Against the pounding of drums, dozens of women jumped up and down, hands pumping in the air, to a football chant they had adapted for the occasion. “Those who don’t jump, voted for Milei,” the women sang. They were all jumping.
It was Saturday, and tens of thousands of demonstrators were marching from Argentina’s Congress to the presidential palace to mark International Women’s Day. They carried placards denouncing recent government decisions, and also cutouts of the country’s hard right president, Javier Milei, depicted as a devil. A handful of Donald Trump caricatures made an appearance too. “The streets are ours,” they shouted. “Milei is a scam.”
The numbers swelled across the pavements, where the vendors were selling choripánes – grilled chorizo sandwiches. Elderly women waved down from their balconies. Children bounced on their fathers’ shoulders. One group of protesters was dressed in the red habits and white bonnets synonymous with The Handmaid’s Tale.
Argentina is one of the most politically forward-thinking countries in Latin America. It was the first Latin American country to implement a parliamentary quota system for women in 1991, while its protest movement known as the Green Wave was instrumental in securing the country’s safe abortion rights in 2020.
But its president, Milei, and his party, La Libertad Avanza, (Liberty Advances) have used their newfound power to push a different narrative – one that opposes feminism and women’s hard-won rights.
Since taking power, Milei has eliminated the ministry of women and dissolved the undersecretariat for protection against gender violence. He has rallied against abortion rights on both the world stage at Davos, decrying the “bloody and murderous abortion agenda”, and here at home – during a recent school visit, Milei remarked that the procedure was, in his view, “aggravated murder”.
In November, Argentina was the only nation to vote against a UN general assembly resolution calling for the prevention and elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls. “Radical feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality,” Milei said.
But it was his latest move that has caused the most outrage. In January, Milei’s administration vowed to eliminate femicide – the murder of a woman by a man in the context of gender violence – from the penal code, where it is listed as an aggravating factor of homicides. “Violence doesn’t have a gender,” Milei said.
During the protest women plastered posters on to buildings which listed the names of the women killed by men in the past year. In front of Congress, one group laid out 172 pairs of purple shoes, each one representing a recent victim.
“We take to the streets against the cruelty of Milei’s government,” said Raquel Vivanco, founder of Now That They See Us, a campaigning organisation. “We came out to repudiate his hate speeches that do nothing more than harangue and naturalise macho violence.”
Hours before the march, Milei’s team threw more kindling on to the fire, publishing a video claiming that previous governments had “wasted thousands of millions of pesos” on gender policies, and that “homicides against women” – note, not femicides – dropped 20% in 2024.
The fact-checking organisation, Chequeado, later said that number was false, acknowledging that data from the National Ombudsman’s Office showed a decline, but of 8% not 20%. Chequeado added that even 8% is questionable, as multiple femicide trackers have yet to publish their 2024 statistics.
Myriam Bregman, a prominent socialist leader and former presidential candidate, was on the march. She called the video a provocation. “It denied the existence of femicides,” she told me. The claim that a clampdown by the security minister would solve the problem were grossly inadequate. “This only feeds the determination to take the streets.”
“The government has chosen women and diversity as its antagonist, and our movement is responding,” she said.
It made me think of the group of young men I’d met at a political rally – when I asked why they had supported Milei back in 2023, they said they were sick of hearing about the gender pay gap. The women’s rights movement had gone “too far”, one of them said. To them, Milei was like a messiah, flipping the system on its head.
But, Argentina’s women won’t be silenced. “We won’t go back,” they sang and shouted. “We will fight with all our strength.”
Harriet Barber is a freelance journalist covering human rights abuses, women’s rights and politics in South America
