On the afternoon of 16 April 2026, a small group of Indigenous women arrived at the state legislature of Salta, a province in northern Argentina, to watch politicians debate and vote on a proposed law.
As the results were announced, the women laughed, cried and embraced one another. They had succeeded in getting the state to recognise, for the first time, the existence of ‘chineo’: the systematic sexual abuse and assault of Indigenous girls and women by ‘criollo’ (non-Indigenous) men, who typically wield greater economic, social or political power.
Argentina’s 1.3 million Indigenous people, who make up just 2.9% of its total population, continue to face injustices despite having some legal rights. Many communities struggle to protect their ancestral lands from mining, logging, and farming projects that damage the environment and threaten their way of life. They also experience discrimination, limited access to quality healthcare and education, and higher levels of poverty.
For Indigenous girls and women, chineo is also a constant threat that has loomed for more than 400 years since the arrival of colonial settlers. It is still common to hear some criollo men say “vamos a chinear” (“let's go chinear”), explains Fabiana Ibarra, a woman from the Wichí people, who was herself assaulted as a teenager. “They mean going out to look for women to abuse.”
In Salta, the passing of Law 8.534 is a landmark victory against such attacks. Indigenous people account for 10% of the province’s population – a much larger proportion than the national average – and local authorities must now recognise chineo as a hate crime to be prevented through awareness-raising and education.
Cecilia Osorio
The new legislation is known as the ‘Octorina Law’, in memory of the late Wichí leader Octorina Zamora, who defended Indigenous rights throughout her life. Among the women present to see it passed was Zamora’s daughter, Tujuay Gea Zamora, who is continuing her fight against chineo. “When we left the legislature, we realised it was just beginning,” Tujuay told openDemocracy. “The law is not a finishing line, but a starting point.”
Tujuay wants further law changes to hand Indigenous people the “legal tools to defend” their lands from “this colonial disciplining”. The Octorina Law does not create new criminal offences – a power reserved for Argentina’s national Congress – or modify the penalties for sexual crimes or the aggravating factors for hate crimes based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity. Instead, it aims to recognise a form of racist and patriarchal violence that has historically been rendered invisible.
The law provides for the creation of a body focused on combating chineo, which will gather statistics on the crime and develop protocols, prevention campaigns and protection mechanisms. It will also require Salta’s ministries of health, education, government and justice to allocate resources for multilingual awareness campaigns, intercultural assistance centres, the training of public servants, and comprehensive support for victims. It has not yet been announced which ministry will bear responsibility for overseeing the new body and deciding its budget.
“We know it is a basic law; we decided to pass it because it was needed. It is a first step,” said provincial senator Walter Cruz, from the Kolla people, who introduced an earlier bill to tackle chineo, which was not debated within the necessary legislative timeframe.
The new law also requires authorities to hold ongoing consultation and dialogue with Indigenous communities through the Provincial Institute of Indigenous Peoples of Salta and enables the Public Prosecutor's Office to intervene as a civil party on behalf of victims. “We can be pioneers with this law. But if we don't apply it well, it will have been a nice piece of paper,” Cruz told openDemocracy.
Cruz believes the Salta law carries greater significance in the current Argentine political landscape. Since libertarian president Javier Milei took office in December 2023, institutions and budgets to combat gender-based violence have been eliminated, and bodies linked to Indigenous rights have been dismantled.
Although Milei’s approach makes it unlikely that a similar law will be adopted nationally anytime soon, the senator hopes the Octorina Law could become a precedent for similar legislation in neighbouring provinces or across the country. “It would be ideal if this could also be discussed in Chaco, Formosa, Jujuy or Santiago del Estero,” he said. “Chineo does not happen only in Salta.”
Oblivion and misery
One of the most famous cases of chineo in recent years is that of Juana*, a Wichí woman from Alto La Sierra community who was born with microcephaly, a rare neurological condition causing problems with the brain’s development.
