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Latin America saw its streets painted green and purple on Tuesday (08.03.2022) during protests calling for an end to male violence, decriminalisation of abortion, fair wages and an end to feminicide, among other issues. Here is a review of how International Women's Day was experienced in the region.
Thousands of women marched in Argentina on Tuesday to express their repudiation of sexist violence and demand equal rights on International Women's Day. "The debt is with us" was one of the slogans in the main march that gathered a crowd of women in front of the National Congress in the Argentine capital, where a new agreement with the International Monetary Fund is being debated.
The demands emphasised violence against women, which in the first two months of this year caused 54 femicides, 63% of the cases murdered by partners or ex-partners, according to statistics from the NGO La Casa del Encuentro.
Hundreds of women marched in Bolivia carrying photographs of those accused or sentenced for rape, judges and prosecutors who have freed those implicated in cases of gender violence or feminicide, to demand justice and denounce the "delay in the resolution of the processes".
The march, organised by the Mujeres Creando collective, began at the Murillo Lighthouse in the city of El Alto and the group walked to the Departmental Court of Justice in La Paz, demanding justice for all victims of male violence and that there should be no impunity for those responsible. This mobilisation took place on 7 March, prior to International Women's Day, when other women's marches were also planned, including a call to President Luis Arce to join the mobilisations of women supporters of the government.
Thousands of Brazilian women, but also many men, took to the streets on Tuesday (08.03.2022) to call for greater gender equality and protested against the "macho and genocidal" policies perpetrated by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro.
Under shouts of "Bolsonaro will fall", "Down with genocide" or "Enough of misogyny and patriarchy", they marched on the streets of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, among other Brazilian cities, to advocate for equality on this International Women's Day. In Sao Paulo, the demonstrators gathered at the Sao Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) on the iconic Paulista Avenue at 16:00 local time (19:00 GMT), from where they marched about three kilometres towards the city centre.
Thousands of Colombian women protested on International Women's Day on Tuesday in a colourful march through Bogotá that celebrated the recent decriminalisation of abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy and demanded an end to male violence.
"It's legal, it's legal, abortion in Colombia is legal," chanted the women gathered in front of the Historical Memory Centre in the centre of the Colombian capital. The demonstrators gathered at around 15:00 local time (20:00 GMT) at different points in Bogota and marched peacefully towards the centre waving green scarves, dancing and chanting.
Tens of thousands of women marched in Santiago on Tuesday (08.03.2022) for greater equality, among them the next first lady, Irina Karamanos, and several ministers of the future leftist president Gabriel Boric, who will assume in three days a government that he promised will be "feminist".
"Democracy in the country, in the house and in bed," read the banner carried by 32-year-old Karamanos, Boric's partner, and other future female officials such as Camila Vallejos, the next government spokesperson, and Izkia Siches, who will become Chile's first female interior minister, during the International Women's Day demonstration.
Thousands of women marched on Tuesday in downtown San José to demand their rights and against harassment and what they consider "neoliberal policies" that affect the development of Costa Rica and its citizens.
The march included slogans against the two presidential candidates for the second round of elections on 3 April: former president José María Figueres, whom the demonstrators called a "thief", and Rodrigo Chaves, whom they called a "harasser" in reference to a sexual harassment sanction imposed on him by the World Bank when he was a World Bank official. The women also expressed their support for the legalisation of abortion, their repudiation of the government for its "neoliberal, patriarchal and sexist" policies, as well as their condemnation of feminicide and sexual harassment.
Cuba commemorated International Women's Day on Tuesday amid official congratulations for the progress made by Cuban women in society and criticism from independent activists on unresolved issues.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel congratulated on Twitter "all Cuban women who make the homeland proud with their work" and thanked them "for sustaining and raising creative resistance every day". Similar messages were posted on social networks to highlight, for example, that Cuba signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
Some 150 people demonstrated this Tuesday (08.03.2022) in Santo Domingo on the occasion of Women's Day to make a series of demands, among them the decriminalisation of abortion in three cases, as well as the prevention of violence.
Wearing orange and green clothing and carrying banners and posters, the groups of demonstrators - men and women - walked to the National Congress, shouting slogans such as "Neither submissive nor obedient, women fighters" and "This day is not a day of celebration, it is a day of struggle and resistance". After the short walk, activist Lucereida Mejía, from the Movement of Working Women, read a manifesto that was delivered to the National Congress to demand that legislators "adopt a different attitude to guarantee women's rights".
A massive march took place this Tuesday in Quito for International Women's Day, in which demands for equality, decriminalisation of abortion and justice against feminicide, but also against wars around the world, were heard once again.
Feminist groups marched through the streets of the centre of the capital of Ecuador in a march in which, loudly, they demanded that the country's president, the conservative Guillermo Lasso, eliminate the time limits of the recent law regulating abortion in cases of rape. The demonstration included a fierce struggle with the police in the vicinity of the presidential palace, in the historic centre of Quito, which has been guarded against the possibility of further social demonstrations.
