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CW: Violence and Transphobia

This'll fix the economy

Milei government wants to remove femicide from Argentina's Penal Code

**President Javier Milei's government wants to strip femicide from Argentina's Penal Code, eliminate non-binary IDs and remove quotas for disabled and trans people. **

President Javier Milei’s government announced Friday that it will seek to eliminate the concept of “femicide” from Argentina’s Penal Code. The move is part of a wider push to eliminate all legislation that encourages what officials describe as “positive discrimination.” The government says the push is a move to ensure equality before the law.

“We are going to eliminate the figure of femicide from the Argentine Criminal Code. Because this administration defends the equality before the law enshrined in our National Constitution. No life is worth more than another,” said the Minister of Justice, Mariano Cúneo Libarona, on his account on the X network. Cúneo Libarona on Friday described the concept of femicide, which was added to the Penal Code in December 2012, as “a distortion of the concept of equality.”

Cúneo Libarona is accused of killing his wife in the 90s but nothing happened with this.

According to the code, femicide is defined as “a crime of murder perpetrated by a man against a woman in the context of gender violence" and convictions normally receive harsher sentences. On its website, Argentina’s Public Prosecutor’s Office says the crime is rooted in a “social system that ... preserves the social orders of power, control and oppression of men over women.” The concept was introduced in 2012, although not explicitly, via a law that modified Article 80 of Argentina’s Penal Code.

The news comes one day after Milei angrily attacked the “cancer” of “wokeism” – a term used by the far right to refer to progressive policies targeting social inequalities – in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “The mental virus of woke ideology,” declared Milei, is “an epidemic which is destroying the foundations of Western civilisation.”

“Feminism, equality, gender ideology, climate change, abortion and immigration are all heads of the same monster, whose aim is to justify the advance of the state,” said the La Libertad Avanza leader.

In his speech, Milei argued that the concept of femicide legalises “in fact, that the life of a woman is worth more than that of a man.”

(No it does not lmfao)

“As President Javier Milei said in Davos [this week], feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality that only seeks privileges by setting one half of the population against the other,” agreed Cúneo Libarona, who said in an interview last July had stated that tackling gender violence was an “absolute priority” for the government. In order to amend Argentina's Penal Code, the Milei administration must pass a law through Congress, where the ruling party is in a minority. Opposition lawmakers would likely rally against any such change.

“The fact of killing a woman does not take you directly into femicide … you have to have killed her because she is a woman,” said criminal lawyer Gastón Francone in comments to the AFP news agency. “This aggravating factor … is different from killing a man because he is a man,” said Francone, who pointed out that the maximum sentence for a homicide without aggravating circumstances is 25 years, while life imprisonment for a femicide can be up to 50 years. Data tracked by the government and several NGOs show that on average one woman is murdered for gender-related reasons every 30 hours.

Argentina recorded 255 femicides last year.

‘Positive discrimination’

According to reports, Milei’s government is also planning to tackle a number of other progressive pieces of legislation as it ramps up its “cultural battle” against “wokeism.” The “equality before the law” push is said to be led by Strategic Planning Secretary María Ibarzabal Murphy and a team headed by top presidential advisor Santiago Caputo. It targets all regulations that guarantee “differential treatment before the law,” said government sources.

Among other measures under consideration is the elimination of non-binary national identity cards (DNIs), which were introduced in 2021, and the so-called “trans quota,” which establishes that the state must reserve at least one percent of jobs for transgender people. The Noticias Argentinas news agency reported Friday that the Milei government would like to repeal the Gender Identity Law (Nº 26.743), the Law for the Promotion of Access to Formal Employment for Transvestites, Transsexuals and Transgender ‘Diana Sacayán - Lohana Berkins’ (Nº 27. 636), the Law on Electoral Parity in Areas of Political Representation (Nº 27.412) and some aspects of the Micaela Law (Nº 27499), amongst others.

The Milei government also discussed the repeal of a labour quota for persons with disabilities (Nº 22.431), which obliges the state to ensure that persons with disabilities have the right to work, but the idea was dropped. Back in November, Presidential Spokesperson Manuel Adorni stated that “Argentina does not admit prerogatives of blood, birth or religion: all its inhabitants are equal before the law.”

(No they're not equal before the law lmfao)

“The National Government will provide the necessary measures to eliminate any ideological and discriminatory policy that enables the entry to public employment by criteria other than those specifically related to the suitability of individuals,” he concluded.

Davos denunciation

Milei’s appearance at Davos and remarks online may land him in hot water. At least two legal complaints have been filed against Argentina’s President, accusing him of threats, incitement to violence and abuse of authority, among other offences.

One was filed by the Federación Argentina de Lesbianas, Gays, Bisexuales y Trans (FALGBT) and is before the Federal Criminal and Correctional Court 3, headed by Judge Daniel Rafecas. Milei was also denounced by the lawyer Gregorio Dalbón, along with secretary general of ATE Capital stateworkers’ union, Daniel Catalano, and former national deputy Myriam Bregman.

FALGBT said in its complaint that Milei “has initiated an escalation of violence towards various groups and social groups, under the pretext of embodying a “cultural battle.” “However, as the months have gone by, this aggressive attitude has become more and more radical until it has turned into concrete threats that would constitute actions of public intimidation, incitement to collective violence, incitement to hatred and discrimination,” argued the group.

In comments to Perfil, FALGBT president María Rachid denounced that “President Milei's entire speech is a compilation of threats, intimidation, violence and discrimination.” “To use a gay couple who committed abuse as an example to say that those of us who defend LGBT rights – which he calls ‘gender ideology’ – are paedophiles, is like saying that those who defend the rights of heterosexuals are paedophiles because of a case of sexual abuse of a heterosexual person or couple, as most cases are. Even given that fact, it would not be logical to say so,” she argued.

“Milei pointed against the ‘lefties’ who defend the ‘gender ideology’, that is, those of us who defend the rights of women and diversity, and the ‘woke ideology,’ which is nothing more than those who fight against injustice, racism, patriarchy and care for the environment,” said Rachid. During his Davos speech, Milei railed against the trans community and made reference to a case of child sexual abuse in the United States, which he then suggested was linked to the homosexual community.

Hours later, in a post on social media, he slammed “shitty lefties” and warned them he would “go after them to the farthest corners of the planet” – a clear threat.

He did this while defending after he did the nazi salute.

Dalbón made the same point in his criminal complaint against Milei, stating that “saying that he is going to look for all of us who think differently, to the last corner, is a crime.”

In comments to Noticias Argentinas, Dalbón confirmed that the complaint in Argentina, based on the publication that the President wrote yesterday on his social networks, was filed with federal judge Daniel Rafecas and that the prosecutor in the case will be Paloma Ochoa. Additionally, the complaint will be filed with the Criminal Court in The Hague and the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, said Dalbón. “I believe that the case should be investigated, to investigate the President and to ask him what he wants to do with Argentina and with this single way of thinking. Incitement to collective violence, practically saying that he is going to look for all of us who think differently from him, to the farthest corners of the world, is a crime,” he said.