Statement regarding the fascist advance in the region

In response to the massive mobilizations of another March 8th and 9th, the members of the group 'Violence, Security Policies and Resistance' declare…

A new March 8th and 9th finds us facing the fascist advance in the region and, along with it, the re-emergence of anti-rights discourses encompassed under the “gender ideology” that traverse Latin America and the Caribbean.

Territorialities and embodied realities are being ravaged by a fierce patriarchy, entrenched neoliberalism, and the rise of extractive projects that commodify life itself. Within this context, human security is under constant threat, confirming the validity of the UN's assessment that Latin America and the Caribbean is the "most dangerous and lethal region in the world" for women. It is therefore essential to continue fighting to ensure that the progress and gains made in the rights of women and other genders become a reality throughout the continent.

Thus, we face an escalation of violence and police and military repression that exposes the true values ​​of those who hold the monopoly on force. Consequently, massive operations have been mounted under the guise of security policies and against feminist protests, in collusion with the mainstream media, culminating in moments of social and political violence that must continue to be denounced.

Once again, these logics perpetuate the criminalization of dissent: women, trans people, and transvestites are now labeled as vandals and violent, if not infantilized, in an adult-centric and patriarchal system that refuses to acknowledge their demands and seeks to roll back hard-won rights. It is in this context that feminist movements are weaving resistance on a regional scale, reflecting the fact that violence accumulates and spreads regionally. The struggle is for the recognition of our differences: sexual, racial, political, and generational, all united by a powerful violet thread that weaves together Latin American and Caribbean lives, confirming the imminent: feminism in these latitudes is anti-racist and anti-capitalist.

The strike and the work stoppage transformed the streets into massive performance stages of dance and chant, whose demands revealed the significant diversity of violence and, at the same time, highlighted its very origin: a structural and simultaneous patriarchy. It is within this context that expressions of new—other—feminist aging emerged: women whose bodies and minds witnessed the most extreme cruelties of military dictatorships and the most atrocious genocides; Indigenous and Afro-descendant women who continue to be violated and murdered under racist, colonial, and extractivist banners; lesbian, trans, and bisexual women; women advocating for free childhoods and desired motherhood and for Reproductive Rights, among others. In these bodies an unbreakable thread was woven that connects temporalities, territorialities and that materializes in a scenario where fear appeared and appears, paradoxically, at the hands of those who have the duty to care, to make rights effective and to guarantee human security, that is, the security forces.

The strike and the work stoppage remind us that feminism is resistance and rebellion, that direct action is the response mechanism to the increasingly perverse scenarios that harm the most vulnerable. But feminism is also the union of pain and celebration, it is the activism that reclaims joy without losing its indignation, as the Guatemalan community feminist Lorena Cabnal teaches us. And so, every March 8th and 9th, public space is taken over by the force of the feminist struggle and resistance.

March 2020
Workgroup
Political security violence and resistance

This statement expresses the position of the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Projects and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.