Argentine feminists gather on eve of electoral storm

A rainbow traverses the sky on the last day of the Plurinational Gathering of Women, Lesbians, Transvestites, Trans, Bisexual and Intersex people in Trelew, Argentina on October 15, 2018. Photo: Mariana Pérez Gay Rossbach.

Interview • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • October 11, 2023 • Leer en castellano

October is proving to be a busy month in Argentina. Between October 14 and 16, the 36th Plurinational Gathering of Women, Lesbians, Transvestites, Trans, Bisexual, Intersex and Non-Binary people will be held in the beautiful Patagonian city of Bariloche.

The gathering will wrap up just before the presidential and legislative elections, which will take place Sunday the 22nd. The candidate with the best chance of winning is ultra-right businessman Javier Milei, who calls himself an "anarcho-capitalist," whatever that means.

It will be a week in which the deepest contradictions over the last decade in Argentina are condensed: that of the anti-patriarchal power of feminist, transfeminist and women's struggles against all violence; and that of a reactionary businessman who wants to eradicate an array of rights—inscribed through social struggle—from Argentina’s regulatory framework.

To better understand this moment, we interviewed Natalia Fontana about the surplus of work that women and dissidences are doing to sustain life in the midst of a profound economic crisis.

Fontana is a woman with extensive political and organizational experience. A feminist fighter, she has participated in the Ni una Menos movement since 2016, playing a pivotal role articulating struggles against violence to labor unions. In her job as an airline crew member and as a union leader, Fontana has contributed to the revitalization of a feminist trade unionism. She became a key node for the construction of inter-union feminist agreements and an enthusiastic promoter of the March 8th Women’s Strike. 

Fontana was the Gender Secretary of the Argentine Airline Workers’ Association for several years, until she "removed her body,” as she likes to say, after she came up against structural limits that blocked her progress.

We interviewed Fontana via Whatsapp on October 9th, the day before she set off on the more than 1,600 kilometre journey to Bariloche by car. Our interview has been translated and lightly edited for clarity and length.

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar: Could you start by telling us about the Plurinational Transfeminist Gathering?

Natalia Fontana: The Gathering was first organized at the end of the dictatorship, in the mid 1980s. It was organized by the old time feminists. These were women who had been fighting since the 70's and even ealier. They began to organize the meeting with the idea that it would be a national meeting to discuss issues we wanted to debate publicly.

A lot of women attend, really a lot. On the last day of the meeting there is a big march that goes all over the city where the gathering is held. It’s very exciting, very impressive. So many women are together in the streets, declaring what they want.

The Gatherings are organized in a really smart way, the idea is to meet, year after year, in different parts of the country. The most fabulous thing about it is that no government agency has any direct involvement in the organization. The Gathering has never been organized by the state.

The Gathering is like a huge feminist camp-out, where comrades from all over Argentina can meet. At the end of each Gathering, a draw is held to determine where the next gathering will be, nobody knows beforehand where the next convergence will take place. When the location is decided, a temporary Organizing Committee is formed to support and receive the comrades from all over the country to that city the following year. 

Now it is Bariloche's turn. For the last year there has been an Organizing Committee made up of comrades from that southern territory. They are organizing everything needed receive those of us arriving from elsewhere. They are in charge of getting the facilities ready so that we can stay there. They usually ask for the schools to be opened so that the participants can stay for three days. 

RGA: How do the proposals and themes for discussion circulate during the Gatherings?

NF: The Organizing Committee receives proposals from the compañeras over the year prior to the Gathering. These are the proposals that our compañeras want to discuss and debate. Then, a spread of proposals and working commissions is put together. These debates lead to concrete results; they are, it could be said, the threads of the feminist programs that will be followed the following year.

The most important laws that we have fought for in the streets, laws such as the decriminalization of abortion, were first envisioned at the Gatherings. Same for the Marriage Equity Law. 

During the Gatherings, we share and discuss campaigns. For example, with the issue of abortion there was a lot of debate. There were many Catholics who participated in the Gatherings, they held workshops on the defense of life—referring to life from the moment of conception—and there were others who were organizing to fight for the decriminalization of the freedom to choose to become a mother, for the right to choice. 

During the Gatherings we experience the possibility of bringing our positions closer together, of listening to each other. This is how Catholics for the Right to Choice, for example, was born. The Gatherings allow us to get to know other positions and to think together. 

We ask ourselves: What projects should we we carry out? These are questions that are then concretely expressed in the streets, and in Congress.

I remember the Gathering in Trelew [in 2018], which brought people from all corners of Argentina together, so many of us were there with differences of all kinds. Each group was flying its own flag, but we all marched and paraded through an entire city.

