From the green scarf to the chainsaw: what has happened in Argentina, the country symbol of the fourth feminist wave in which a misogynist now rules
December 30, 2020. Thousands of women overflow the Congress square in Buenos Aires. The House just passed the hard-fought abortion bill and the crowd roars. By then, the green scarf on her wrists had become a symbol far beyond Argentina: the symbol of a feminism that, like that square, roars on both sides of the Atlantic. The image travels the world. No one expects what will happen in exactly the same place three years later. December 10, 2023. Javier Milei harangues his followers from the steps of Congress. He has just been sworn in as President of Argentina. The square is today taken over by those wearing light blue colors and sporting national team jerseys. The symbol today is not a handkerchief, but a chainsaw, the one that Milei, an ultra leader, has promised to set in motion. Anti-feminism is one of its unquestionable signs of identity, and that chainsaw, the weapon with which to confront it.
What has happened in just three years for the country that was key in the beginning of the fourth feminist wave to end up governed by an anarcho-capitalist who flaunts his misogynist discourse? In a country that ended 2023 with 200% year-on-year inflation, almost all the answers are based on this figure. However, there is a discourse that seeks to blame precisely feminism for Milei’s victory. „There is a fashion in Argentina, which is to say that the government of Alberto Fernandez failed because it prioritized the agenda of women’s rights and dissidence. It is a wrong and vindictive look. What happened has to do with a profound deterioration of living conditions,“ says Argentine journalist Sonia Tessa.
After the administration of Mauricio Macri’s government, which acquired a debt with the IMF of more than 44 billion dollars that deeply conditioned the country’s economy, the Executive of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández arrived with the promise of recovery. However, the purchasing power of the registered salary continued to fall during his term of office. „And not to mention the unregistered, those who are in the informal sector. With the pandemic and the difficulty to articulate policies among the different sectors of the ruling coalition, there was a deterioration of politics. The pandemic crystallized an idea: that the political sector lived above the majority of the population and Milei articulated from there his discourse on caste“, Tessa continues. In this context, Milei exploited, in passing, the anti-feminist rhetoric of the extreme right and its denialism of structural inequality with statements against gender violence, the wage gap or abortion.
Fabiana Ríos was the first woman governor of an Argentine region. From 2007 to 2015 she governed Tierra de Fuego and today, at the age of 59, she continues to militate in feminism from an autonomous organization. Ríos argues that Milei’s economic and political positions were allied with sectors reluctant to the advances in rights that the country had been experiencing for some time. „Milei does not appear at any time, he does it post-pandemic, reacting to the decisions on isolation, and it is from there that he builds an idea of freedom from an individual perspective and not as a collective right. The national government closed itself instead of opening itself, stopped debating and there was an impossibility to respond to an inflation that came from the debt contracted but also from the issuance that had to be made to sustain the pandemic economy. There is a historical moment that is functional to a discourse. In the last twenty years there was a constant policy of growth of rights from a progressive perspective that the most conservative and reactionary sectors, both in politics and in social and cultural life, perceived as a threat. At this moment they found the possibility of a strategic alliance with economic, ideological and political participation to achieve this triumph that shocks us as feminists“, she explains.
These advances in rights crystallized in the equal marriage law, the trans identity law, the trans labor quota, the sexual and reproductive health law that guarantees contraception in public centers and also comprehensive sexual education, retirement benefits for housewives and, finally, the law on voluntary interruption of pregnancy. „Feminism was the movement with the greatest impact on these achievements. It was a mistake to consider that they were untouchable. Now what we thought was indisputable is being discussed, including who should pay the costs of the crisis,“ says the former governor. Only two months before Milei’s victory, the 36th Plurinational Meeting The Women, Lesbians, Transvestites, Trans, Bisexuals, Intersexuals, Intersexuals and Non Binaries’ Association gathered thousands of people in the city of Bariloche with the advance of the extreme right as a key point of the agenda, but that final push did not counteract the pro-Milei wave.
