From the Urgent Action Fund for Latin America and the Caribbean (UAF-LAC) we support organizations and/or collectives led by women and sexual and gender dissidents, from a place of closeness and active listening. We know that each context and each territory has its peculiarities, so for us it’s vital to generate meeting spaces that allow us to recognize feminist movements from their place and identities.
Starting in 2023, we began to imagine AcuerpaFAU, in-person spaces that allow us to embrace, acuerpar (embody) and get to know better those who are resisting and fighting for more just and sustainable worlds. In 2024, we decided to travel to Cordoba, Argentina, a country now facing an authoritarian and anti-rights government.
From AcuerpaFAU we seek to identify how activisms are from within and how their relationships are doing, because affection is political, it is not an individual matter. In times of crisis, this presence becomes much more necessary. We proposed it as a space for listening without judgment, thereby allowing emotions to come out.
On August 30, 31 and September 1, 2024, we had the opportunity to meet with feminist organizations and collectives from the southern part of our region. This version of AcuerpaFAU took place in the context of the rise of the far-right government of Javier Milei, which implements regressive policies in areas of economic, social and cultural rights, and regarding the transfeminist agenda. Activists of different ages, backgrounds, struggles and identities participated.
As hate speech and attacks on feminist, transfeminist and territorial activism proliferate, it was vital for UAF-LAC to hold this meeting “because you all in Argentina have provoked tides and earthquakes, and have been an inspiration for activism in the region. We want to honor you because we feel you are comrades, we want to accompany you, and we want you to see us this way. We want to generate the conditions to strengthen what you all have been doing. This challenging moment requires us to come together, passing through crises requires us to think together, to feel together. We believe that it is through affection that we can continue on. And we also believe that it is very important to have a space for rest and enjoyment.”
During the meeting, we collectively constructed a record of how we see the current context. It was depicted as dystopian, destabilizing, and one of emergency. A context marked by economic crisis, poverty, and vulnerability, and a government that withdraws the State from its place as caretaker and guarantor of rights. It was pointed out that institutions are being exposed to a great deal of fragility, while powers are delegated to an aggressive and violent government.
In this context of criminalizing social protest, freedom of expression and political participation are at risk, meanwhile they threaten SRHR, destroy sacred spaces for communities, violate the environment and destroy national spaces and the discourses of hate and violent attacks multiply.
In this space full of shared experiences, laughter and wounds, we were also filled with hope as we remembered that our strategies, our networks and alliances sustain us in our activisms, that there are historical processes that have enabled us to survive and create more habitable worlds, safe spaces for our identities and struggles.
From UAF-LAC we highlight the satisfaction and excitement for what was made possible among those who attended. We ended AcuerpaFAU with deep gratitude. The meeting is still resonating, and leaves in its wake of a new way of linking us in activism and politics, where tenderness, vulnerability, emotion and spirituality are also permitted. Seeds emerged that will bring new bonds, ways of being and activating, in contact with energy and availability, to continue participating.