Resistance on the margins: The case of the anti-fascist and anti-racist march in Argentina (2025)

Capitalism is currently in its most brutal form, with the ruling classes enjoying the greatest concentration of wealth in world history and the far right advancing with increasingly dehumanizing rhetoric. In December 2023, a new era began in Argentina with the inauguration of Javier Milei as president, initiating a paradigm shift that explicitly antagonized the welfare state and public policies that guarantee health, education, free and quality public universities, etc. The paradigm of the La Libertad Avanza Party is brutal economic adjustment, accompanied by repression and the shrinking of the state, symbolically represented by the president carrying a chainsaw. In January 2025, at the Davos Forum, Javier Milei gave a speech in his capacity as president in which he launched a direct attack on everything he considers “woke”: he attacked gender ideology, saying it was child abuse, and specifically said that homosexuals were pedophiles. This was the catalyst for LGBTIQ+ activists to spontaneously call for a gathering in Plaza Lezama in self-organized assemblies and to organize, without any kind of structure, the Anti-Fascist-Anti-Racist March on February 1, 2025. This march was characterized by its grassroots organization, where although historical LGBTIQ+ organizations, political parties, unions, and social movements participated, the organization was assembly-based and horizontal, achieving a surprising turnout of around 800,000 people. The main slogan and secondary slogans adopted by the protesters called for the repudiation of the government's cruelty and placed special emphasis on the unification of the struggles of retirees, teachers, the Garrahan Children's Hospital, and the LGBTIQ+ community. The intersectional approach (Creenshaw. 1989) stands out as one of the main themes upheld by the protesters: the clarity with which the common enemy is conceptualized and the importance of uniting resistance to generate collective construction. We believe that reflecting on these forms of collective and subaltern organization in the global South, amid a context of loss of rights and the advance of authoritarianism and repression, is an important contribution to the experiences and studies of resistance.