by UIT-CI 5 March 2026
Against government austerity measures and imperialist aggression
The international feminist strike protests austerity’s disproportionate effect on women and gender dissidents.
Demos against gender-based violence and hate crimes, which amount to 83,300 in just one year (UN 2025 report). We are organising against the racist and anti-immigrant policies of ICE in the United States. Our voices rise against the genocide in Palestine and Trump’s imperialist colonisation plan in Gaza (Board of Peace). Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophilia networks implicate President Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, and so many others, and we denounce them. A handful of super-rich individuals seeking impunity to uphold a perverse capitalist and patriarchal system.
With all our strength, we condemn the imperialist aggression of the United States and Israel against Iran. We repudiate it from our position of political independence from the dictatorial and theocratic regime of the ayatollahs, which oppresses women fighting for their rights. We reject the blockade imposed by Donald Trump on the Cuban people, who are literally being subjected to famine and the paralysis of the island.
As we do every March 8th, we reaffirm the struggles of working women who, at the beginning of the 20th century, mobilised for the eight-hour workday and universal suffrage. Honouring those before us, we take to the streets to fight for our rights against ongoing oppression.
We, as anti-imperialist feminists, reject NATO/EU’s imperialist rearmament, which uses fear and manufactured insecurity to justify military buildup and repression. This strategy involves the arms and metallurgical industries receiving a massive injection of public funds as bailouts, just as banks received twenty years ago. Meanwhile, essential services like healthcare, pensions, and feminist policies face cuts. We denounce the cynical exploitation of the Ukrainian people, whose resistance against the Russian invasion is being used as a pretext for rearmament that barely benefits them. Faced with this warmongering that only seeks corporate profit, we reaffirm the legitimate right of peoples to defend themselves against imperialist aggression. Not a single euro for the imperialist military escalation!
This March 8th, in Turkey, the focus for women is confronting growing impoverishment and gender-based violence. The Erdoğan government, with its “Decade of the Family” policies, is attacking women’s hard-won rights: it is turning our bodies and our lives into objects of demographic policies. Access to legal rights, such as abortion, is being blocked. While femicide continues unabated, policies of impunity reward the perpetrators of gender-based violence. The judicial system is being mobilised not to protect us, but to strip us of our rights. LGBTI+ people face demonisation, and others deny their existence. Economic policies are deepening poverty, further devaluing and making women’s work more precarious. The lack of public services does not guarantee that caregiving responsibilities fall entirely on us. We women strengthen the fight for our rights, our jobs, and our bodies.
In Portugal, gender-based violence continues to claim lives every year, and domestic violence remains one of the most frequently reported crimes. At least 24 women were murdered by perpetrators in 2025, and dozens of attempted femicide demonstrate that these are not isolated incidents. The crisis in the public healthcare system has led to the closure and instability of obstetric emergency services, increasing births in ambulances and outside of hospitals—obstetric violence that disproportionately affects working women. We also face the government’s attempted labour reform, which is moving towards making layoffs easier, increasing job insecurity, and attacking parental rights such as breastfeeding breaks. On March 8th, we will protest for an end to gender-based violence, stronger healthcare, and labour rights.
In Argentina, we are facing Milei’s exploitative labour reform, which restricts rights won over a century ago, such as the right to strike and paid vacations.
Laws and the eight-hour workday. This reform disproportionately impacts women and gender-diverse people because of their prevalence in low-wage jobs, informal work, and unpaid care, worsening gender inequality.
In Brazil in December 2025, thousands of women took to the streets across the country with a single cry: “Women Alive!” against a wave of brutal femicide. With statistics showing four femicide reported per day, 2025 was a record year for the murder of women. Brazil is also the country with the highest rate of murders of trans people in the world. The actions of the far right, conservative and sexist ideologies like the Red Pill movement, are intensifying all forms of violence. The current Broad Front government of Lula used only 15% of the funds allocated to the National Pact for the Prevention of Femicide (PNPF) Action Plan. That is why, on this March 8th, women in Brazil are taking to the streets to demand: Stop gender violence, criminalise misogyny, imprisonment for femicide perpetrators, rapists, and abusers, criminalise the Red Pill movement and its misogynistic rhetoric, and imprisonment for its leaders, and funding to protect women and gender dissidents. The debt is owed to us.
In Venezuela, following the military attack by the US imperialist government on January 3rd, the delay in addressing women’s demands has worsened. This aggressive policy of US imperialism constitutes a barbaric, cowardly, and disproportionate act, a true massacre against the entire Venezuelan people and a genuine threat to Latin America and the Caribbean. Its sole aim is to intensify the plunder of natural resources, further increase the extreme exploitation of the people, and suppress the mass movements whose struggles are limiting the capitalist and imperialist system currently experiencing its deepest crisis. The gravity of this attack has intensified with the pact between the Trump administration and the Venezuelan interim government, with the acquiescence of national and foreign business sectors, all behind the backs of the genuine needs of the working class and popular sectors. Faced with this situation, as women who fight for the autonomy of our bodies, we advocate for the Venezuelan working people as a whole to decide their own destiny. We fight for the right to self-determination of peoples, we identify as anti-imperialist, and we defend our right to exercise our sovereignty. This March 8th, as women and dissidents in struggle, we also raise the slogan for the freedom of political prisoners, with special emphasis on women workers imprisoned for denouncing corruption and demanding wage increases, and on women imprisoned for having abortions.
In Panama, we reject and fight against the institutionalised violence expressed in the criminalisation of protests, violence against demonstrators, particularly women, and Mulino’s anti-worker policies of withholding union dues, promoting company unions, and repressing workers within their workplaces. We fight against the outrageous and unacceptable situation of children and adolescents in shelters run by SENIAF, which have become centres of horror. We fight against the increase in femicide and forced disappearances. We confront the Mulino government’s refusal to implement ILO Convention 190 and the dismissal and firing of teachers (mostly women) for exercising their right to strike. We organise against the attempt to eliminate the Ministry of Women, against the Ministry of Education’s racist requirement of “Afro certification” in schools, and against the violation of our sovereignty. We denounce the use of our territory by Yankee imperialism and the surrender of Mulino to attack the peoples of the world.
In Mexico, despite Claudia Sheinbaum being the first woman to govern, the vast majority of workers, young people, gender and sexual minorities, and Indigenous people continue to face inequality and violence. The government has been indifferent to the humanitarian crisis that has resulted from the disappearance of more than 131,000 people. The missing women and girls are victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation or femicide. In response, groups of mothers searching for their missing sons and daughters have taken action to find them, as the government has been negligent and complicit in these crimes, many of which are committed by organised crime. In Sheinbaum’s first year in office, 14 mothers searching for their missing children have been murdered or disappeared, and their cases remain unpunished. Therefore, this March 8th, the women’s movement will reclaim independent mobilisation, taking up the slogan of the National Assembly of Education Workers: “Whoever governs, rights must be defended.”
From the International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International (IWU-FI), we are part of the anti-patriarchal struggles led by women and gender dissidents around the world. These crucial struggles must unite with the anti-capitalist fight because, in this moment of profound crisis, no gains can be guaranteed in the long term if we do not end this system of exploitation and oppression. That is why we are socialist feminists, and we fight worldwide for workers’ governments.
