence are being questioned. They are regressive bills that would leave women who report unprotected, but the fact that the bill exists and that the issue is being discussed is (already) a step backwards.

Creating a villain to combat sexual diversity

The Plata River stretches across South America. Election results aside, no one along the river wants to swim against the current. Women must guard what they have won, on one end, and mourn what they have lost on the other. Everywhere women are accused of lying, and lying itself becomes a way of speaking without any foundation.

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 prohibiting the teaching of gender ideology in educational institutions.

It is not a pandemic, not a virus that is spreading. “Gender ideology”, poetically painted as a villain, creeps across borders. It is not an exception; it is an international orchestration.

In El Salvador, in late February 2024, President Nayib Bukele attacked gender education and decided not to include it in public education. Education Minister José Mauricio Pineda posted: “Verified: We have removed all traces of gender ideology from public schools.”

Bukele made the decision after meeting Trump and Milei in the United States at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In the 1970s, Plan Condor ordered military coups in South America from the United States. Their collaboration is no longer to fly over, but to be silent.

The president of Peru is a woman who was not elected and is destroying policies for women, even without any electoral support. However, 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, same strategies

In Latin America, there are many elected and unelected governments, left-wing or right-wing authoritarian democracies, and none respect the rule of law and women’s right to a life free of violence.

They all use the same old strategies. The removal of organizations against gender-based violence is in the album of almost all countries. Dina Boluarte’s project 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 Social Development and Inclusion (MIDIS).

Against the backdrop of Peru’s crisis of corruption and human rights violations, feminist lawyer Parwa Oblitas says:

Fusionar el Ministerio de las Mujeres would be a serious retroceso, because it will take more than 30 years and promoted policies, and well you did not touch, we fight gender inequality in the country.

The merger of the Ministry of Women would be a serious failure because it has been in existence for more than 30 years and has promoted policies that, although not sufficient, 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 he proposed to put the Ministerio de la Mujer dentro de otro: para diluirlo. Era muy scandaloso convertilo en Ministerio de la Familia.

They follow in Mile’s footsteps and want to merge ministries for the invisible (women). That’s why they wanted to put the Ministry of Women in another: to dilute it. It was very scandalous to turn it into the Ministry of the Family.

Barrientos also explains that current Peruvian politics is conservative and far-right. “They are trying 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 points out that, before this happened, the population had repudiated these measures in the streets.

This comeback is not a headline, but a constant. It does not happen in one place, but in many. Latin America is going against progress and going backwards after decades of advancement.