The shock of which Fabiana Ríos speaks and which is clearly felt among Argentine feminists has led many to reflection and self-criticism. There is, at least, one widely shared conclusion: the struggle was deflated once the law on voluntary interruption of pregnancy was passed. Behind a common objective, abortion, there were different sensitivities and positions on many other issues. And also a lot of fatigue, especially when the economy tightened even more and the same bodies that hold two or three jobs to get by are the ones that also have to sustain the mobilization. There are, however, those who see clearly that the dissolution of the abortion campaign once the law was approved was a strategic failure.
A hostile climate
Milei’s rhetoric has already begun to materialize. The Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity has disappeared: it will be a sub-secretariat under the so-called Ministry of Human Capital, and the continuity of policies to prevent and address gender violence is uncertain. Cecilia Cataldo is 40 years old and is an examining magistrate in the city of Río Grande. „We are concerned that there is a lack of funding or that when the ministry closes the fund that existed to assist victims does not reach the provinces and municipalities and forces them to take measures that limit the staff that assists women. A victim accompanied by the institutions goes through the process better. It is usually very difficult for them to denounce because of what it implies, which often means being left without income or isolated. Accompaniment is fundamental for these women to be able to continue and sustain their story,“ she explains. Cataldo underlines the positive effects that prevention and accompaniment policies have had, both in the courts and, for example, in high schools, but now everything is still up in the air.
The journalist Luciana Peker is clear: „Milei took anti-feminism as a flag. The strategy is to take the women who fought as the enemy, to tell people that there is going to be adjustment while showing a kind of revenge against feminists, as if we were the witches to be burned so that everything goes better“. The anti-feminist climate has become increasingly rarefied and Peker’s situation is a good example. An emblematic feminist journalist and writer, she has just retired for a few months in Spain after suffering serious threats that are still being investigated by the justice system in her country. She is not the only one who has suffered threats or is now directly unemployed in public media or institutions.
„Violence against public women has been a direct strategy,“ says Luciana Peker, who criticizes that progressive men have taken advantage of the tide of the ultra-right „to join this idea that feminist women are to blame“ for everything. The journalist argues that not all the changes that Argentina will undergo will be made through the direct repeal of laws, but that there will be „cunning ways“ to implement these cuts, such as emptying some resources or eliminating budget items that, in practice, will mean dismantling some policies. The virulence in social networks and aggressive speeches against feminism seek, he adds, to limit freedom of expression and the response to these cuts.
The challenge
Sonia Tessa stresses that the core of the electoral defeat of the progressive forces lies in the fact that the previous government „did not change the deterioration of the living conditions of the majority of the population“, but the strong adhesion of the young vote to Milei may also be due to „sectors of young men who felt they were losing their privileges“. Fabiola Ríos agrees with the idea that the new president has benefited from the „strong support of a youth that grew up in democracy and perhaps for that reason believes that rights have always been and is not aware of how many lives and struggles they have cost“. „They end up being functional to an authoritarian and retrograde, anarcho-capitalist scheme, with measures that in the short, medium and long term are going to harm the most vulnerable sectors,“ he says.
Magui represents well the astonishment of younger feminists. His political awakening coincided with the green tide. She went there with her mother and friends. Today he is 20 years old and the night Javier Milei won the elections he burst into tears. „Since June 2018 when I went to my first march I was shocked. I think that if any person goes it would happen to them exactly the same. Seeing a lot of women from different realities fighting together for the same goal opened my head and I’m sure it changed the way I see and think about many things. It put me on alert. That’s why it was so hard for me to understand how everyone around me voted in favor of this president. Doesn’t the patriarchal measures proposed by this guy resonate with anyone?“ she asks. The young woman is still affected by seeing how people around her, also in progressive families, ended up voting for Milei.
Sonia Tessa puts perspective: „Not all the population was feminist just because the feminist movement had high levels of mobilization and not all the population is now anti-feminist. This victory was not about us, but we cannot stop thinking about us either. These people are coming to take revenge but we have to make it clear that the ballot boxes did not give them legitimacy for that. There are conservative sectors that have always acted against our rights and today, they are not only empowered, but they are also at the top of the state structure. And another challenge is coming: shock policies are being applied that once again generate an immense transfer of income from a very impoverished and precarious population to the corporations and we will have to see how the Argentine people accept or fight this. And how feminisms will stand up“.
