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On June 3, 2015, the murder of Chiara Páez, a pregnant teenager from Santa Fe, at the hands of her boyfriend, sparked one of the most powerful mobilizations in recent Argentine history. Under the slogan #NiUnaMenos (Not One Less), a crowd took to the streets to say “enough is enough” to femicide and all forms of gender-based violence. That day marked a turning point in the feminist organizing process that had been unfolding since the return of democracy in communities, unions, health and educational institutions, both within and outside the state. It was a massive gathering that kicked off a cycle of feminist social mobilization against neoliberalism, which soon spread throughout Latin America.
Since then, Ni Una Menos has ceased to be just a phrase. It has become a cross-cutting, intergenerational, and continental slogan. In the squares of Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago, Montevideo, and Mexico City, thousands of women and dissidents began to organize. Assemblies, support networks, artistic collectives, feminist strikes, and campaigns for the legalization of abortion where it did not yet exist emerged. This created the conditions for the reemergence of a political subject that had had a strong presence since the mid-1970s and throughout the following decade: Latin American popular feminism, which turned pain into organization and anger into a transformative force.
“We are all workers”: between gender violence and economic violence
From its inception, the Ni Una Menos movement made it clear that sexist violence cannot be understood in isolation: it is deeply connected to economic inequality, job insecurity, indebtedness, and the multiple forms of exploitation that particularly affect women and dissidents. But it also forged a scene of rearticulation of feminist energy in every sphere of social, organizational, and political life.
Through international women’s strikes – promoted since 2016 by an assembly energized by feminist collectives, social movements, unions, political parties, gender diversity groups, anti-racist networks, and migrant groups – the slogan was amplified: “If our lives are worthless, produce without us.” The feminist strike challenged the economic system from a radical perspective. It highlighted that care work, which is mostly unpaid and feminized, sustains the functioning of capitalism. It demanded that we are all workers, not only in formal employment, but in every space where life is produced and reproduced.
In addition, Ni Una Menos incorporated the denunciation of debt as a form of subjugation: many women are forced into debt in order to survive or to cover what the state does not guarantee. This economic violence is also gender violence. Thus, feminism proposed a new framework for thinking about social justice: there can be no emancipation without redistribution, nor freedom without economic autonomy.
It is not freedom, it is neoliberalism: the war against social justice
Ten years after the first 3J (June 3, the date of the movement’s first mobilization, which started it all), feminism faces not only its historic struggles, but also a global conservative offensive that seeks to delegitimize transfeminisms and all forms of popular mobilization of the last decade, as part of an ideological reinforcement of the radicalized right in the rearmament of financial neoliberalism, in its most extreme and neo-colonial phase.
In 2024, Javier Milei’s government in Argentina took office with the promise of carrying out “the world’s biggest adjustment”. Of the total spending cuts in 2024, contributory pensions and retirement benefits accounted for 24%, real direct investment in public works for 15%, transfers to provinces for 16%, energy subsidies for 10%, social programs for 11%, and wages for 8%.
Under the rhetoric of individual “freedom”, fiscal austerity, and the “chainsaw”, lies a policy of state destruction and structural adjustment that hits the most vulnerable sectors: retirees whose pensions have lost up to 35% of their value due to inflation, coupled with cuts to essential free medications and a 29% increase in poverty. The reaction includes budget cuts in gender policies, the criminalization of feminist activism, and the amplification of social and street violence against gender and sexual minorities. There is an attempt to return to the discourse of the traditional family, to question comprehensive sex education, and to erase inclusive language.
This conservative onslaught is also supported by the discrediting of achievements such as legal abortion, gender identity laws, and job quotas for transgender people. In the name of fiscal “order”, the popular economy is also being dismantled with the elimination of policies supporting cooperatives and informal workers, pushing thousands into poverty.
At the same time, memory, truth, and justice are being persecuted: human rights policies are being dismantled, historical institutions are being delegitimized, and state terrorism is being denied. And state personnel in care sectors, including health and education, are being defunded and suffocated with wage cuts. These sectors are considered an expense, as are those specifically dedicated to promoting scientific and technical knowledge in the country.
These actions do not represent real freedom, but rather a neoliberal offensive that turns rights into privileges, redistributes power and resources to concentrated sectors of power, empties the role of the state, and attacks the very heart of social justice won through decades of struggle.
Faced with this scenario, the feminist movement is at a new crossroads: how to sustain its gains, protect its spaces, and respond to hatred with greater organization and more street action. The networks built over the past ten years will be key to resistance. But it is also necessary to renew strategies, add new voices, and strengthen coordination with other social movements.
Ten years after Ni Una Menos: unifying struggles against the advance of neo-fascism
Feminism is not just a struggle for women’s rights. Today, more than ever, it is a trench against all forms of authoritarianism and exclusion. In a global context where neo-fascist political projects – xenophobic, anti-feminist, and anti-rights – are advancing, the challenge is clear: to build a broad, plural, and combative unity that confronts hatred from below.
Ten years after Ni Una Menos, in a difficult scenario for street strategy, feminist organizations called for the unification of struggles in defense of pensioners, who for months have been mobilizing and facing weekly repression by the libertarian government, but also by all those affected by this political project aimed at restoring class power to the concentrated sectors of power, mainly the financial sector.
On June 4, 2025, a large and diverse crowd mobilized in front of the Argentine Congress to protest budget cuts promoted by President Javier Milei. The march brought together retirees, teachers, scientists, doctors, people with disabilities, social activists, and feminists, unifying demands that had previously been expressed separately.
The feminist experience of this decade has shown that it is possible to change the rules of the game. But it has also shown an extraordinary sensitivity to the conflicts that society faces in the face of the processes of dispossession of rights and destruction of the living conditions of the popular majority.
On the last 4J, called by Ni Una Menos, the streets once again became a territory of resistance. It was perhaps the most plebeian of all in the last ten years on this date, sustained especially by the economic and political networks deployed in working-class neighborhoods. Despite the goal of libertarian neoliberalism to break all the bonds of community solidarity and discourage all forms of political and social participation, there they were, alongside their comrades, embracing the women workers of Garrahan – Argentina’s main high-complexity pediatric care center – in struggle, the families of people with disabilities who have been the target of attacks by government officials, and women workers who mobilized with their unions.
The square was also filled with feminist comrades from the ecumenical roundtable that systematically accompanies the mobilization of retirees, and the transvestite-trans community was also present, which since 2014 has been organizing to demand historical reparations for the systematic persecution and institutional violence they have historically suffered.
It was also a square that reminded us that, in the face of fear and the feeling of vulnerability and unease, there is a more powerful force: solidarity, empathy, resistance, and grassroots organization. Because united, reorganized, and with memory, we continue to shout: Not one less, we want to live, free and debt-free.
Maisa Bascuas is a feminist activist from Argentina. She has a degree in Political Science (UBA), is a university professor, and a researcher on issues related to memory, Latin American feminisms, popular economies, and public policy. She currently coordinates the Latin American Popular Feminisms area at the Buenos Aires office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. From there, she promotes the production of the podcast Destapar la Crisis (Uncovering the Crisis), the fanzines Crisálidas, memorias del Movimiento de Mujeres y Feministas en América Latina y El Caribe (Chrysalis, Memories of the Women’s and Feminist Movement in Latin America and the Caribbean), and the collection Cuadernos Feministas (Feminist Notebooks).
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
