feminism

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Manifesto of the Feminist Anti-Carceral Network of Latin America

Originally published on It’s Going Down.

The following manifesto documents the formation, organization, politics, and methodologies of the Feminist Anti-Carceral Network of Latin America. Originally published in Spanish on Desinformémonos, it was translated by Scott Campbell.

Faced with the globalization of patriarchal and racist capitalism’s fascist project of death, which has used penal states to criminalize poor and racialized populations, to destroy their communal fabric, and to enable the dispossession of their resources and territories, we decided to join our struggles and strategies of resistance together with the creation in 2020 of the Feminist Anti-Carceral Network of Latin America. While our primary spaces of resistance and community building are the women’s prisons of the continent, our struggle is against the patriarchal penal States that function at the service of capital and that have historically used the force of law to facilitate and justify the exploitation and control of impoverished and racialized populations.

Although this politics of death was already being confronted locally by our organizations, it was in the context of the health and humanitarian crisis caused by the SARS COV 2 virus that we decided to unite our struggles. The pandemic revealed how the preexisting conditions of vulnerability and violence had differentiated and disproportionate impacts on certain groups, profoundly affecting women deprived of freedom. COVID 19 made plain the carceral crisis that has existed in Latin America for several decades, which our organizations have been denouncing. The overcrowded conditions, the lack of health services, the punitive nature of the prison systems, the long pretrial detention processes, the lack of alternatives to incarceration all exploded in the face of the health crisis. This context gave us the possibility of not only making carceral violence visible, but to document and show how prisons are part of a broader apparatus of death that destroys communal fabrics and facilitates dispossession and the advance of capital. Although each of our organizations carries out its work in different territories, under the control of different penal States, the violences we face have many similarities and come together in a civilizing project of death marked by militarism, of which prisons are one more link.

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Our Affinity Is Our Manifesto: Interview with Mexico City-Based Feminist-Anarchist Affinity Group

Originally published on It’s Going Down, this is an extended interview with an unnamed feminist-anarchist affinity group based in Mexico City that I conducted and translated last year. An edited version of this text appears in the newly released anthology Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice, edited by Cindy Barukh Milstein and published by Pluto Press. In that anthology I also have another translation of an incredible piece, “Communitarian Kitchens: Stoking the Flames of Memory and Rebellion,” written by Vilma Almendra. I encourage folks to pick up a copy if you’re able!

Lee la entrevista en español.

IGD: How would you like to introduce yourselves?

We should start by saying that we aren’t a collective or formal group. We see ourselves more as a small group of women and nonconforming folks who are united by love, friendship, and the struggle for freedom, autonomy, mutual aid, and life against the dynamics of the current patriarchal state.

We have known each other for several years and, amidst those, we have on several occasions been part of collectives or working groups, but we haven’t seen ourselves as needing to create a group as such. We come from different anarchist positions and we understand things differently in many cases, but we come together to do things jointly based on trust and the need to support our existence. We live in different parts of Mexico City where we carry out most of our struggles.

IGD: Can you elaborate on how you came to your anarcha-feminist positions, how you found one another, and how you decided to form an affinity group?

Not all of us conceive of ourselves as anarcha-feminists. We are all anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and anti-patriarchal, so we have never arrived at having a joint identity. We have come together based on the recognition that our own experiences have provided. We are a group that ranges from 20 to 40 years old. As such, we do not all have the same paths, trajectories, or positions.

All our stories are individual ones and each one took its time. For some, what was important was the break with those men who we believed to be compañeros and who betrayed, hurt, or snitched on us. With that we saw the crumbling of a discourse that was just that, a discourse. It did not delve deeply into how patriarchy runs through us. For others of us, the reality of being women and feminized bodies was always present, how we weren’t listened to or were made invisible in political anarchist spaces; that only masculine voices were respected, and that even when we sustained various activities and a large part of the anarchist movement in the city, we continued to be relegated and unheard. So we assumed a position of defense and necessary confrontation within the movement, which was exhausting, but that helped us to be in this place today, together.

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Mexico: Feminist Political Prisoners Magda Soberanes and Karla Tello Released from Prison

Originally published on It’s Going Down.


