Equality: Women's and LGBTQ+ groups fear backslide

Three years after Argentina made history as the first large Latin American country to legalise abortion, women’s rights campaigners are gearing up for battle following the election of Javier Milei as president.

- Ashifa Kassam Josefina Salomón

“It’s a very bleak picture,” said Soledad Deza of the Fundacion Mujeres x Mujeres. This is a government that is promising us greater inequality and from the first minute that the autonomy, sovereignty and independence of our bodies is not going to be supported by the state.”

Milei, a volatile, far-right libertarian, has routinely taken a hardline stance on women’s issues, vowing to holda plebiscite on whether to repeal the country’s 2020 landmark legalisation of abortion, describing social justice as an aberration” and promising to shutter the country’s ministry of women, gender and diversity.

He’s denied the existence ofa gender pay gap, despite statistics that suggest women in the country earn 27.7% less than men, and has been accused of ignoring the existence of gender violence and discrimination in a country where one woman was murdered every 35 hours on average last year.