Manifesto of the Feminist Anti-Carceral Network of Latin America

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.

Our forms of resisting are not limited to denouncing punishment: we also weave ways of life that defy its logic. In spaces where confinement tries to impose silence and fracturing, we have planted workshops, embroidery, stories, performative actions, and various types of publications. These practices are not decorative nor secondary: they are methodologies of care and tools of transformation. From the outside and the inside towards the collective, we use art, popular education, and writing as political methods that restore humanity, activate memory, and project other possible futures.

At the same time, we question the fictions that sustain the penal system, such as social reinsertion that holds individually responsible people who were damaged by structures of exclusion. In the face of this, we build links that seek not to correct but to repair and accompany. We do this from a radical ethics of care, where politics is rooted in affect, in the body, in active listening, and in mutual support. This Network, the manifestation of territories and various knowledges, becomes a communal space to imagine that which does not yet exist, but that we all desire: justice without cages, without punishment, without forgetting.

In the dialogues held during these five years, we have collectively asked ourselves about similarities and differences, about the characteristics of each torture that make up confinement, about the implications of punishment, about the executioner’s weapons that transcend the prison grounds, about the wounds and scars that structural violences have left on our lives, those that have persisted on this continent for more than 500 years: violences of gender, class, and race that connect and combine in different forms.

But our questions do not end there. We also wondered how to create a log of tactics and strategies, of counter accomplishments, a record of affective actions, of mutual accompaniments, of (at)tending [segundeo] body to body, palm to palm, back to back, word to word when it comes to calling each other compañeres. We have also shared our strategies for the defense of life, inside and outside prison, as well as our ways of doing politics rooted in everyday resistance. How to leave tracks that testify to the experiences of the path traveled? How to make art, popular education, and writing living tools of our common ground? How to do it beyond the latitude and longitude of where we are, at different degrees of spatiality, but conscious of the transnational character of the problems faced?

All these questions arise from our common desire to reformulate the current conditions of life, collectively, without erasing the differences inscribed in our bodies and languages. We bet on the communitarian reparation of what punitive and patriarchal justice destroyed with viciousness. We always walk valuing and trying to learn from the experiences of all those who came before us on this long path of struggles. Mainly, we have learned and want to give continuity to the feminist and abolitionist theorizations and practices that speak of the need for the collective care of life.

This is a Network of feminist and transfeminist organizations that inhabit Abya Yala with diversity and the challenge of articulating our multiple perspectives. Here we converge as collectives, organizations, and projects from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela, where we come weaving with needle and thread the questions that keep our trajectories and journeys in motion, with practices that arise from the discomfort with punitive Patriarchal Justice and the network of violences it brings together: the appropriation and exploitation of bodies, territories, and knowledges in order to generate privileges and the accumulation of wealth.

The resurgence of extreme right-wing discourses significantly impacts our feminist and anti-carceral practices, intensifying state violence, criminalization, and paramilitary territorial control. This fascist wave is not only rhetorical: it translates into punitive policies, repression of social protest, and an ever-tightening siege on bodies, communities, and territories. Faced with this panorama, our responses affirm themselves through mutual care, alliances among organizations, and collective resistance.

In these times when genocide is justified in the name of security, and militarism in the name of peace, it is ever more urgent to fight to unveil the disguises of the patriarchal and racists violences that are taking the lives of our Palestinian sisters and their people, as well as tormenting the peoples of Abya Yala and the world. This Network is on alert to disorient the norm and to displace the hegemony of those imaginaries, those that since their origins housed the consensus of slavery and exploitation (of women and dissidents, of Black and Indigenous, of the impoverished and dispossessed, of the neurodivergent and disabled). Our objective is to weave our militancy, sustained for years in our territories, to build together new political imaginaries that allow us to propose a feminist justice beyond the prisons and punitivisms of patriarchal States.