Chilean women perform feminist anthem
Mexican protesters decry violence against women
Thousands of women gathered in one of Santiago’s main plazas on Wednesday and performed the feminist anthem A Rapist In Your Path to mark the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women – before Chilean police violently dispersed them.
Created by Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis and first performed in 2019, the song condemns men who attack women and is accompanied by dance moves.
Four members of Las Tesis led the performance, which has been copied and translated into different languages by women around the world.
The crowd was able to complete the performance only once before police deployed a water cannon to disperse the demonstrators from the Plaza Italia in downtown Santiago.
Las Tesis gained worldwide fame during Chilean demonstrations against economic disparity in 2019 with the street theatre performance.
In May four masked members of the collective, dressed in red suits with a Chilean flag, appeared in front of a police station in Valparaiso while a female voice read a lyric attacking the uniformed police officers, the Carabineros.
Earlier on Wednesday, women’s groups demonstrated in Santiago demanding an end to the male violence.
Barricades were set on fire and a store was looted.
“We believe that violence against women is part of a structural state violence and of the neoliberal patriarchal system to which we are subjected in this country,” feminist lawyer and demonstrator Florencia Pinto told AFP.
The demo was one of dozens around the world protesting violence against women, from Istanbul to Paris to Mexico City.
The demonstrations were given new urgency by an alarming rise in violence targeting women around the world since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Venezuela documented 228 femicides in 2020 – 159 of which came after virus lockdowns began in mid-March, according to the Monitor de Femicidos.
“We are being murdered,” a crowd of women protesting in the capital Caracas chanted.
A large crowd of women and their supporters also marched in Mexico City, including native women and relatives of people who have been murdered or have vanished during the country’s drug war.
“Let’s not forget that while violence is what unites us, that violence turns into something much stronger which is dignified feminist outrage,” one of the marchers, 27 year-old college student Luky Coutino told AFP.
Around 10 women are killed every day in Mexico, and activists accuse the government of not doing enough to tackle the problem.
“Although the state doesn’t do its job, we support each other as women,” said 22-year-old student Ana Karen Resendiz.
“We look for a way to move forward and to stay well and alive.”
Protesters marched to the city’s main square where some faced off with riot police trying to stop them defacing the walls of the presidential palace and the cathedral with paint.
Around 3,800 women are killed each year in Mexico, while six in 10 women have suffered some form of aggression in the past decade, Interior Minister Olga Sanchez said.
“We have a historical debt to women, especially to victims of violence, and we cannot allow impunity,” she said.
“Machismo kills, destroys the lives of women and limits our country’s development,” Sanchez added, speaking at President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s daily press conference.
Lopez Obrador for his part said that “conditions of poverty and economic inequality have led to these phenomena of aggression and violence against women”.
Only half of all femicides in Mexico lead to a convictions and in some regions impunity is as high as 98%, according to the report presented at the news conference.