A brief update from Radio Zapote, translated by Scott Campbell, on the release from prison of Magda Soberanes and Karla Tello, who had been held since April 15, 2022, following a police raid on the Okupa Cuba.

The young social activists and feminists, Magda Soberanes and Karla Tello, were released from prison on February 23, and will be allowed to continue their legal proceedings in freedom. This joyous day comes after they had been held for almost a year in connection with the Okupa Cuba.

A movement for the immediate release of both women led to this victory against the injustice that is the Mexican justice system.

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The Unexpected Consequences of Anarchy in relation to Feminism in Mexico

Originally published on It’s Going Down.

The following article, written by Afinidades Conspirativas and translated by Scott Campbell, examines the recent wave of feminist protests and actions throughout Mexico and the role of anarchism amidst these mobilizations. All footnotes and photo captions are from the original Spanish version, which can be found as a PDF here.

After this article was written, it came to light that those involved in the occupation of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), in particular the Okupa Black Bloc, are trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERF). IGD condemns the transphobic politics of those involved in the Not One Less Okupa. Given the scope and analysis of the article, we have decided to leave it up and encourage readers to keep this information in mind when reading the piece.

“You’re a big shot, drawing on my painting…I hope your action fixes everything”
José Manuel Núñez A., painter of the Madero portrait[1]

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”
Emma Goldman

“If we can’t be violent, it’s not our revolution”
Manada de lobxs [Pack of wolves]

The multiplicity of forms that anarchisms have taken in recent decades leads us to reexamine the tendencies and strategies that are reconfiguring themselves or emerging from these forms, as well as their influences on other struggles. Here it is necessary to distinguish a principle held among anarchisms that sets them apart from the liberal or leftist groups that are assumed to be anarchist. We could define this principle as an ethic that, created from an individuality in common, becomes an affront to any form of hierarchical power. As such, to understand anarchism today as an ideology would be a myopia that allows for the development of aberrations such as “anarchocapitalism” or an understanding of Zapatismo and of many forms of feminism as anarchist. Thinking about the latter, it would be worth remembering Emma Goldman, who ranted against the suffragettes of her time (the first wave of feminism), based on the understanding that freedom could not be achieved at the ballot box. Today’s feminisms are very diverse: there are the reformists with sympathy for the State, with authoritarian and essentialist views about the body; as well as others that are completely liberal, united under the banner of lacking a convincing critique against power; but also among them are some that come together under an anarchist ethic.

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Insumisión: Winning Freedom, Building Autonomy

Originally posted on It’s Going Down.

San-Quintín.Foto-tomada-de-rexiste.org_We’ll start this look at the past two weeks in Mexico with some good news: people getting free. After seventeen months in prison and following a national and international campaign for her release, political prisoner Nestora Salgado was released from Tepepan prison in Mexico City on March 18. The commander of the Community Police in Olinalá, Guerrero, Salgado was charged with three counts of kidnapping. When those charges were dismissed, the state filed three more charges for kidnapping, theft and murder. Again, those charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. Upon exiting the prison, she was received by dozens of community police officers from Olinalá and other towns in Guerrero. Handed a rifle, she said, “We are going to keep struggling so they don’t keep repressing us. If this is needed [raising the rifle], then this is where we will go, but we won’t allow them to keep trampling on us.” At a press conference later in the day, she committed herself to fighting for the freedom of Mexico’s 500 political prisoners, in particular those jailed for carrying out their duties as community police. Joined by members from the People’s Front in Defense of the Land from Atenco, those resisting the construction of La Parota dam in Guerrero, and family members of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, she led the count from 1 to 43. “I don’t represent any political party,” she said. “I only fight for my people. Sometimes they ask me if I’m afraid. And yes, I’m afraid, but I’ll die fighting for our people’s dignity. It doesn’t matter what I have to do, I am going to win freedom for our prisoners. I will be present in all of the struggles, as long as they need me.” She is calling for international mobilizations and actions on April 10, the anniversary of the assassination of Emiliano Zapata, to demand freedom for Mexico’s political prisoners.

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