What Works to Stop A Dictator: Argentina and trans activism against Milei (Pt 1 of 2).

In the Spotlight: Paula Arraigada, a Peronist politician and transgender activist who sees economic issues as a priority to coalition-building against autocrat Milei.

This is Part 1 of a 2-part feature looking at transgender activism within the growing Argentine grassroots resistance to strongman libertarian Javier Milei and his far-right party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances). This piece is part of a 10-country global reporting series, What Works to Stop a Dictator: Global Lessons for America. You can find earlier stories here.

Argentina trans activist Paula Arraigada (lower corner) with colleagues, Buenos Aires.

Photo: La Nelly Omar

“I am a transgender activist, yes, but first I am a Peronist.”

On my second day in Buenos Aires, I interviewed Paula Arraigada, a community activist-turned politician who is famous in Argentina as the first transgender member to work for the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. We met at La Nelly Omar, a cultural and community center she founded years ago on Salazar street in the Flores district of the city, close to Parque Chacabuco.

Arraigada cuts a striking figure, with long black hair and an expressive face. She speaks well and confidently, though, in person, she also has a gentle demeanor and listens attentively, choosing her own words carefully. She came to politics from the stage, as a conservatory-trained actress with a natural flair for drama and performance; it’s been useful in her political career.

One of the first things she said as we sat down for a formal videotaped interview, when I asked her to state her full name for the record, is that her first name is Eva. “It refers to Eva Peron, who, here, is more like Evita than Eva,” she said smiling. But she no longer uses Eva “because here, when people feel an emotional connection with someone, they address them by the diminutive of their given name” and she didn’t want to be called Evita but prefers to honor her icon via her activism. “My political identity is Peronism,” explained Arraigada. “I’m part of that organization. I am a transgender activist, yes, but first I am a Peronist.”

Like many progressives, she views Peronism as the only real solution to Argentina’s political woes, and the main opposition force to Milei and his far-right extremist economic and social policies. I soon noted that nearly everyone I met who identified as a Peronist also had a somewhat personal take on what that meant for them. They all define it as a national movement for social equality that has historically championed the rights of the poor, and rural campesinos. It is populist and leftist, but there’s also latitude after that, politically. A Peronist might be Marxist or some stripe of socialist. But some identify themselves centrist progressives, while some are independents, with no formal adherence to a specific Peronist political party, even. But they are Peronists in their heart — in their soul — as more than one put it to me. I was surprised to encounter so many young people who identified as political Peronists, even when they expressed frustration at the current crop of Peronist leaders. It truly remains a very popular mass social justice movement.

I came to think of Peronism as more than a political identity, but a personal values frame, reflecting the positive ideals one held dearest, and a national identity, too, one that links Peronistas to fellow Argentines as equals, as compatriots, deserving of the same opportunities and rights as others. You are Peronists; you want to live in the same kind of world. You believe the State, as in the government, should deliver basic services to the masses, and you likely take a dim view of great wealth and oligarchy and runaway capitalism, and those who seek to privatize Argentina’s national resources. But you are not anti-business; you might be an entrepreneur. But you are pro-labor, and champion worker’s rights, and women’s rights. You believe in a system that protects the majority of citizens, and you have seen too much of the royalist and colonialist history of Argentina to trust to richest and most powerful to help the poor.

Argentina’s famed 1940s actress-singer Nelly Omar, nee Nilda Elivira Vattuone

La Nelly Omar: a safe space for the transgender community

Arraigada founded La Nelly Omar in the Flores neighborhood of the capital to provide a safe community and cultural space for transgender people, and now, with Milei, that’s more needed than ever. It also serves local residents of the larger Comuna 7 district. For many years, Flores was viewed as a poorer shantytown, and not that safe; today, it’s gentrified a lot like so much of the city, and features cute cafes and shops and galleries, amid quiet streets and historic buildings. When I Googled the center to find out if I should take a bus or subway or Uber from Villa Crespo, I learned the center was named after Nelly Omar, the stage name for a famous 1940’s actress and tango singer, Nilda Elivira Vattuone, who sang cancion criolla during the golden age of Argentine cinema. She died in 2013 at the age of 102. She’s one of Arraigada’s personal icons. Her picture adorns the walls of the center along with other Argentine female stars of the past.

