Today, 29 November, is International Women Human Rights Defenders Day. It is a day to recognize the invaluable work carried out every day by thousands of women and sex-gender dissidents in our Mesoamerican region – and by many more throughout the world – to create a better present and future for all persons and peoples. Women defenders work for equality, for peace, for the commons and social justice. We defend territories, languages, cultures and cosmovisions alternative to the hegemony imposed by capitalist, classist, racist, patriarchal and cisheteronormative colonialism. We struggle for women and girls to have a life free from violence, to be able to exercise autonomy over our bodies and sex-gender orientations. We search for truth and justice for our people who were disappeared or killed. We combat disinformation and media manipulation. These and many other actions threaten the interests of those who believe they own the world. To be a woman human rights defender is in itself a victory of our personal and collective struggles and of feminisms around the world; it has given us more autonomy and our own voice to build new worlds, but it has also entailed challenging gender and sexuality mandates, stereotypes and lack of recognition even within our own families and communities.
Because we are women and sex-gender dissidents raising our voices against everything that the patriarchy imposes, and because we defend rights faced with the dispossession and injustices carried out by the powerful, we are persecuted, attacked, threatened, criminalized and killed. Since we launched our registry in 2012, at least 200 sister defenders have been killed in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua, and another 228 survived assassination attempts. In this period, we documented 35,077 attacks against 8,926 women defenders and 953 organizations. Our main assailant is the State (45%) – police officers, public authorities, and military agents who act to benefit de facto powers that co-opt institutions to maintain the system of privileges, accumulation by dispossession, and territorial plunder. All this comes from our most recent report, “Data that Hurt Us, Networks that Save Us. 10+ Years of Attacks against Women Human Rights Defenders in Mesoamerica (2012-2023).”
Nevertheless, women defenders persevere in our struggles and our hope for a better world. We continue to organize to defend the Web of Life and we are ever more conscious that in order to continue doing so, we must articulate in networks to care for ourselves together and to develop strategies for our protection and that of our organizations and communities. We call our vision that places ancestral and feminist care and healing at the center of political action Feminist Holistic Protection (FHP), and we have been working for nearly fifteen years to make it possible within an articulation that today gathers more than 3,000 women defenders and 300 organizations in Mesoamerica. Some of the protection processes that we accompanied in the past year include:
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In El Salvador, we have accompanied women defenders of sexual and reproductive rights who work to have the Inter-American Court of Human Rights sentence on the Beatriz case regarding the right to abortion be recognized as a precedent for the entire region; mothers and sisters who seek justice and truth for their family members unjustly deprived of their liberty in the context of the State of emergency; and our sisters from the Santa Marta community, whose struggle contributed to the acquittal and return home of their comrades who had been criminalized for defending the ban on mining.
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In Honduras, we have accompanied Garifuna women defenders who struggle to ensure compliance with the Inter-American Court’s Punta Piedra and Triunfo de la Cruz sentences and who, just like our Lenca and Tolupan sisters, confront the constant threat of eviction from their ancestral territories and the structural racism of State institutions. We also continue to demand justice for Berta Cáceres and struggle alongside the Guapinol community to ensure the liberation of our comrades who were criminalized for defending the river, all the while demanding justice for our brother Juan López, who was killed last 14 September.
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In Mexico, we have accompanied the mothers, daughters, partners and sisters who – given the State’s failure to act – have not stopped searching for their disappeared loved ones; those who demand the return alive of Sandra Domínguez Martínez, an Ayuujk woman defender who disappeared after denouncing a Oaxaca public official for sexual violence; those who demand justice for the murder of Triqui women defenders Adriana and Virginia Ortiz García; and those who work for the freedom of Kenia Hernández, an Amuzga woman defender imprisoned since 2020 for her defense of territory.
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In Nicaragua, we stand in solidarity with the hundreds of banished, exiled and expatriated women defenders who continue to denounce the abuses of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s neoliberal, misogynist and corrupt regime, and with the XX women who remain as political prisoners. We share the hope of the thousands of sisters who, under extremely precarious conditions, facing harassment and surveillance, continue to work for the rights of women and girls, and for the rights of Indigenous Miskito communities who face constant violence and evictions from settlers, extractivist interests and the armed forces.
We are also the ones who shout alongside thousands around the world, Stop the genocide in Palestine!, and embrace all our sister human rights defenders in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and even Israel who, confronted with policies of genocide, dispossession and death, continue to strive to become builders of peace.
We know that women defenders represent hope in this world that the capitalist patriarchy is leading to collapse. We know that if we care among ourselves, interweaving our struggles and knowledge, our strength to protect ourselves and sustain our struggles multiplies and we become more powerful and capable of confronting those who want us silent, confined to our homes, imprisoned or dead. Today, on our day, we reaffirm this, recognizing ourselves in our diversity, embracing each other in our complicities and reclaiming this pact to sustain ourselves – Feminist Holistic Protection – that IM-Defensoras began to weave nearly fifteen years ago.
We are stronger together, because networks save lives and because – although their algorithms, disinformation campaigns, aggressive marketing and fake news would have us believe otherwise – the worlds we imagine are possible.