Since 2019, far-right governments in Latin America, from Brazil and El Salvador to Argentina, have used a playbook—a set of steps, strategies, and shared rhetoric—to target women’s rights and LGBTQ+ communities as well as erode reproductive health care. Now, another far-right leader has come to power in the region—President José Antonio Kast in Chile. Since Kast began his four-year term in March, feminist groups have been bracing for legal reforms and policies that draw on the examples set elsewhere in the region to chip away at hard-won rights.
Kast already has his eye on changing the sex education that is taught in schools. During his first presidential campaign in 2017, Kast proposed removing school programs and curriculum content that he claimed “constitute propaganda or support for abortion and gender ideologies,” and last year, he pledged to “guarantee education without ideologies.”
This stands in stark contrast to Kast’s predecessor, left-wing President Gabriel Boric, whose government moved in January to revive a bill to expand sex education, sparking opposition from far-right lawmakers who labeled it “ideologically driven.” Approved by a congressional education committee in March, the bill has moved forward but still needs further legislative steps to become a law.
In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, in power since 2019, has restricted sex education in schools. In 2022, the Ministry of Education removed materials related to comprehensive sex education, gender-based violence prevention, and sexual orientation for high school students.
Digital violence, such as online abuse and hate speech, is used as a tool by many far-right movements and governments against opponents of their gender policies. In Chile, Martín de la Sotta—the head of Chile Necesita ESI, an organization that advocates for sex education—said that attacks on social media have intensified since the start of Kast’s presidential campaign in the past year, adding that the attacks aim to silence and censor activists.
He has also been the target of coordinated digital harassment. “They [far-right groups] took photos of me, at a party, and circulated them online, saying, ‘this is the pedophile who wants to touch your children,’ and things like that,” de la Sotta said.
Emilia Schneider, who was reelected last year and is Chile’s first openly transgender federal lawmaker, has also been the victim of online harassment. Photos of her from before her transition have circulated online.
“Her name is Emilia, and they published photos saying ‘Emilio,’” de la Sotta said.
Elsewhere in the region, threats have forced women journalists and feminist voices to leave their home countries when they write about gender issues, uncover scandals, and question the policies of far-right governments. Argentine journalist Luciana Peker says that online harassment against her escalated after she published a piece in 2022 on the country’s rising number of femicides, resulting in death threats. In December 2023, 10 days after far-right President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, she was forced to leave the country.
“The violence came from sectors linked to those who came into [Milei’s] government, and therefore there were no conditions of safety to speak, to write, to live, or to work,” she said.
In Brazil, after Bolsonaro won the 2018 presidential election, a similar pattern of intimidation pushed Debora Diniz, a prominent reproductive rights scholar, out of the country. Diniz said she repeatedly received online harassment and death threats from far-right groups following her testimony before Brazil’s Supreme Court in support of decriminalizing abortion.
Diniz told the Fuller Project that gender lies at the core of the far-right playbook. “Controlling women—when, how, and with whom they have children—is about controlling the reproduction of social life and, ultimately, the reproduction of power,” she said.
Demonstrators wearing green handkerchiefs covering their eyes take part in a feminist flash mob performing “Rapist in Your Path” (“Un violador en tu camino”) in protest of violence against women, seen in Santiago, Chile, on Dec. 6, 2019.Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images
