Since 2015, every June 3, thousands of people take to the streets in Argentina shouting “Not One Less” to remember the victims of femicides and demand justice for their deaths. That first march was the awakening of a new feminist wave in the Latin American country, but it has lost strength since then. Unlike the massive demonstration nine years ago, this Monday there were a few thousand people in front of the Argentine Congress. The main slogans were against the Government of Javier Milei, which has openly attacked feminist movements, has eliminated the gender perspective from the national Administration and is defunding policies aimed at reducing inequality between men and women. The participants denounced the setback in recent months and the rise of hate speech against sexual diversities.
Despite the great social mobilization of recent years, femicides have not stopped: one is recorded every 35 hours, on average, mostly at the hands of couples or ex-partners. This weekend, the body of Johana González, 30, was located in a lagoon in the city of Resistencia, in northern Argentina. She had been murdered, dismembered and thrown into the water in a bag. A few days ago, the body of Talía Abigail Aragón (27 years old) was found at the foot of a cliff. She did not fall by accident: they had stabbed her in the chest before and the police suspect that the murderer was her ex-boyfriend. Anahí Robledo Yuvero, 17 years old, received more than twenty stab wounds while she was sleeping in her bed, presumably by her mother’s ex-partner as an act of revenge against her for leaving him.
González, Aragón and Yuvero add to a long list of victims, which approaches 2,500 in the last decade, according to data from the Supreme Court of Justice. The Government of Javier Milei condemns these crimes but denies that they are due to gender reasons. “They kill women and they kill men,” said pro-government deputy Lilia Lemoine during an interview on the LN + television channel in which she did everything possible to discredit the Ni Una Menos march.
The origin of the first mobilization was the murder of Chiara Páez, a 14-year-old teenager beaten to death by her boyfriend. This 2024, the most resonant case has been a savage hate crime, the triple murder of Pamela Cobbas, Roxana Figueroa and Andrea Amarante. They were burned alive by a neighbor of the boarding house where they lived.
“We demand justice for Pamela, Roxana and Andrea, cruelly murdered with Molotov cocktails for being lesbians,” the organizations calling for the march stressed in the agreed document that was read in front of Congress. “We consider that the hate speeches promoted by the highest representative of the national Executive lead to a society that acts accordingly. We hold him responsible for the fact that the attacks against the LGBTIQ+ community have increased and have reached their maximum expression,” they added. The participants demanded that the city offer reparation measures to Sofía Castro Riglos, the only survivor of what is known as the Barracas massacre.
The Government rejects that it was a hate crime committed for reasons of sexual orientation. With the same script as Lemoine, the presidential spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, assured days ago that “there are many women and many men who suffer violence and these are things that cannot continue happening.” Adorni stressed that “violence is something much more comprehensive than simply an issue against a certain group.”
The slogans against femicides and transvesticides were mixed with messages of rejection of the Milei Government. “With hatred and hunger there is no freedom,” could be read on banners that question the meaning of the word freedom raised by the far-right leader. “The Milei Government established cruelty and hatred as state policy. The violence of the Milei Government is social, it is economic and it is political,” they highlighted in the statement.
Femicide is the tip of the iceberg of multiple forms of violence that are rooted in a society with large gender gaps. Advances in the public sphere, now under threat, have been greater in recent years than those occurred at home: women still dedicate twice as much time to care tasks as men and Argentina is at the bottom of Latin America in paternity leave: only two days per child. In single-parent households the challenge is even greater, since two out of three parents fail to pay child support in a timely manner. Requests for a cultural change to put an end to these differences now collide with the narrative of a Government that denies that they exist.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the region.
#Una #Menos #Thousands #women #march #regression #gender #policies #Milei #Government
