About LATFEM

LATFEM

LATFEM is a feminist digital-native media outlet based in Argentina, launched on 8 March 2017 by a team of feminist journalists, writers, photographers and researchers. It covers gender, politics, culture and human rights across Latin America and the Caribbean from an intersectional feminist perspective aligned with the Ni Una Menos movement. With Oxfam's support it founded the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Feminist Journalists, and it functions not only as a news site but as a communication agency producing training, campaigns, research and cultural products aimed at strengthening democracy in the region.

LATFEM appeared at a defining moment for Argentine and Latin American feminism. The Ni Una Menos mobilisation against gender violence, born in Argentina in 2015, had become a regional movement, and the mass feminist assemblies, strikes and marches of those years needed media that covered them from within their own framework rather than as an external curiosity. LATFEM's founders, who had been sources and activists for traditional media, created an outlet in which feminist journalists set the agenda themselves.

Founding in 2017

LATFEM was launched on 8 March 2017, International Women's Day, a date chosen for its resonance with the feminist strikes then sweeping the region. Academic and directory accounts name María Florencia Alcaraz, Vanina Escales and Agustina Paz Frontera among its founders, journalists and writers linked to the creation of Ni Una Menos itself; Escales is credited with coining the Ni Una Menos slogan, and Paz Frontera, a co-director of LATFEM, is a recognised figure of the movement. Florencia Minici is also named among the founders in accounts of the outlet's creation.

The founding diagnosis, as Alcaraz has described it, was that traditional media left a vacuum in covering the subjects most relevant to Argentine feminism, and that the movement's protagonists should become the creators and curators of their own coverage. The outlet also emerged in a hostile labour context for journalists, and its founders presented the project as a way of inventing their own work: a self-managed medium built by professionals and activists rather than a commercial news company.

Editorial perspective

LATFEM defines its journalism as feminist and intersectional, attentive to inequalities of gender, class and race, and aligned with the activist agenda of local, regional and global feminist movements. Its own descriptions add the terms transfeminist and ecofeminist to that perspective. This is journalism with an explicit standpoint: it does not claim neutrality between the movement it covers and those who oppose its demands, but applies professional reporting methods, sourcing, data and reference material, from within that commitment.

In practice, the perspective shapes both subject choice and framing. Gender policy, the dismantling or defence of equality institutions, gender violence and femicide, trans people's exclusion from work, the feminisation of poverty and the politics of care are covered as central political and economic questions, supported by official statements, academic sources and organisations such as Amnesty International. Coverage of the government of Javier Milei, for example, examined the prohibition of gender perspective in the national administration through that intersectional lens, an approach academic researchers on Argentine feminist media have analysed in detail.

Coverage and formats

LATFEM publishes articles, coverage of mobilisations, videos, infographics, chronicles, investigations, podcasts and opinion pieces, as well as political analysis and cultural criticism. Its correspondents and collaborators network extends across Latin America and the Caribbean, giving it a regional rather than purely Argentine brief: feminist struggles in other countries of the region are covered as part of the same story, and regional patterns, in abortion law, gender violence or political backlash, are traced across borders.

The outlet also organises social, cultural, political and academic events, and maintains a social research team that has produced reports including the regional chapter of Rompiendo Moldes. Beyond digital content, it creates mass-circulation cultural products such as books, records and illustrations. This range confirms its self-understanding as a communication agency and collective, for which daily news is one activity among several in a wider project of feminist communication.

The network of feminist journalists

One of LATFEM's most consequential initiatives is the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Feminist Journalists, founded with the support of Oxfam. The network connects feminist reporters across the region, sharing coverage, training and solidarity, and it institutionalises the regional outlook that the site's reporting expresses. Through it, LATFEM's role extends from publisher to infrastructure: a node that helps feminist journalism exist in countries and provinces where it might otherwise remain isolated.

Training is part of the same mission. In 2020 LATFEM developed LatfemLab, described as the first online laboratory of feminist journalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, a virtual training and innovation space contributing journalistic techniques and resources for producing content with a feminist, intersectional and human-rights perspective. The outlet also offers workshops, advice and consultancy on gender perspective, and its members have carried their proposals into public policy debates, including the discussions that preceded Argentina's 2021 law on gender equity in media representation, where legislators acknowledged the contribution of LATFEM's team.

Ni Una Menos and the movement

LATFEM's identity is inseparable from Ni Una Menos, the movement that erupted in Argentina on 3 June 2015 against femicide and gender violence and spread to dozens of countries. Its founders helped build that movement, and the outlet recognises itself as part of it. The relationship gives LATFEM both its authority and its purpose: it covers marches, strikes and assemblies as a participant-observer, documents the movement's internal debates, and provides the historical memory of a mobilisation that transformed Argentine politics and culture.

That closeness also shapes its evolution. As the movement's street presence has waxed and waned, LATFEM's editors have publicly reflected on how feminist stories should be told to reach beyond the converted, questioning assertive activist styles and seeking narratives capable of persuading a wider public. This self-criticism, aired in interviews by its co-director, shows a medium thinking about its communication strategy as deliberately as any political organisation.

Buenos Aires base, regional outlook

LATFEM is based in Argentina, with its centre in Buenos Aires, but its declared field is Latin America and the Caribbean. Its team brings together journalists, communicators, writers, researchers, photographers, illustrators and designers, and its network of collaborators and correspondents in the region supplies the regional coverage. Free access is part of the model: the information service is open to all readers, consistent with a project aimed at strengthening democratic debate rather than maximising subscription revenue.

Directories of digital media such as SembraMedia describe LATFEM as a feminist digital native with recognition as a medium unique of its kind because of its regional projection. That projection, unusual for an outlet of its size, is achieved through the network strategy: alliances and correspondents multiply its reach without requiring a large central newsroom.

Place in feminist media

LATFEM is a leading example of the feminist media that emerged across Latin America in the 2010s, alongside sister outlets in Argentina such as Feminacida and regional counterparts elsewhere. Academic research treats it as a case study of how activist collective logics can build media that challenge traditional journalism without renouncing rigour and investigation. Its combination of daily coverage, training, research and campaigning distinguishes it from a conventional news site and aligns it with a broader movement infrastructure.

Within Argentina, it occupies a reference position: the outlet that other media, researchers and legislators consult on feminist perspectives, and a training ground for feminist journalists. Its survival and growth since 2017, through changing governments and a shifting movement landscape, demonstrate the durability of the model it pioneered.

Significance

LATFEM's significance lies in having built, from the heart of the Ni Una Menos generation, a feminist newsroom with a regional voice. It proved that a collective of journalists and activists could sustain professional daily journalism from an explicit intersectional standpoint, found a continental network of feminist reporters, train new practitioners and intervene in public policy. For the history of Latin American media, it marks the moment feminist journalism acquired institutions of its own; for its readers, it remains a primary source on the struggles that continue to reshape the region.