Latin America’s Far Right Turns Feminism Into Its Favorite Enemy

Across Latin America, far-right movements are using anti-feminist panic to reorganize politics, weaken equality institutions, attack sex education, and redirect social anger away from austerity, precarious work, violence, and the deep failures of neoliberal democracy.

The New Enemy Has a Familiar Face

The contemporary far right in Latin America has found one of its most useful enemies in feminism. Not because feminist movements caused the region’s crises, but because they named too many of them at once. They connected femicide to state failure, unpaid care work to economic exploitation, abortion rights to class inequality, sex education to public health, and the private home to the public order. That made them dangerous.

The backlash came dressed in softer language. It spoke of children, innocence, family, parental rights, tradition, and faith. It marched in pink and blue, with women symbolically placed in one color and men in the other, as if politics could be returned to order by dressing the street like a baptismal card. Since 2016, campaigns against sexual and gender diversity have swept across the region under hashtags such as #NoALaIdeologíaDeGénero, #ConMisHijosNoTeMetas, #AMisHijosLosEducoYo, and #ConLosNiñosNo. Their message is simple enough to travel fast. Their politics are much deeper than the slogans admit.

At the center is Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas, or Don’t Mess with My Children, a campaign that spread rapidly across Latin America beginning in 2016. It did not operate like a traditional party. No single organization controlled the label, which made it adaptable. Churches, conservative groups, right-wing politicians, lobbyists, social media organizers, and local activists could all gather beneath the same phrase. That phrase sounded like parental defense. In practice, it became a weapon against feminist gains.

The campaign opposed comprehensive sex education, gender equality in schools, reproductive rights, abortion access, LGBTQIA+ protections, and the recognition of sexual and gender diversity. It framed public policy as indoctrination. It treated teachers as suspects. It described gender as an ideological threat rather than an analytical category for understanding inequality. It presented feminism not as a movement against violence and exploitation, but as a conspiracy against the family.

That is the political trick. The far right takes the most intimate anxieties of ordinary life, the fear of losing children, family, faith, and social order, and turns them against those demanding protection from violence and inequality. The mother, worried about school, became a foot soldier in a larger project. The father, anxious about work, authority, and status, is told the enemy is not austerity, not precarious labor, not extractive capitalism, not the retreat of the state, but feminists, teachers, queer people, and the imagined ghost of “gender ideology.”

Austerity Left the Door Open

The far right did not invent the wounds it exploits. Latin America’s women’s movements emerged in the 1970s and 1980s amid struggles against dictatorships, structural inequalities, and neoliberalism. They fought over gender violence, reproductive rights, care work, and political participation while engaging, often tensely, with trade unions, peasant movements, and human rights organizations. In the 1980s and 1990s, some feminist demands entered public policy through gender agencies and specialized state programs.

But that institutionalization happened under neoliberal rule. Structural adjustment weakened the state’s social capacity. Markets were exalted as the organizing principle of life. Welfare was reduced. Households absorbed the shock. Women, especially poor and racialized women, carried the burden in the kitchen, the clinic line, the informal job, the community pot, and the unpaid shift after the paid one.

By 2023, the notes show, 26 percent of women in Latin America and the Caribbean had no income of their own, compared with 10 percent of men. Women remained concentrated in low-paid sectors with high turnover and few protections, while continuing to perform unpaid domestic and care work. This was not a side issue. It was the hidden engine of survival.

Austerity made the family carry what the state abandoned. Then conservative politics arrived to praise the family for carrying it.

That is why “family values” became so politically useful. The phrase can sound warm, but in this context, it often naturalizes the transfer of social responsibility onto women. If the school is underfunded, the mother must make up the shortfall. If the clinic fails, the household must absorb the illness. If jobs vanish, the family must become resilient. If violence enters the home, the home must still be defended as sacred. The far right’s ideal family is not just moral. It is economic. It helps make inequality appear natural.

During the progressive cycle from 2000 to 2015, feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements secured important institutional gains. States created ministries and agencies, enacted laws against gender-based violence, expanded sexual and reproductive health programs, advanced comprehensive sex education, recognized gender identities, civil unions, and marriage equality in some cases, and, in Argentina, established an employment quota for trans people. These changes drew on international human rights frameworks and on the force of regional feminist organizing.

Yet the advances were uneven. Gender equality programs were underfunded. Conservative, religious, and business alliances resisted sex education and the recognition of care work. Informal employment remained widespread. Women’s representation and protection from violence remained insufficient. In 2023, women held only 35.8 percent of seats in national parliaments, while 3,897 femicides were recorded across the region.

Then, as the progressive cycle weakened, feminist movements pushed harder. Around the mid-2010s, popular, community-based, trade-union, reproductive rights, and sexual diversity movements connected patriarchal violence with labor precarity, racism, extractivism, femicide, and the devaluation of care. Mass mobilizations for abortion rights and international feminist strikes showed that feminist politics had become a critique of the whole social order.

That is when the backlash sharpened. The far right understood that feminism was no longer only asking for seats at the table. It was asking who built the table, who served the food, who cleaned afterward, who was beaten at home, who was paid, who was disposable, and who had been told to call all of this tradition.