In 2015, when she was 12 years old, Juana was caught and dragged into a bush by eight criollo men. They drugged, beat, and raped her. She became pregnant. The long distances to the nearest suitable healthcare provider, the lack of ambulances and language barriers meant she did not receive medical attention for days. Although abortions in cases of rape are legal in Argentina, local health and justice authorities then delayed proceedings and denied Juana access to an abortion until her story became national news.
By this time, her pregnancy was “too advanced” for a regular termination. She was forced to undergo a caesarean section to terminate the pregnancy, which doctors had concluded was non-viable and was putting her life at extreme risk.
Juana’s mother, meanwhile, faced threats and pressure to drop her police report of her daughter’s assault. When she refused, she faced a cover-up from the authorities that eventually led to a prosecutor and judge being removed from the case and sparked calls for the firing of medical staff who carried out Juana’s examination.
Octorina Zamora supported Juana's family, as she did with many others, even years after the abuse. “Juana remains trapped in oblivion and misery, without the assistance she is entitled to as a victim, as a woman, as an indigenous person, as a child,” she recounted in 2020 at a symposium of the National Institute against Discrimination.
Juana’s family refused to back down, and her attackers were eventually sentenced to 17 years in prison in 2019. This is not typical of chineo cases; most never reach trial or stall amid language barriers, the lack of interpreters, or local pressures, as detailed in an investigation that openDemocracy republished last year.
‘A fundamental first step’
Much of the campaigning for the new law has come from the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversities for Good Living, which brings together at least 36 communities from more than 20 Indigenous peoples and has a national reach.
The movement was officially formed in 2012, but has its roots in earlier meetings held around community bonfires, when women would travel many kilometres to meet and share problems they faced in their territory, from a lack of drinking water to child malnutrition. In 2019, it launched its #BastaDeChineo (#EnoughWithChineo) campaign, building networks to protect one another and their children, support victims, and help those who do not speak Spanish to file complaints.
In some communities, Indigenous women organised to report what they were enduring. Women and adolescents from the Wichí community of Misión Kilómetro 2 held a march and signed a public letter after the rape and femicide of 12-year-old Pamela Flores in 2022. With the support of Octorina Zamora, they also participated in the First Assembly of Indigenous Women of Route 81, where they made their demands heard by provincial and national authorities.
In May of the same year, the Movement of Women and Diversities organised the third annual ‘Plurinational Parliament’ in Chicoana, Salta, attended by more than 36 Indigenous delegations from across the country. Delegates put together the Chicoana Report, which included a call for urgent measures against chineo; several of their demands are now part of the new law, such as obligations for authorities to produce statistics on chineo, provide intercultural training for public servants, hire interpreters, and allow Indigenous communities to participate in developing public policy.
Zamora died one week after the Plurinational Parliament. Soon after her death, Senator Cruz introduced a bill in the Salta legislature to pay tribute to her and legislate on some of her ideas around chineo, but the bill’s passage stalled after certain political parties and landowners objected to the language used.
With no progress in sight, activists and human rights groups decided on a new approach, tabling the new bill and removing explicit mentions of chineo, while using descriptions that make clear that it is targeting the behaviours that constitute chineo. “The purpose of this Act is to raise awareness, promote sensitisation and provide education in order to prevent sexual assaults against women, girls and adolescents belonging to Indigenous Peoples, considered hate crimes, throughout the province,” the new law describes. The draft “has changed a great deal from its first version”, explained Senator Cruz.
The word chineo still causes debate and controversy today, says activist María Pía Ceballos, a Wichí Ava Guaraní trans woman from the Salta city of Tartagal. “Some Indigenous women see chineo as a dirty word, and it affects them emotionally. From within the Movement, we explain that this concept describes a practice of colonial and patriarchal sexual violation that must be named,” she told openDemocracy.
