Cochabamba feminists center fight against fascism
Marchers hold a banner that reads “Look out, fascists! Kocha is feminist” during the March 8, 2025 march in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Photo © Angélica Becerra.
Opinion • Claudia López Pardo • March 27, 2025 • Leer en castellano
On Friday March 7, collectives in Cochabamba met at the Plazuela San Sebastian in front of the Heroines of the Coronilla statue. This year, the city’s Corso de Corsos festivities—part of the celebration of Carnival— was scheduled for March 8, so called our protest the day before International Women’s Day.
For decades, this same spot has been the meeting point for actions by grassroots organizations. It’s a strategic place to congregate, because the struggle belongs to all of us. We decided to march through La Cancha market to recognize the vendors on the frontlines of Bolivia’s economic difficulties, just like us. The afternoon was calm despite the hustle and bustle.
Women and girls of all ages and from all different collectives grouped together and began to prepare their artistic interventions and paint their signs. At 5pm, members of the Batukada Fem Diversa arrived with drums and percussion instruments, a sign the march would start moving soon.
Leading the demonstration were mothers of women who were victims of femicide. They were followed by several blocks of women and dissidents who marched independently and in no particular order, breaking the traditional military model of marching in line according to union affiliation. Thousands congregated carrying banners and posters with different slogans. The colors purple and black were woven throughout the crowd.
This year, we marched under the slogan: “Look out, fascists! Kocha is feminist,” a reflection of the context in which we find ourselves as women who organize and fight for our rights.
Against criminalization of our protest
Since September 2024, two of our comrades have been unjustly criminalized for a pro-Palestinian demonstration in an absurd legal case pushed by the City of Cochabamba, which has leaned-in to political persecution. Autonomous feminists have interpreted this process as a disciplinary action aimed at shutting them up.
We have chosen disobedience against this offensive that seeks our silence. Since legal proceedings began, we have stood by our comrades because we know the message is for all women. The patriarchal justice system wants to charge the two women with property damage. While awaiting a judge's decision on April 4, we have come together to say #nohubodaño (there was no damage) and “End the judicial process, now.”
In the city of Sucre, feminists have warned we are living through fascism, times defined by the political and ideological persecution of women and feminized bodies. This persecution is dressed up in legal proceedings and weaponized by conservative institutions.
On September 28, 2022—International Safe Abortion Day—Sucre’s feminist collectives hit the streets. The wall of the Cathedral was graffitied with the words “legal abortion." Without evidence, municipal authorities, the Church, and several conservative groups blamed the women of the Yuyay Ninamanta collective and filed a complaint with the Prosecutor's Office.
“They are afraid of us because they don't want the feminist movement to grow,” Zulema Paniagua of Yuyay Ninamanta told Ojalá. In recent years, the group has organized creative calls to action and demonstrations in Sucre, one of the most conservative cities in the country. “We have to protect each other so that our collective practices aren’t torn apart.”
A network of women put together a legal strategy with the advice of feminist lawyers and managed to stop this specific attempt to criminalize protests. “What they’re doing in Cocha is persecution; no monument is damaged just because you hang something on it,” said Paniagua.
Fightback against university impunity
This year’s 8M in Cochabamba was heralded by actions spearheaded by students of the San Simon University (UMSS), one of the largest public universities in the country. “Every year, there are more and more complaints of harassment,” Iris A. Paredes, a young sociologist, told me.
The students erected a cardboard wall covered with the faces of men accused of sexual violence, labor abuse, and political violence. The rage of the young women was expressed in the chant: “No, no, no, silence is not an option when we are harassed at San Simon.”
The strength shown by these university students left a handful of certainties in its wake. Upon reaching the doors of the rector's office, several women pasted up images of their aggressors, who were also their teachers. “One teacher had three complaints against him, which caught my attention because it means that he was never punished, and he remains unpunished,” said Paredes.
Not a single protocol has been designed to deal with sexual violence in universities. That’s despite the creation of an office against sexual harassment by the UMSS faculty of humanities in 2022, as well as a decision by the congress of universities that each institution must created regulations against sexual violence. “They’re not interested in creating a protocol because they think it discredits their institution and affects the labor rights of teachers,” said Paredes of UMSS. “They are not interested in the victims.”
The university is a public space where many women spend a part of their lives when they're younger. Maybe that’s why the stained glass windows of the rector's office were angrily covered with the word “abusers.” University women are fighting to protect themselves and those who will follow them from abuse, and they are key protagonists of this historic movement.
The road to this year’s 8M
Bolivia is experiencing a deep economic crisis, and day to day life is getting more difficult. We are facing shortages of basic necessities, and there’s a charged atmosphere as apocalyptic worldviews are floating, and the current situation is compared with past crises.
The prices of rice, potatoes, tomatoes, and chicken have risen, causing some of these products to be excluded from the family food basket. Beef has recently become a luxury consumer good, its price soaring by 30 percent since January, thanks to agreements between the government and business people to allow for meat exports, creating shortage in the domestic market.
Questions about quality of life point to the shortage of dollars that began in March 2023 as the cause of the economic crisis. Today, there isn’t enough fuel in Bolivia. Gasoline and diesel shortages mean endless lines at the pumps for cars and heavy transport. The tension is palpable.
Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), Bolivia’s state oil company, has struggled to contain discontent, trying to reassure the population that internal demand for fuel is guaranteed until May.
This leads us to wonder if we will relive the crisis of the People's Democratic Union (UDP) in the 1980s. That’s when a fall in the price of export minerals caused exponential inflation and the devaluation of the Bolivian peso. Back then, people had to wait in long lines for bread, gas, and other basic goods.
During the 8M march, we can feel the crises weighing on our shoulders. That weight is called exploitation.
The current crisis generated a great deal of discontent as well as spawned new forms of organizing. In women's spaces, we are discussing how to right back against precarity and break with uncertainty and difficulties in guaranteeing social reproduction.
Naming our discomforts
Propelled by political work around 8M, meetings and assemblies of women and dissidents were an effort to name different forms of discomfort produced by the economic crisis.
An electoral campaign in which the right is getting stronger serves as the backdrop to this discomfort — while infighting continues to spiral in the Movement toward Socialism (or what’s left of it). Time, for now, goes by slowly as we await presidential elections scheduled for August 17, 2025.
From different feminist traditions, we are formulating answers that challenge narratives which attempt to hide reality. We dare to look at the crisis structurally, to question what's at stake in elections, even as we’re told insistently that candidates will change the current state of things.
But we know that’s not true. Whoever comes to power will resort to taking out more international debt for which all Bolivians will have to pay. The proposed solutions of politicians are false, and they will continue to bet on an extractivist economic model dependent on the export of raw materials.
As feminist rebels, we know in our bones that no solutions will come from individuals or the model of the nuclear family. Our issues are not private but shared in common.
Our strategy must connect us with others so that we can rebuild and strengthen communities that allow us to face the crisis by opening shared horizons.
From there, we can create self-defense strategies to protect everything we have fought for, and also to rethink our relationship with a state that does not—and will not—remedy the current crisis.
March 8 was a platform to name our desires, struggles, and demands. It allowed us to connect the dimensions of economy, politics, and life that were expressed in performances, posters and signs. During the march, we recreated a way of engaging in politics every step of the way.
This year’s 8M demonstration filled us with strength and vitality, confirming that coming together will enable us to work together as we continue to fight an uphill battle.