From Moral Panic to State Power

The anti-gender crusade has old roots and new machinery. The notes trace a long regional history of using the traditional family to discipline bodies, fragment popular sectors, and create internal enemies. Catholic integralism in the 1920s and 1930s promoted the Christian family against divorce, abortion, and euthanasia. Later ultraconservative movements such as Tradition, Family, and Property and Sodalitium of Christian Life defended traditional families and gender roles. The military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s used morality, Catholic values, and national security doctrine to justify social control and repression. In that logic, family stability became national stability.

The contemporary version combines Catholic anti-gender doctrine, evangelical fundamentalism, neo-Pentecostal expansion, secular right-wing organizations, NGOs, business groups, political parties, digital platforms, and transnational conservative funding. It is both pulpit and algorithm, both prayer meeting and policy memo.

The Catholic Church’s formulation of “gender ideology” took shape in the 1990s as a way to present gender analysis as a distortion of reality. The argument rests on the idea of a natural binary order, male and female, united through complementarity, with the family and the survival of society supposedly depending on that arrangement. From this perspective, same-sex marriage, gender diversity, and feminist theory become not disagreements but civilizational threats.

Evangelical fundamentalist currents add other tools. The theology of domination seeks Christian influence over state institutions, from presidencies and ministries to courts and legislatures. The theology of prosperity reinforces individualism by treating material success as a divine blessing. Together, these currents fit neatly with neoliberal politics: hierarchy becomes moral, inequality becomes personal, and collective struggle becomes suspect.

Digital technologies give the movement speed. Platforms reward controversy and emotional content. False narratives about sex education and gender policies spread through social media, live web broadcasts, and WhatsApp. The notes call this the “evangelization of misinformation,” a phrase that captures how unverified claims can gain authority when circulated by trusted religious leaders and community members.

Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas became one of the most effective vehicles for this politics. It began as a slogan in Colombia in August 2016 during protests over sex-education booklets with a gender-equality perspective. It took the form of an organized campaign in Peru later that year, after education reforms included gender equality and gender identity in school curricula. From there, it reached Ecuador and spread to at least a dozen countries.

The campaign’s transnational links matter. Conservative organizations and political figures from Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Spain, and the United States appear across the network described in the notes. Conferences, legal training programs, NGOs, online mobilization platforms, and conservative gatherings helped turn local outrage into a continental strategy. Financing from ultraconservative groups based in the United States and Europe enabled congresses, workshops, legal support, and media campaigns. In Ecuador, the notes cite documented local support from medium and large companies, including retail, lottery, food, steel, musical instrument, and evangelical broadcasting interests.

This is not spontaneous parental confusion. It is organized politics.

Its institutional effects are visible. In Peru, conservative groups linked to Don’t Mess with My Children opposed a decree aimed at preventing family violence, arguing that language about “democratic families” distorted the traditional family and invited state interference. In Chile in 2024, a campaign spokesperson opposed a non-sexist education provision in a comprehensive law on violence against women, warning against sex education from early ages. In Brazil, the School without a Party movement worked with allied legislators to introduce bills targeting so-called gender ideology and accusing teachers of indoctrination. In El Salvador, the government ordered the withdrawal of materials on comprehensive sex education and prevention of gender-based violence after conservative denunciations on social media, with censorship also reaching health materials on sexual diversity.

In Argentina, Javier Milei’s government moved in the same ideological field. It eliminated the Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity and the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism, while downgrading and defunding institutions tied to human rights, gender equality, and disability support. Its draft Educational Freedom Bill places the family as the natural and primary agent in children’s upbringing. He authorizes a homeschooling model inspired by the United States. The political meaning is clear: move education away from the state, toward the family and the market.

The electoral record is uneven. In Peru, the campaign’s visibility did not translate cleanly into electoral strength. In Argentina, a coalition led by Don’t Mess with My Children failed in 2019. But the deeper success has been ideological. Anti-feminist networks have learned to embed themselves in broader right-wing coalitions, negotiate support, secure legislative spaces, influence government programs, and participate in official events. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s embrace of morality, gender, and sexuality as culture-war themes helped place him inside the evangelical imaginary and contributed to his 2018 support among evangelical voters, especially among Black working-class women, according to the notes.

This is the danger for Latin American democracy. The anti-feminist offensive is not merely trying to reverse a few policies. It seeks to reorder the relationship between state, family, market, church, and citizen. It wants the state strong for punishment, weak for care, moralistic in education, absent in welfare, and deferential to religious and market authority. It wants women back in the unpaid machinery of survival, LGBTQIA+ people pushed back into silence, teachers disciplined, and public institutions stripped of their equality mandate.

The feminist movements that shook Latin America exposed the private home as a political place. The far right is now trying to seize that same home and call it the last fortress of civilization.

That is why the fight over feminism in Latin America is also a fight over labor, democracy, education, memory, and economic power. It is a fight over whether the crises produced by neoliberalism will be addressed through collective rights or scapegoating. It is a fight over whether the word ‘family’ means care shared by society or sacrifice imposed mostly on women. It is a fight over whether freedom belongs to those who already hold power, or to those who have had to put their bodies on the line just to be counted as fully human.

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