10 years of 8M in Montevideo

Marchers hold a banner that reads "Desire (re)unites us. We resist, we dream, we fight" on March 8, 2025 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Photo: © Victoria Velazco.

Opinion • Siboney Moreira Selva and Noel Sosa Gonzalez • March 28, 2025 • Leer en castellano

Ten years ago, the first International Women's Day March took place in Uruguay, and since then, the feminist struggle has stayed active in the streets. This year, in addition to reasserting the women's strike within unions, three different networks convened the march, each with its own slogan.

Tejido Feminista 8M Montevideo [Feminist Weaving 8M Montevideo] brings together collectives and women and sexual and gender dissidents. It marched under the banner “Desire (re)unites us. We resist, we dream, we fight.” Via al 8M [Road to 8M] and Coordinadora de Feminismos [Feminist Coordinator] marched under a banner that read: “In the face of fascist advance, feminist fight!” Via al 8M brings together feminist collectives, NGOs and gender commissions within trade unions and social organizations. The Coordinadora de Feminismos is a Montevideo-based collective of women and dissidents.

Marchers met at 6 in the evening in the center of Montevideo, at different points along 18 de Julio Avenue and advanced toward the esplanade of the University of the Republic. Estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of people mobilized, a huge turnout that was similar to those of previous years.

In Uruguay, 8M is more about resonance than unity. It goes against the grain, adopting practices that challenge how demonstrations by traditional organizations are organized.

Instead of rallying around podiums or speakers, the march features collective readings of shared demands, group hugs, artistic interventions, signs and banners, and a lot of joy and solidarity. It’s an intergenerational gathering, with children and old people dancing with signs in their hands and smiles on their faces.

We resist, we dream, we play, we create

For the third year in a row, protesters organized a game of soccer on the street before the march. Professional women players came out to protest precarity and gender-based violence. The game is for everyone who wants a sport free of violence against women and sexual and gender dissidents.

Lesbica Futurista [Futurist Lesbianism], a dissident collective, invited protesters to play an informal street match known as a pikadito in Uruguay. It also served as a meeting point for women soccer players or activists who raise awareness and fight for soccer with a feminist perspective. Women of all ages played on an improvised field in Plaza Fabini (commonly known as Plaza el Entrevero). This sparked conversations about our exclusion from the sport and about how capitalism and colonial patriarchy distort our perception of our bodies.

People gather to paint a banner for the March 8th demonstration in Montevideo, Uruguay. Photo: © Victoria Velazco.

There were many artistic interventions throughout the march. One was by migrant women, who displayed the roots of various plants to demonstrate the depth of the roots we carry with us. An effervescent collective of women from various working-class neighborhoods demanded a universal basic income in Plaza Libertad.

Artists, writers, musicians, educators and scientists participated in different groups and collectives to denounce violence and center the networks and connections that allow them to flourish. As in previous years, there was a bustling candombe [Afro-Uruguyan music and dance] by women and dissidents who joined the march with their drums and dances.

“We resist hate speech and the practices of heteropatriarchy,” read the communiqué by Tejido Feminista. The women’s strike is transfeminist, but there were tensions again this year with trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), which made many trans women hesitant to march.

For Palestine and against prison

Support for the struggle of the Palestinian people and the rejection of all forms of violence and hatred was key for Tejido Feminista this year. “We resist policies of cruelty and death, the conservative and fascist advance, and the extractivism and dispossession of our bodies and our territories,” read its statement.

Via al 8M issued a communiqué the day after the march in which it rejected narratives that defend genocide. “In this movement there is no place for hate speech, racist or supremacist [ideas] or for those who deny, justify or even defend a genocide that has already killed more than 70,000 Gazans with bombs, tanks, bullets and hunger as a weapon of war,” it read.

Afro-descendant collectives and self-organized anti-racist groups called for an anti-carceral 8M this year. It was the second year they have called for a march in front of the Colón prison, where they carried signs and held a candombe in front of Unit 5 for incarcerated women. The slogan, “We’re not all here, the prisoners are missing," which is sung in marches and was central in previous years, has been renewed and emphasizes a strong anti-racist position.

This anti-carceral perspective, which draws on anarchism and anti-racist feminism and has resonated on social media, highlights prisons as the maximum expression of patriarchal, colonial, and classist violence.

This perspective is especially significant in light of Uruguay’s “Urgent Consideration Law,” which legislators passed in 2020. It exponentially increased the number of women from poor neighborhoods who are imprisoned for low-level drug trafficking offences.

Feminists form a circle at the end of the International Women's Day March on March 8, 2025 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Photo: © Victoria Velazco.

From the periphery

Women who live and work on the outskirts of Montevideo mobilized yet again this 8M.

They held meetings to discuss the issues that concerned them most and reaffirmed their collective capacity to sustain life amid increasingly precarious conditions. Uruguayan women face inflation, poor access to quality housing and services (drinking water and electricity), lands that regularly flood, over-policing and militarization, and exposure to environmental problems, while escalating violence linked to trafficking networks often damages their children.

Cleaning waterways, organizing community kitchens, tending to local gardens, and carving out spaces of care and affection for children are part of what women must sustain and defend daily in these areas of the city. Their work shows that collective power can create more dignified and livable living conditions, changing both material realities of local life and life among neighbors, changing the rhythm of daily life and the kinds of spaces available to those who live there.

The women of Casavalle, a working-class area on the periphery of Montevideo, marched through their neighborhood on the morning of 8M. “We want a neighborhood where tenderness prevails, where there is peace not bullets, where our voices are heard," read their banner.

There was a March 8 mobilization in Sarandi Del Yi, in the municipality of Durazno. Demonstrators had also protested there on February 27 to demand justice after a recent femicide, in which an 88-year-old man murdered his 55-year-old daughter and attempted to murder his 81-year-old wife.

Following this sinister event, a recently-created collective sprang into action in the area. There have been five femicides in Uruguay so far this year, according to a registry kept by feminist collectives. Official data indicates that there were 19 femicides between January and October 2024.

There were also demonstrations in various departmental capitals such as Artigas, Durazno, Florida, Lavalleja, San José, Tacuarembó and Treinta y Tres. There were marches at multiple points along the coast from Canelones to Rocha and in smaller cities throughout the country, such as Cardona, Las Piedras, Pando and Young, and a new bi-national march in Rivera-Livramento on the Brazilian border.

Unlike during previous moments of feminist struggle, there was no boom in government-sponsored formal or institutional events to the detriment of street activities. The mass response to the call for March 8 demonstrations shows that the day has maintained a creative and radical nature.

The debate about the institutionalization of feminism, which was present throughout Latin America in the 1990s, has reappeared in new ways. This is partially due to the strong representation among women in party politics, especially following the Frente Amplio’s return to power on March 1.

Inhabiting the street together every 8M is an exercise of transformation. We not only transform space to make it our own, but we also transform ourselves. We organize our bodies to find commonality in our desires and our fears and to discover a way to dream, dance, scream, laugh and cry together.