To the unified cry of "Ni una menos, viva nos queremos" (Not one less, we want us alive), thousands of Salvadoran women marched through the main streets of San Salvador on 6 March to demand justice for the disappeared and victims of feminicide, perpetrated in the Central American country, considered one of the most dangerous for women.
Feminists, trans women, war veterans, human rights defenders and students gathered at one of the entrances to the University of El Salvador (UES) and then headed in a block to Cuscatlán Park, in a demonstration held to mark International Women's Day. "Alive they took them away, alive we want them alive", chanted the women who also carried different posters with messages such as: "I look prettier when I'm quiet, I don't look quiet", "we fight for those who are no longer here and those who are coming after us", "my fear has become strength", "we are the cry of those who are no longer here", among others.
Dozens of women in Guatemala demanded justice on Tuesday (08.03.2022) for the deaths of 41 girls who were burned to death five years ago in a state-run home, in a case that is making tiny steps forward in the Central American country's judicial system.
The call for justice took place during the day of International Women's Day, both in morning and afternoon marches that took place in the centre of Guatemala City, specifically at the altar created several years ago by various social organisations to remember the girls. The altar, a few metres from the National Palace of Culture, the seat of the Guatemalan government, was attended on Tuesday by dozens of women who honoured the 41 girls who died in the tragedy, as well as 15 other girls who were injured.
Hundreds of Honduran women marched this Tuesday in Tegucigalpa against the 61 feminicides that have shaken the country so far this year and to demand the fulfilment of their rights and the approval of the Shelter House Law for victims of male violence.
In one of the marches, which went all the way to the Honduran Parliament, they also protested against harassment and other macho aggressions against them, on International Women's Day. Honduran activist Celeste Guardiola told Efe news agency that the mobilisation, called by different feminist non-governmental organisations, also seeks to "make disabled women visible". "As women with disabilities we want to make ourselves visible to society, we have also been victims of violence," said Guardiola, who uses a wheelchair.
Tens of thousands of women shouted for justice in Mexico City on Tuesday (08.03.2022), protesting against the rising number of femicides and domestic violence, as part of International Women's Day.
"The women who set off from the emblematic Angel of Independence, a monument on the Paseo de la Reforma, to the Zocalo, the country's main square, chanted "Feminicidal state" and "Justice, justice! "Diana Renedo, 19, a business relations student, told AFP agency, "It's a lot of impotence because you can't do anything for your sisters" who have been assaulted, while a contingent shouted in unison "Not one more murdered woman! Mothers of femicide victims were chanting, calling out the names of their daughters. "I want to see the murderers in jail," said a banner from that contingent.
Nicaragua commemorated International Women's Day on Tuesday with 14 female opposition leaders detained in the context of the socio-political crisis that the country has been experiencing since April 2018, while the government of President Daniel Ortega highlighted advances in gender policy.
Various human rights, feminist and opposition organisations took to Twitter to "shout" for the convicted dissidents, through the hashtag #GritoPorLasPresasPoliticas, promoted by the Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights (CENIDH).
At least a thousand women marched in Panama on Tuesday (08.03.2022), International Women's Day, to demand greater protection for girls and adolescents against sexual violence and to demand better labour rights.
"We are fighting for these girls, because Panama is the country with the second highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the Americas, only Haiti is second," Walkiria Chandler, an alternate deputy in the National Assembly (NA, parliament) and women's rights activist, told Efe news agency. Under a large banner bearing the phrase "girls, not mothers", women of different ages, social classes and political persuasions marched in purple, the symbol of feminism, through the main streets of Panama City.
Hundreds of Peruvian women marched through the centre of Lima on 5 March, International Women's Day, to raise their voices against male violence, a scourge that does not let up in a country where a woman is murdered every two days simply because she is a woman.
Collectives of common pots, domestic workers, peasant women, sex workers, disabled people and relatives of disappeared women and victims of feminicide gathered in front of the Palace of Justice in the Peruvian capital and walked through the main streets of the city to demand equality and denounce the capitalist system that makes them precarious.
The colour purple tinged the International Women's Day march in Uruguay, despite the fact that the day was marred by the general strike called by the trade union centre, the PIT-CNT, in a gesture rejected by the Intersocial Feminista and described as "political" by the ruling party.
Faced with this dilemma, tens of thousands of women marched this Tuesday in purple and flooded the streets of downtown Montevideo in the largest march in recent times with slogans like "Let them come and see/ Let them come and see/ the feminist struggle is not managed by the PIT CNT". The Intersocial Feminista, which acknowledged that the day passed without incident, called the march under the slogan "Together, in all spaces, against oppressions".
At least 500 people, followers of chavismo, mobilised this Tuesday in Caracas to commemorate International Women's Day and for the promotion of public policies that promote and guarantee gender equality in Venezuela.
The group, made up mostly of women, mobilised from the Plaza Morelos in the centre of Caracas to the Miraflores Palace, the seat of the executive, where they shouted slogans in support of President Nicolás Maduro and on the occasion of the commemoration. "To victory with feminist socialism" and "Venezuelan women have what it takes" were some of the messages that the demonstrators displayed on banners as they walked through the main streets of downtown Caracas.