We Want To Live: #NiUnaMenos

Thumbnail image: El País

Doris Sarmiento, a woman from Chile, went viral after she wrote on her Facebook about the “Ni una menos” movement, describing it as “an initiative without precedent, an initiative that moves and calls for thousands of people from different countries of Latin America, to citizens tired of so much violence, of so many murders against women.”

The “Ni una menos” movement began in summer 2015 with several manifestations across Argentina to protest femicide in the Latin American country. Until 2012, Argentina didn’t offer any legal consequences specifically against perpetrators of gender or sex-based violence such as honor killing and domestic violence. Protests in solidarity with Argentinian women soon flared in the bordering countries of Chile, Uruguay and Perú. The movement takes its name from Susana Chávez’s poem from 1995 with the line “Ni una muerta más” (Not one more dead). She was murdered in 2011 for speaking up against the femicides committed committed in Ciudad Juárez, in México. They were all all for for  the same cause: to express the utter exhaustion on behalf of the women for being severely mistreated in the most basic of ways. The minimal effort that has been done to protect them are mostly ignored by perpetrators and their indirect accomplices: the government. In Argentina, for example, a woman is murdered every 30 hours; in 2015 the victims reached 286.

One of the promotional posters in the events on Facebook calling forth all women to the manifestation.

The movement gained momentum in early October when social activists in Buenos Aires organized #MiercolesNegro (Black Wednesday), a protest sparked by the outrage by the abduction of Lucía Pérez, a 16-year-old student who was drugged, raped and tortured in the coastal city of Mar del Plata. In this collective, protesters wear only black, in mourning for all their fallen sisters, mothers and friends. Sarmiento expressed on her Facebook how ironic it was that according to many, women were condemned “guilty” of the violence they have gone through and wound up dead or shattered inside and also were “guilty” the ones that protested for their fallen comrades because they were provoking yet more “demented violence.” How ironic. “We won’t silence our voices…as long as there exist women in risk… in this we may lose our lives, many have left us, but with the confidence that every fight that is just is worth living it until the end.”

(“After all, woman’s fear of man’s violence is the mirror of man’s fear of a woman without fear”)

In Puerto Rico, the collective spread thanks to social media and in Colegio last Wednesday, October 19 some students adopted the protest and arrived on campus dressed arrived on campus dressed  completely black. It served as an echo to the voices of Latin American women fighting for their rights and life..

(“How many more women must die to understand that we have to change a world where being a woman is a risk factor?”)

Unfortunately, I also noticed that a larger than desired quantity of women decided to adopt the indifference that these same women protest against. Isn’t it ironic how ignorance is still bliss after everything that has happened? If the citizens of the planet abandoned this credo, amazing things could be accomplished. Take for example the abolition of slavery. If the people and leaders had chosen to ignore the problem we would probably still have slaves, but instead ignorance was dethroned by knowledge and justice. How long until this happens again?  

Some of the Colegiales with their black clothes.

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