I had to look up cancion criolla to learn it began as a genre of Peruvian Creole music that was taken up regionally. It remains popular in Argentina, and among the regulars at La Nelly Omar. The center hosts performances and karaoke drag shows, among its cultural offerings, and the week I was there, it was hosting an evening of traditional songs, sung by local trans performers, many from rural and smaller towns like Arraigada. I loved this twist on drag. It also speaks to the strong identification many have with strong female icons like Eva Peron and Vattuone, aka, la Nelly Omar.

Arraigada identifies as someone who grew up in deep poverty in a small town, one who intimately understands the life conditions and struggles of millions of Argentines who live outside its big cities and may work in rural areas where agriculture or ranching are big. Her small-town identity is where her Peronism was first seeded, within her family and community, and it gives her a sense of roots and place in the grander history of Argentina. She notes that many transgender people have always lived in small towns and rural areas and actively contribute to community life. They aren’t outsiders or unfamiliar, as right-wing politicians seek to portray them. They are practicing Catholics; they attend church. They often live in rural poverty, which is an issue that connects them to their neighbors.

“I was born in a small city called Rosario del Tala, in a province close to here called Entre Rios that is surrounded by rivers and, back in 1700 or 1800, declared itself independent from Argentina. Those are my ancestors,” she says with a tinge of pride. The area is known as Gobernador Echaguë. Like everyone there, she grew up in a traditional Catholic family, attending church regularly. Her mother was devout, part of the women’s committee that embroidered and washed the tablecloth of the altar at the local church and carried flowers for saint’s day. Arraigada recalls all this fondly. She felt close to her parents, growing up.

“I was born in love,” she says, explaining that she was welcomed and loved by her family. Her parents realized her inner gender identity – a natural femininity -- well before she did and always supported her. “In the town where I lived, there wasn’t a negative reaction, not in my family, either,” she said. “I think they didn’t understand what was happening to me like I did, but they accompanied me,” she says of her parents. “I had a happy childhood.”

Community members of La Nelly Omar

Photo: La Nelly Omar

A lifelong concern for the poorest

Her personal experience of economic struggle -- being really poor and outside a big city -- shaped her political focus on Argentina’s class divide and the impact of unfettered capitalism and her belief in Peronism to address the great disparities in wealth that still exist in her country. That divide is also a rural-urban one. In some areas, indigenous groups remain on the social and economic margins, some battling wealthy landowners and industrialists who are taking over ancestral lands to engage in logging, cattle ranching, and oil extraction. Indigenous groups make up three to five percent of Argentina’s total population, and up to 25% in some areas.

Arraigada views poverty and economic survival as important priority features of the fight for transgender equality, too, because so many live are forced to live on the economic margins, an issue other Argentines can relate to. Many have only found work in the informal economy, including sex work, finding themselves rejected in the workplace and society. Therefore, they aren’t able to access pensions and state benefits of other workers. But, she notes, their economic struggle can serve as a social bridge to find common cause with the masses, citing one of the lessons of her activism. Rather than talking first about hot-button topics like gender identity and sexuality with more conservative audiences, she talks about the right to work and make a living, and financial independence, and the need for protection from discrimination – issues that people who are outside or less familiar with the trans or LGBTQIA+ world can relate to. It’s a starting point for discussing issues of social equality and gender rights.

This approach to coalition building has worked. It’s a reason why trans and LGBTQIA+ activists reached out to labor groups to organize against Milei after the Davos speech, and to pensioners, and indigenous groups, too. But as the points out, it can’t be a one-way road, either: it’s important for trans and other LGBTQIA+ activists to advocate for the needs of the working poor, including the rural poor and indigenous groups, and show up for their rallies.

Juan Peron and his second wive Eva wave from the balcony of Casa Rosada at Government House in Buenos Aires, 1950.

