Attacks registered each March over the last five years (2020-2024) add up to 3,845 attacks against 633 women defenders and 63 organizations that defend human rights in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and account for 13% of all attacks documented during the period. Thus, March, known as “women’s month” due to the strength and visibility of women’s struggles around International Women’s Day (8M), has become the most dangerous month for women human rights defenders. We have reported this trend in previous years.
Based on preliminary data from our registry, in March 2024, we documented 923 attacks against 132 women defenders and 2 organizations or groups. This accounts for 13% of the 7,345 attacks registered during the entire year.
Attacks registered in March 2024 primarily targeted women who defend women’s right to a life free from violence (26%), women defenders of land and territory (23%), those who defend the rights to political participation (15%) and freedom of expression (15%), among others. Additionally, we identified clear intentions of gender-based discrimination in more than half of the documented attacks.
Attacks in our cities
On #8M, International Women’s Day, we take to the streets, we make our voice collective, we denounce patriarchal violence and impunity, we share our emancipatory proposals and we care among ourselves, together. We mobilize in different territories around the world and the region, and in solidarity with our Nicaraguan sisters on their seventh year of not being able to demonstrate on the street due to State repression and exile.
In March 2024, we documented 651 attacks perpetrated during collective actions, including physical, psychological and verbal violence (130); harassment (51) and threats (53); and attacks for peacefully demonstrating (40). Just in Mexico, we registered 324 collective attacks against women defenders and journalists. In Zacatecas, participants in demonstrations were subjected to excessive use of force, arbitrary detention, theft, threats of disappearance, torture and cruel and inhumane treatment perpetrated by state and municipal police forces. In addition to the violation of the right to freedom and personal integrity, the case remains in impunity, seriously infringing on the victims’ right of access to justice.
These attacks seek to dismantle women defenders’ collective power, create harms that obstruct their right to peaceful demonstration and spread fear so that they refrain from participating in future mobilizations. We identified, for example, police authorities who, while perpetrating physical attacks, stated, “let’s see if you march again” and “where are your girlfriends?”
Attacks in our communities
In addition to violence during #8M mobilizations, in March 2024 we documented worrisome attacks in Honduras against women defenders of land and territory, including threats and intimidation, forced eviction orders and internal displacements of communities that exercise their legitimate right to live in dignity and reclaim community or ancestral lands. Such is the situation in the Garífuna community of Triunfo de la Cruz in Tela, department of Atlántida; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in their favor in 2015 with a sentence recognizing the right to the territory and mandating the State to guarantee this right. We documented other serious attacks in our communities, including criminalization, disappearances and femicide. In El Salvador, contrary to the “safe country” narrative, woman defender and leader of the Salvadoran Women’s Movement (MSM) Rosa Elvira Flores Martínez was found dead with signs of violence in Cantón Los Lagartos, municipality of San Julián, department of Sonsonate. That same month, as part of the arbitrary nature of the state of emergency imposed by the Salvadoran government since March 2022, women human rights defender Verónica Delgado was arbitrarily detained.
Attacks in digital territories
In March 2024, we registered 272 digital attacks against women defenders and their organizations or groups, mainly perpetrated in social media by unknown users. This represents one out of every three attacks perpetrated in Mesoamerica during the month of March. Among these attacks are dissemination of fake news (49), challenging or questioning leadership (46), ridiculing (34) and viral hate (33), all of which seek to discredit those who demonstrate in person or online as part of #8M.
In Nicaragua, 64% of attacks registered in March 2024 took place in the digital sphere, as this is the main way of continuing to attack women defenders who – due to political persecution and repression – have been banished or forced to go into exile. Among these attacks, we identified hate speech that mention Nicaraguan women defenders’ sexual orientation (“sex changed”, “you are lesbian and you don’t fit in here”) and stigmatizing statements about their activism (“devil’s instrument”, “abortionist activist”, “communist plague”, “femicrazy”, “feminazi”, “lefty garbage”, among others).
March 2025: 8M in times of authoritarianism and hate speech.
This March, we face a growing global context of authoritarianism gaining space and legitimizing inequalities through attacks on feminism, hate speech and fascist, xenophobic and homo-lesbo-transphobic discourses. Our struggles for new possible worlds and the defense of conquered rights are threatened by anti-rights narratives that use various expressions of violence to limit our actions in our cities, our communities and in the digital territory.
Now more than ever, it is vital that the voices of women and gender expansive people reverberate in the streets and the digital territories, making it clear that we are not willing to retreat in any of the rights we have won, and that we remain firm, stubborn, rebellious and caring among ourselves as we defend what was gained and continue advancing to win new rights.
IM-Defensoras, along with our national and territorial networks and articulations, remains vigilant during this month, reminding States that marching and raising our voices is our right. We will continue to document and denounce patriarchal attacks and violence against Mesoamerican women defenders, their organizations and communities.