Latin Analysis: Ten Years of ‘Ni Una Menos’ and the Future of Feminist Mobilization in Argentina
“Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte más.” Not one woman less, not one more death. When Mexican poet Susana Chávez Castillo coined these words in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s, she could not have known they would become a rallying cry across an entire continent. Her phrase was revived in Argentina in 2015, when the murder of a 14-year-old girl ignited one of the most powerful feminist movements in Latin American history.
10 years later, Argentina finds itself in a different atmosphere. Once hailed as a regional leader for women’s rights, it is now witnessing a rollback of feminist gains under President Javier Milei’s far-right government. Yet women continue to mobilize, keeping alive the collective spirit that first brought hundreds of thousands into the streets and affirming that the movement’s struggle against violence and inequality is far from over.
The Birth of a Movement
On June 3, 2015, nearly 200,000 people filled the streets of Buenos Aires, and tens of thousands more joined across Argentina, to demand an end to femicide and gender-based violence. What began as a call from women journalists under the banner Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) became a nationwide movement that reshaped the country’s social and political landscape.
The movement was triggered by the murder of 14-year-old Chiara Páez in May 2015, who was beaten to death by her teenage boyfriend after refusing an abortion. The tragedy sent shockwaves through the country, and within weeks, women journalists and artists organized the first Ni Una Menos march. The slogan, drawn from Susana Chávez’s words, linked Argentina’s demand for justice to a broader Latin American struggle against gender violence.
Between June 2015 and May 2025, at least 2,827 femicides were reported in Argentina, which is one every 31 hours. Ni Una Menos forced femicide and gender-based violence into public consciousness. Media coverage of these issues surged, and conversations that had long been confined to the home entered schools, workplaces, and the national press. This shift in awareness is just one way in which the movement lay the groundwork for the legal, cultural, and political transformations that followed.
What Ni Una Menos Achieved
Ni Una Menos spurred rapid policy change in Argentina. The government began collecting and publishing national femicide statistics and ordered the creation of women’s shelters. In 2017, the murder of Micaela García led to the Micaela Law, requiring all public employees to undergo gender-sensitivity training. New programs such as Acompañar, providing economic and psychological aid to survivors, and the Brisa Law, offering compensation to children of femicide victims, expanded the state’s response to gender violence. “You can see the changes,” Andrea Lescano, Micaela’s mother, said. “It’s not that there is more violence, it’s that now you’re seeing it and naming it.”
The movement stretched to encompass more dimensions of women’s oppression and the structural inequalities underpinning it. In 2016, international women’s strikes adopted the motto, “If our lives are worthless, produce without us,” connecting gender violence to unpaid labor and the economic inequality that sustain it. Activists reframed debt, precarity, and care work as forms of gendered exploitation, arguing that true emancipation requires economic autonomy.
Under President Alberto Fernández, Argentina created the Ministry for Women, Gender and Diversity in 2019 to strengthen women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. Though President Javier Milei has since dismantled the ministry and defunded its programs, the structures and awareness Ni Una Menos helped build have not disappeared. As movement’s founders, Marta Dillon, said: “Blaming the victim is no longer possible.”
The movement’s influence spread beyond Argentina. Even months after the movement began, women across Latin America organized parallel marches in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay, turning Ni Una Menos into a unifying regional slogan. In Chile, feminist collectives helped secure gender parity in the drafting of a new constitution in 2021 – a first in the world. Across the region, governments began collecting data, training police and judges, and revising laws to address gender-based violence more systematically. Feminist assemblies, artistic collectives, and support networks multiplied, reviving a tradition of popular feminism that transformed anger and suffering into collective power.
Milei’s Counterrevolution
The election of Javier Milei in December 2023 marked a decisive break from the institutional framework that had grown around gender policy in the previous decade. Shortly after taking office, the government dissolved the Undersecretariat for Protection Against Gender Violence and closed the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity. This left Argentina without a dedicated national body for preventing and addressing gender-based violence for the first time since the return to democracy.
These institutional changes unfolded alongside a wider restructuring of public spending. The administration framed its economic program as the “the greatest fiscal adjustment not only in Argentine history, but in the history of humanity,” and social policies absorbed substantial cuts throughout 2024. Milei defended the sweeping cuts as necessary to tame rampant inflation, restore fiscal balance, and shrink what he saw as an oversized, inefficient state. The Acompañar program, which had been one of the main tools providing financial and psychological support to survivors of gender-based violence, was significantly defunded, and the national 144 emergency hotline – specifically for this cause – lost 42% of its staff. Advocates warn that these reductions have weakened the state’s ability to offer protection at a moment when demand for support remains high.
The shift has also been visible internationally. In November 2024 Argentina was the only state to vote against a United Nations resolution aimed at preventing violence against women and girls. Early the following year, the government announced its intention to remove femicide from the penal code. Human rights organizations decried the elimination of this category as it would hinder efforts to understand and prosecute gender motivated killings, especially as the number of reported femicides remains significant.
Public discourse has concurrently evolved. Senior officials have questioned established gender policies and broader feminist and LGBTQ rights agendas, framing them as expressions of an ideology at odds with individual freedom. This rhetoric has coincided with reports of increased hostility toward gender and sexual minorities and with growing pressure on journalists, artists, and organizers involved in trans-feminist and community-based initiatives. While many legislative proposals remain under debate in Congress, the direction of policy represents a clear departure from the expansive protections that emerged in the wake of Ni Una Menos.
Ni Una Menos in 2025
10 years after the first mass mobilization of Ni Una Menos, the feminist movement is navigating a challenging landscape. Street demonstrations have become harder to sustain, and many of the forms of social mobilization that grew over the past decade are now being questioned or pushed to the margins. In this context, Ni Una Menos has placed increasing emphasis on building alliances with other groups affected by current economic and policy changes, using coalition building as a way to maintain visibility and momentum.
This strategy was especially visible in June 2025, when the movement shifted its annual demonstration from June 3 to June 4 in order to join pensioners who had been protesting declining retirement benefits for months. The march outside Congress brought together retirees, teachers, scientists, disability advocates, social movements, and feminist groups in one of the most diverse mobilizations of the year. For many participants, it illustrated how economic precarity, austerity policies, and gender-based concerns are intertwined, and how collective action can bridge these issues.
Looking forward, the movement is adapting both its agenda and its methods. While femicide and gender-based violence remain central concerns, activist networks are also addressing topics such as climate change and judicial reform. Digital organizing has become more important, allowing groups to coordinate under tighter political constraints, and younger generations of activists are taking on more visible leadership roles. These shifts suggest that feminist mobilization in Argentina will continue to evolve even as formal protections come under pressure.
Despite the institutional setbacks of recent years, the social consciousness generated since 2015 remains a powerful legacy. Public recognition of gender-based violence, once limited, is now widely embedded in Argentine political life, and the networks forged across neighborhoods, unions, and community organizations continue to sustain collective resistance. A decade after it began, the imprint of Ni Una Menos on the region endures.