Photo: AP

Arraigada grew up in a Peronist activist household. Her father was in the union, identified with the workers. Her mother was the daughter of a local tango singer nicknamed “La Calandria de Durazno” (The songbird of Durazno). “In my house they were always very honorable: honestly and loyalty went hand in hand with Peronism,” she says. “All of my strongest memories are related to Peronism.” She also developed an early attachment to Santa Evita, as she refers to Eva Peron, who served as Argentina’s First Lady from 1946 to 1952 and was also born in poverty in the country’s Pampas region, famous for its gaucho cowboy culture.

Peron was 15 when she moved to Buenos Aire in 1934 and became a famous stage radio star, then film actress. She married Juan Peron in 1945 when he was an army colonel; a year later, he was elected president. She became a figure of public devotion, appreciated for her defense of the poor and her philanthropy via the Eva Peron Foundation. Arraigada admires that about her icon, too, and it pleases her that others regard her as following in Santa Evita’s steps.

She also admires the Peronist politicians who succeeded Eva, Nestor and Christina Kirchner. The day we met, Arraigada was tuned into the radio for news about public reaction to the pending sentencing that day of Christina to a term of six year’s house imprisonment. For Arraigada and many Peronist supporters, her trial was a tragic development, given how much good they feel Christina did to advance social equality, including for LGBTQIA+ Argentines. “It’s the end of an era,” she told me. “You cannot imagine what this means for Argentina.”

The Nelly Omar center not only provides an emotional home for the trans community in Buenos Aires, but provides services to members who are hungry or need things, such as clothes, and serves as a mutual aid center. Arraigada showed me a storeroom there stacked with food and other necessities available to members. In the fraught current political climate of anti-trans attacks by Milei’s administration, the center focuses on creating a safe space, supportive services, and provided concrete support – meaning food, and clothes, or whatever basic needs community members lack.

A poster celebrating the political movement of Kirchnerism, an offshoot of Peronism.

Source: La Nelly Omar

Love of the People

“Peron was always the best,” she says, adding that her grandmother was devoted to the Peron family. “In fact, even during the [later] dictatorship, there was a picture of Isabel Peron kept inside the closet next to San Cayetano, and where she did her laundry, there was a holy card of Evita and [Juan] Peron.” She vividly remembers the day Juan Peron died, sitting around a table with her grandparents listening to the news on Radio Colonia, a station from Paraguay. “That was the big event” for the nation. His death set the stage for his third wife, Isabel Martinez de Perón, to assume office; she served as Argentina’s 41st president, from 1974 to 1976, before losing power to the military dictatorship that followed. To this day, the search goes on for the estimated 10,000 to 30,000 people disappeared by the junta, haunting the nation’s memory.

Arraigada shares her family’s devotion what the Peron’s stood for. “The thing they conveyed to me most, directly or indirectly, was that the idea of Peronism is love for the people; it’s the construction of something communal. And of service. We lived in a place that provided service and unity.” Her unionist father worked for the railroad, and was well-respected in their town.

Being from a poor, rural small town deeply defines her, she says, offering up an image from her childhood that captures the wealth disparity still dividing Argentina. “We would wear white smocks to school, and the owner of a ranch would drive by in a huge pickup truck on a dirt road and cover out smocks with dust,” she recalls. “At that time, what I felt was the lack of respect that someone who has money and power had for those of us who didn’t have it.” Today, demanding respect – and social equality – remain central pillars of her transactivism.

Her family was also better off than some others. “There was a whole other marginalization, made up of some of my schoolmates who lived in mud houses with dirt floors, where poverty was acutely felt.” She later experienced a period of severe hunger herself, she explains. “Somewhere in one’s body, that leaves its mark.”

Women sitting on bench near their homes in Tucuman, Argentina, surrounded by a garbage dump.

Photo: Natacha Pisarenko | AP

A turning point: ‘Everything went to hell’

Arraigada chose acting before her later entry into community activism. She studied at a school for fine arts while a teenager, but found her calling on stage, having cultivated an early love for soap operas. She moved to Buenos Aires in 1998 to study theater and pursued a conservatory degree and was setting herself up for a career as an actress when, under the government of Carlos Menem, a Peronist, “everything went to hell,” she recalls. Before that moment, she says, her goals had been that of her parents: “I wanted to have a house... a traditional family... a husband, with a rosebush and a garden in the front, and a vegetable patch in the back with chickens...” she says, smiling at the memory, “...to live the days my parents lived. Instead, she entered a period of great difficulty, along with many.