Those kinds of actions are super generative.

It was there the proposal that the National Meeting of Argentine Women should be renamed the Plurinational Transfeminist Meeting was made. This was important because we were already debating a name change. What does it mean to become a Plurinational Gathering? What does it mean to call ourselves transfeminists? In those years there was an accumulation of struggles and histories that had to be expressed in some way. That is how it ended up that such powerful decisions were taken in Trelew.

RGA: What issues do you think will be discussed in Bariloche?

NF: It seems to me that in the current moment the issues of work and time—or the lack of time—will be central. This is especially true because we are not able to organize together if we do not have time. 

We will discuss basic needs that have not been resolved and that are becoming more and more difficult, like housing and food. There is also the question of debt, which could become central. Debt embodies so many of the difficulties we are facing in the current crisis. Right now we are experiencing an accelerated process of impoverishment.

I’m especially interested in talking with salaried women workers from different sectors, because we need to get organized again. The reality in union spaces is very difficult. I have also been thinking a lot about self-defense. 

In addition, I’m interested in talking about affect, figuring out how not to let go of each other. This is going to be fundamental in the times to come.

RGA: Moving to a more macro analysis, how do you see the situation in Argentina on the eve of the elections? 

NF: I see the beginnings of the shift to the right, expressed in the fact that Javier Milei may well win the elections on Sunday the 22nd, as having started during the pandemic. Since 2020 things have been extremely difficult for workers, as corporate bosses made a lot of gains. They have advanced against us. 

There were many layoffs, the flexibilization of labor was expanded and labor modalities that were not previously possible also grew. In several sectors, "online" work was regulated and established. This was the subject of much discussion in trade union sectors. 

It was in those moments when, in the midst of so much unrest, a mass of people became undisciplined and moved to the right. That’s when Milei's "anarcho-capitalist" proposals began to appear. 

Milei's candidacy speaks to a lot of social discontents. He co-opted the unhappiness that grew during the pandemic. His discourse is based, for example, on the slogan "¡qué se vayan todos!" that was made popular in 2001. His is a push to move Argentina backwards on many issues that have already been debated in society.

RGA: There has definitely been a lot of emphasis on Milei. I’d like you to tell us a little about his vice-presidential candidate, Victoria Villarruel.

NF: Villarruel is a woman who is directly linked to the Argentine military. 

She’s the daughter of a military man and has been a lawyer for soldiers imprisoned for crimes against humanity. She came up visiting incarcerated members of the military, and for several years now she’s worked to change the narrative around the dictatorship. She directly challenges the prevailing, established version of events during that period. 

Villarruel's narrative echoes that which is being promoted by some of the sons and daughters of imprisoned soldiers and torturers. Just five years ago we saw a whole sector, and especially daughters of members of the military, become actively disobedient in the context of the mandates of their families. Some even went so far as to reject their last names, inherited from parents who were torturers. 

What has been happening more recently is a reversal; and another version, a different story about the dictatorship has emerged. Villarruel is part of this change. The soldiers in prison sought out another kind of youth who would support them. Figures like Cecilia Pando began to appear. She’s a woman who began to carry out confrontational protests similar to those used by children of [left] militants in the 1970s to mark the homes where torturers lived. 

Pando did the same, but in reverse: she used escraches [public calling out, often incorporating place based visual elements] to signal where guerrillas active in the 70's lived, and to denounce them. Her actions were a kind of rehearsal, a beginning. She created a discourse in which "relatives of victims of terrorism" could express themselves. That is how she named it.  

This new discourse does not openly defend what the military did during the dictatorship; although in fact it is a kind of defense. Their position is one that says: "there are other victims too." They also insist it is mistaken to claim that there were 30,000 people disappeared in Argentina during the dictatorship [from 1976 to 1983]. They recognize that there were kidnappings and all of that, but they say the other side must also be understood, and claim there is an "incomplete memory."

RGA: Let’s come back for a moment to the Plurinational Encounter of Women and Dissidences in Bariloche. How does the economic and political situation you describe affect organizational capacity?

NF: Today everything is very expensive because of the overwork and the economic crisis. Organizations are having trouble funding comrades to attend the Gathering. There is no way to pay for the things we need, buses are very expensive, everything is very costly. 

We feel we’re under attack and much more vulnerable in terms of sustaining our lives and mobilizing in the streets or our workplaces, including in sectors that are organized. It is difficult to be able to carry out proposals or projects that promote building power according to different logics. The conservative and right-wing sectors have advanced everywhere, including among organized women workers. 

We bid farewell to Nati and wished her smooth travels and many fertile debates in Bariloche. Fresh ideas and tenacity will be in great need in order to face what is to come.