CIVICUS discusses attacks on women’s and LGBTQI+ people’s rights with Natalia Gherardi, Executive Director of the Latin American Team on Justice and Gender (ELA), an Argentinean civil society organisation that works at the regional level.

On 1 February, LGBTQI+ and women’s rights organisations mobilised thousands of people in major Argentine cities to reject President Javier Milei’s hate speech. Days earlier, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Milei had denounced ‘radical feminism’ and ‘gender ideology’. His proposals, in line with Donald Trump’s anti-gender agenda, include dismantling diversity, equality and inclusion policies and removing femicide from the Penal Code as an aggravating factor in homicide sentences.

Why is the government seeking to eliminate the legal concept of femicide?

The proposal to remove the legal concept of femicide from the Penal Code is based on the argument that this concept gives women a ‘privilege’ as it confers more value on their lives than those of murdered men.

This is not true: in Argentina, the penalty for murder – from eight to 25 years – is always the same. The Penal Code then establishes various aggravating circumstances that can increase the sentence to life imprisonment. Some aggravating factors apply regardless of whether the murder involves a family member or an intimate partner and regardless of the gender of victim and perpetrator – for example, if the murder is committed with cruelty or using poison, for pleasure, greed or hatred, or in exchange for a payment or promise of payment. Other aggravating factors focus on the prior relationship between aggressor and victim, for instance when the person killed is an ‘ascendant, descendant, spouse, ex-spouse or a person with whom the aggressor has or has had a partner relationship, whether or not they lived together’. In this case, the aggravating circumstance also applies if it is a woman who kills a man. An example of this was the case of Nahir Galarza, a young woman sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering her boyfriend in 2017.

The aggravating factor for femicide, which by definition refers to the murder of a woman by a man, applies when there is evidence of gender-based violence, increasing the sentence to life imprisonment. But, as we’ve seen, it’s not the only possible aggravating factor.

The rejection of the aggravating factor for femicide is based on the refusal to recognise the existence of a structural inequality that makes femicide different from other homicides, which the state should respond to. The government is trying to erase this difference. Vice President Victoria Villaruel has said it many times since the election campaign: for her, violence ‘has no gender’ and we should all be ‘equal before the law’.

Feminism recognises there are different forms of violence and men can also be victims. The problem is with believing all forms of violence are the same, with the same causes and the same consequences. The slogan that we are all equal before the law is appealing, but it ignores the different circumstances in which people develop and the injustices that result from treating them all the same.

What was the process leading to the inclusion of femicide in Argentina’s Penal Code?

The concept of femicide emerged in Latin America as a legal response to a persistent social problem: violence against women, particularly in intimate relationships. Femicide is the most brutal manifestation of violence against women and is defined as the violent killing of a woman for gender-related reasons, often perpetrated by people close to the victim, but also as an extreme form of sexual violence. The term was coined to emphasise the political nature of these murders and the need for a specific approach, as standard security policies are not effective in combating murders that usually take place in the private sphere.

For many years, violence against women was seen as a domestic problem in which the state could not and should not intervene. This changed with the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979 and, at the regional level, the 1994 Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women.

Female activists, academics and journalists fought for years to shine the spotlight on gender-based violence and femicide. They documented that while the majority of homicide victims – eight out of 10 – are men, murders of women have specific characteristics. The circumstances and perpetrators are radically different: while men are often killed by strangers in public spaces, women are killed by people around them : 60 per cent of women are killed at home by an intimate partner or family member. Just over 10 per cent of men are killed in this way.

The concept of femicide as an aggravating circumstance for homicide was introduced into the Argentine Penal Code in 2012, following a regional trend encompassing countries such as Costa Rica in 2007, Guatemala in 2008 and Mexico in 2012.

How did people react to Milei’s words?

The response was swift and large-scale. On 23 January, in his speech in Davos, Milei claimed that so-called ‘gender ideology’ constituted child abuse, linked homosexuality to paedophilia and described ‘woke ideology’ as ‘a cancer that must be removed’. In addition to announcing plans to remove femicide from the Penal Code, he announced that he would repeal several gender equality laws, including those guaranteeing gender parity in political representation and employment protection for LGBTQI+ people.

Human rights, women’s and LGBTQI+ rights organisations and activists, academics and artists quickly came together to organise a Federal Anti-Fascist and Anti-Racist Pride March. The march took place in many cities just one week later and was massive and powerful.

Of particular significance was the fact that even many people who support economic measures or other government initiatives publicly expressed their opposition to an agenda seen as undermining hard-won democratic and pluralist consensuses.

Is Argentina experiencing an anti-rights backlash?

We are experiencing a regressive wave that is part of a global movement that has been building for years, attacking not just feminists but society as a whole.

We will continue to see attempts at regression disguised as initiatives to balance the budget, which are in fact ideological choices. It has been shown that cutting funding for policies to prevent and respond to gender-based violence ends up costing the state 22 times more. Reduced investment in programmes to prevent unwanted teenage pregnancies, for example, leads to school drop-outs, employment difficulties and the intergenerational reproduction of poverty.

In the face of these setbacks, we are working with other organisations on legal tools, legal strategies and international initiatives. It is essential for society to prepare to act collectively to defend rights and democracy.