Menem was elected in 1998 on a promise to reverse an inherited 1980s debt crisis. He enacted neoliberal reforms that initially reduced hyperinflation, but sharply increased unemployment and social inequality. As an openly transgender woman, Arraigada couldn’t easily find work, and had to drop her studies. “Everything that was happening to me is interrupted by the identity choice. Everything I could have become was not,” Arraigada recalled in an October 2019 interview with a local outlet, Nuestras Voces, reflecting on her path to activism. “My studies ended, I stopped being able to have a job or pay rent.” She experienced a period of extreme poverty that, today, serves as an impetus for her focus on economic empowerment for trans individuals and the mass of poor Argentines who are being crushed by the ongoing economic crisis.

During this period, she developed a rich social community in Buenos Aires among artists and activists, including the women at La Nelly Omar who regard each other as chosen family. She starting doing advocacy around issues impacting them and other neighbors in Flores. A decade later, she joined public protests over agrarian reform policies and a Highway 125 project under the Christina Kirchner government. By 2012, she was doing social work for the Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular, a Peronist worker’s group, working in the popular 1-11-14 neighborhood of southern Flores where she opened La Nelly Omar a year later. In 2015, she ran as a Peronist Front for Victory party pre-candidate for the Flores district, promising to fight for needed schools, sanitation, and health services – top local priorities. She was 45, and coming into her own as a transgender voice for residents in a less-resourced part of the city.

A younger Arraigada flashes a V for victory – and peace – after winning an election to represent her Flores district and its transgender community.

Photo: Paula Arraigada

Significant advances – then the fresh Milei backlash

Argentina’s history of transgender activism existed well before the late 1990s, but that’s when it became more publicly visible and organized as a social justice movement. In 1998, trans activists there won a major victory with the repeal of “police edicts” long used to target and jail people for “immorality”. In 2006, the Argentine Supreme Court affirmed the legal right of transgender individuals to organize, and over the years, won legal cases against discrimination and harassment. In 2010, activists won passage of Argentina’s landmark same-sex marriage law, followed by a 2012 Gender Identity Law that allowed a self-defined gender-identity change on national identity cards and a passport to a third option gender market, X, without requiring medical or legal approval. (Milei has since revised the Gender Identity Law).

Arraigada was among trans leaders who secured the breakthrough 2021 Cupo Laboral Trans law, or trans labor quota law, mandating a 1% quota for trans workers in civil service jobs, the same year it legalized the X gender marker for national identity documents.

Argentines celebrating the passage of the 2021 Trans Quota Labor Law

Photo: Victor R. Caivano | AP

End of Part One. SEE PART TWO for a continuation of this article and a discussion of trans-led resistance to Milei’s backlash, coalition building, and take-home lessons.

Additional note to readers:

This article is part of a global reporting series that aims to identify and discuss successful and less-successful examples of resistance to autocratic takeovers in other countries and what insights and models they offer to us in the US — and elsewhere. I am spotlighting the voices of resistance in specific sectors, looking at different themes and issues in each country that we are also facing here in the US.

I invite you to share the contents by restacking this piece, and a link to it in your social media. The more we can share field-proven examples, the more they can be adapted for use in America to stop Trump 2.0 and Project 2025’s agenda.

As I wrote in the Introduction to this global series, this reporting project is one I feel it urgent and addresses a gap in the literature on autocracy with its focus on solutions and strategies to address different aspects of autocratic takeovers. If this series resonates with you, I invite you to consider an upgrade to a steeply-discounted paid subscription to help cover my reporting costs. I am also seeking sponsors and selected advertisers to help underwrite the costs of reporting this series, so if you are interested, please get in touch at gendemocracy2025@gmail.com.

Above all, I hope this article and the series provide information and ideas to you and a basis for hope and a continued commitment to defending democracy. Thank you. ACD