Between 2023 and 2025, the bill was discussed with Indigenous leaders, feminist organisations and human rights actors. The organisation Na' Nechepa (Let's Rise Up), which is led by Tujuay Zamora, the Juala Foundation and several local women leaders drafted and submitted specific amendments to the bill's articles. Although the law includes some of their demands, the price of its passage has been its reduction. “The law suffered several cuts on important points, such as economic and judicial reparation,” said Tujuay Zamora. “It is not ideal, but it is a useful tool and a fundamental first step towards being seen.”
A platform for struggle
The Chicoana Report was more than a petition against chineo, it was a wide-ranging platform that addressed the roots of exploitation and abuse.
It called for “institutions and religious groups [...] who are complicit” in chineo and companies whose employees had committed abuses to be barred from operating in Indigenous territories. It demanded police officers and military personnel who commit chineo be prosecuted, convicted and dishonourably discharged, and public officials and traditional authorities who are perpetrators, accomplices, or facilitators of chineo be prosecuted. It also called for “all the assets of the rapists” to be seized and paid to victims in reparations.
The report also said that women should be “the recipients and administrators of food and social assistance programmes”, with Ceballos explaining: “We have cases where drivers of trucks carrying food aid arrive at communities and demand girls in exchange for delivering the supplies. And some chiefs hand them over.”
Tujuay Zamora recalled that her mother witnessed such abuse in the 1980s. “During the return of democracy in Argentina, Octorina denounced that when boxes of the National Food Plan were distributed, some drivers would grope ten-year-old girls in intimate areas or exchange food for sex.”
The Chicoana Report also gave explicit name to ‘terricide’, a concept coined by the Movement of Indigenous Women for Good Living to describe the destruction of the lands of Indigenous peoples, perpetrated by an extractivist, colonial and patriarchal economic system. “The occupying civilisation has created death and harm to all lives in the ancestral territories. Our pain and our losses are irreparable,” it states.
In December 2024, Milei’s government repealed a law that had suspended Indigenous communities’ eviction orders from their ancestral lands, which have lived on for generations but do not typically hold titles for. Now, communities in the provinces of Salta and Jujuy are watching with concern the progress of the Capricorn Bioceanic Corridor, a South American road network that will cross their territories to connect central-western Brazil with ports on the Pacific Ocean.
For Indigenous women, trucks and new trade routes are linked to another kind of transit: human trafficking, drug trafficking and increased violence from criollo men. “Situations of trafficking already exist in some communities and this could get much worse,” said Tujuay Zamora. “The extractivist project advances even as communities resist. So we need tools to protect our girls and adolescents from what is coming.”
“The Chicoana Report and the issue of terricide brought us together and enabled awareness of the legal vacuum that exists on this issue,” said Ceballos.
Women who illuminate
The Wichí worldview, which predates Spanish colonisation, says the atsinay katés (star women) are bearers of ancestral wisdom and fundamental pillars of the community.
Fabiana Ibarra, a member of the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversities for Good Living, is one of those star women. In 2006, when Ibarra was 13 years old, she was stopped by a hätäy – the Wichí word for a criollo man, meaning ‘white demon’ – as she returned from selling crafts near the border with Bolivia and Paraguay. “I don't know if he was drunk or on drugs; he was red-eyed,” Ibarra said, speaking slowly and with long pauses. “The man threatened me and took me to some bushes where he abused me.”
Ibarra tried to report the sexual abuse, but struggled with the language barrier with the Spanish-speaking police. “Nobody fully understood me,” she told openDemocracy. They took down the complaint with what little they managed to understand, though “there was no follow-up on the case”. The case was closed; the man had relatives in the police, and Ibarra never received any reparation. She taught herself Spanish soon after.
What followed were years of struggle and pain, which began to ease when she met other Wichí sisters who had been through similar experiences. Today, Ibarra is a star woman who guides others who cannot express themselves in Spanish before doctors, police or judicial officers. She said: “I feel like a spokesperson for the sisters who cannot speak.”
Florencia Galarza is an Argentine journalist specialising in gender, justice and human rights. She contributes to national and international media and investigates violence, inequalities and access to rights. She also works at the National Council of the Judiciary, an organ of the judicial branch.
