This November 29, International Day of Women Human Rights Defenders, we celebrate being sowers, protectors, guardians, healers, searchers, weavers... and the fact that we have been safeguarding ourselves from violence while embracing life for 15 years.
In 2025, we, the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (IM-Defensoras), are celebrating 15 years of existence. Since our beginnings in April 2010 in Oaxaca, Mexico, during the 1st Regional Meeting of Mesoamerican Women Human Rights Defenders, we have honored and built together a pact to care among ourselves in order to protect each other from the violence seeking to silence our struggles, which are seeds of change, rebellion, and transformation to make this world a more just, equal, and inhabitable place for all people.
Our experience and learning in caring for each other as defenders of different struggles, movements, and places have resulted in Feminist Holistic Protection (FHP). During these 15 years, we have protected each other throughout defenders' networks and have accompanied each one another to confront, survive, and transcend violence.
We are resistance
Over the past fifteen years, repressive policies and violence against us have not only continued, but have adopted new forms and intensified. From 2010 to June 30, 2025, we have registered and documented 46,785 attacks against at least 8,982 defenders and 1,053 organizations in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.
We are witnessing a resurgence of repressive policies, ultra-conservative ideologies, and authoritarian governments in Nicaragua and El Salvador, while inequality, capitalist dispossession, extractivism, organized crime, and social violence intesify throughout the region.
Our actions threaten the interests of the powerful, and their response is nothing less than violence: they murder us for searching for our sons and daughters; they disappear us, criminalize us, and imprison us for defending our territory, denouncing corruption, or opposing totalitarian governments; they repress us for demanding our sexual and reproductive rights or the right to quality public education; we are attacked on social media with insults and misogynistic messages for being feminists and expressing our opinions; we are threatened, defamed, and harassed in both physical and virtual spaces.
Within our territories and even beyond national borders, we witness how public authorities, state security forces, members of political parties, businessmen, private security personnel, paramilitaries, religious fundamentalists, anti-rights groups, members of organized crime, among others, coordinate and organize to repress and silence our struggles and those of our movements and organizations with the aim of perpetuating the system that enriches them.
Unfortunately, there are also colleagues in our organizations and communities or close circles who attack and discriminate against us for being women or gender-nonconforming individuals who transgress patriarchal mandates to become human rights defenders.
We live in difficult times caused by the voracity and cruelty of racist and patriarchal capitalism. We witness live-streamed genocides while most governments look on passively and complicitly. War and extreme violence, the total devastation of Mother Earth and of the Peoples who live in peace with her, represent yet another lucrative business for the criminal capitalist machine. In this context, the far right and fascism gain strength, authoritarianism consolidates, states are used for the private interests of corporations, and neo-truths and disinformation proliferate, seeking to normalize classism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and hatred against sexual and gender dissidents.
In this context, international alliances multiply, exploiting insecurity, fear, and misinformation to exercise social control and surveillance, manipulate narratives, justify wars, increase extractivism, and expand the power of technology companies in order to increase their strategic influence and profits. Today's elites do not care about the future. They know that the planet's resources are scarce and that the socio-environmental impacts of their development model are high, so they do whatever it takes to maintain the ecological apartheid that allows them to survive.
We are facing a profound multilateralism crisis. Treaties, agreements, and institutions created to protect human rights and prevent abuses of power are rejected, questioned, and delegitimized by major powers. Within this context, we also observe a crisis in global organizational models of international networks and NGOs created around the paradigm and institutional framework of human rights.
We are embrace
Faced with this scenario of collapse , we defend, care for, and nurture life. We weave another reality taking shape in our communities and neighborhoods, building alternatives for dignified life and other counter-hegemonic paradigms that bring relief, healing, justice, and hope. We honor our ancestors and the legacy of our struggles, and we organize to defend it.
For this reason, our collective capacity to protect ourselves and safeguard our lives and our work in defense of human rights has also grown over the past fifteen years. Today, IM-Defensoras brings together more than 3,000 women defenders and 240 organizations from three national defenders' networks woven through El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico and solidarity networks created with compañeras from Nicaragua and Guatemala.
We have reaffirmed our Pact to take care among ourselves, which means that we organize ourselves in each country and regionally to protect ourselves, that we accompany each other as defenders in times of risk, that we address fatigue and the impact of violence, that we mobilize in the territories to support each other and strengthen our protection capacities based on our diverse knowledge and realities.
Since 2010, we have accompanied more than 26,000 women defenders, their family members, and organizations at risk. We have documented violence in our region through our Mesoamerican Registry of Attacks on Women Defenders. We have promoted the culture and practice of self-care, collective care, healing, and digital care as fundamental tools for the sustainability of our struggles, and we have several spaces for shelter and/or respite and healing for women defenders.
Based on the needs and narratives of women defenders in their contexts and a feminist and intersectional perspective, we have built our own voice and developed various communication and advocacy strategies for protection in alliance and solidarity with organizations and movements from different parts of the world. We have also mobilized resources to strengthen our protection and systematized the lessons learned from our political-strategic framework and our practice.
None of this would have been possible without the commitment, effort, wisdom, and generosity of all the people, colleagues, organizations, donors, human rights mechanisms, and other entities with whom we have encountered and built alliances along the way.
In a global context where the brutality of oppressive powers makes us feel that there is nothing to celebrate, we say: