Seven years of "Ni Una Menos"

(June 3, 2022)

Today is the seventh anniversary of Argentina’s “Ni Una Menos” movement, which launched a regional surge of protests against femicides, gender violence, and fed into the “Green Wave” of abortion activism that has successfully advanced women’s rights in many countries of the region.

Seven years ago about 2,000 people gathered in front of Argentina’s Congress to demand policies responding to femicides, spurred in particular by the gruesome case of a pregnant 14-year-old last who was beat to death by her boyfriend and buried in a courtyard. (See Latin America Daily Briefing for June 4, 2015.)

Since then, about there have been about 2,000 victims of femicide in Argentina. More than half were killed in their homes, in most cases by former or current romantic partners. In 83 cases the perpetrator was a member of security forces who used a regulation gun to commit the murder. (Página 12)

A major factor behind the movement’s success: transversal work, across party lines and generations, writes Mercedes Funes in Infobae.

News Briefs

Migration

• A migrant caravan of about 11,000 people plans to leave Tapachula,on the Mexico-Guatemala border, and head north for the United States on Monday. The date coincides with the beginning of the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas, which has migration among the Biden administration’s thematic priorities. (Guardian, see Wednesday’s post.)

Regional Relations

• The U.S. Biden administration revoked a series of restrictions on flights to Cuba imposed by the previous government, including ending a prohibition on U.S. airline flights to Cuban airports other than Havana. (Reuters, see May 17’s post.)

• The flights are among a handful of measures aimed at easing former President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the Cuba’s government. Yet, while the measures are bringing hope to families like Carvajal’s, they fall well short of the normalization of relations under President Barack Obama, reports the Washington Post.

Colombia

• Colombian presidential candidate Rodolfo Hernández’s campaign is heavily focused on anti-corruption discourse, which makes it particularly salient that prosecutors have presented evidence of undue interest in public contracts signed during his tenure as mayor of Bucaramanga, writes Daniel Coronell at W Radio.

• Hernández met with centrist politicians from the Coalición de la Esperanza — led by Sergio Fajardo — yesterday. La Silla Vacía reports that Fajardo is likely to back Hernández if he meets certain criteria, including a commitment not to ally with Uribismo, guarantee that his government would have gender policies, and a realistic tax reform.

• Centrist politicians apparently also seek guarantees that Hernández would defend the country’s institutionality, after campaign promises to declare a state of emergency and implement policies by decree, reports La Silla Vacía.

• La Silla Vacía looks at Hernández as compared to Donald Trump, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Nayib Bukele and Jair Bolsonaro — “the pieces of the populist Frankenstein that would be Rodolfo.”

• In recent years, dozens of subsistence farmers populating national parks in Colombia have been targeted by state forces under Operation Artemis, an army-led offensive aimed at combatting rampant deforestation. Deforestation rates, however, remain high, in large part because the policy is misguided, according to experts. (Al Jazeera)

• Artemis has targeted vulnerable farming families with expensive helicopter missions into the remote Amazon, instead of focusing on the kingpins who finance mass forest clearance from the comforts of their urban homes, reports Al Jazeera.

Regional

• The future of the British monarchy in the Caribbean looks bleak: In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, public sentiment toward the monarchy has soured, and calls for reparations for Britain’s often brutal role in the slave trade have been rising, reports the New York Times.

• Countries in the Americas should fortify their health systems to confront rising coronavirus deaths as well as the growing threats posed by other contagious diseases, including monkeypox, viral hepatitis and the flu, said PAHO Director Carisse Etienne, yesterday. (New York Times)

• Efforts by Brazil, Chile and Uruguay to shift to renewable and carbon-free energy sources, along with the emergence of new lower-cost technologies, could position South America as a leading global green hydrogen supplier, writes Thomas Andrew O’Keefe at the Aula Blog.

Guatemala

• Food inflation related to the Ukraine conflict and Covid-19 has only exacerbated a decades-long increase in Guatemalan food prices resulting from inequality in access to land and an emphasis on export crops over food staples — an issue with particular relevance for the country’s Indigenous communities, reports Nacla.

Brazil

• Brazil’s Bolsonaro administration said it aims to include state oil company Petrobras in its privatization program, though experts are skeptical, reports Reuters.

Códigos

• Netflix tested a new password-sharing policy — asking to pay extra when sharing their account passwords outside their homes — in Peru, Chile, and Costa Rica. “Widespread customer confusion and regulatory hurdles are a taste of what's to come soon for markets around the world,” according to Rest of World.

Happy Friday!