After more than two centuries, oppression, exploitation, and discrimination against women still prevail.
This date emerged from the heart of the international labor movement (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1910; New York, 1911). And from the struggle unleashed by female textile workers in Russia during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Nationally and internationally, feminist movements have established important legal tools for the protection of women’s rights. However, social inequality has not been resolved. Costa Rica is dominated by a capitalist, patriarchal, and colonialist system. Feminicide and femicide, disappearances, trafficking, sexual slavery, and so-called “child marriages” are on the rise. Homophobia, xenophobia, infamous pedophilia, and other atrocities are legitimated.
Neoliberalism, together with the rise of different expressions of the right, now led by Trump and servile accomplices such as Milei, Bukele, Netanyahu, and many others, have installed and perpetuated a multiplicity of structural violence against girls, young women, and women. This, in addition to their expansionist, warmongering, and predatory policies against Mother Earth.
The massacre of more than 150 girls, victims of war, is unheard of, as an Iranian school in Hormozgan, Iran, was viciously bombed by the United States Armed Forces. Along with all the victims in Palestine due to the genocidal capitalist-fascist-patriarchal-Zionist siege and its allies.
The impact of the oppression of women in unpaid reproductive work in the home continues. It conditions the family to be an instrument that legitimizes patriarchal oppression and the economic subordination of women.
In Costa Rica, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of femicides and all types of sexual violence against girls and women of all ages. In the last two months alone, there have been eight more “registered” femicides than in 2025. Most remain unpunished. Victims who report the crimes face state policies and judicial processes that are complicit in these abuses. They are even subjected to institutional revictimization.
As part of the global crisis of capitalism, women who are most exposed to this violence come from sectors that are most excluded and oppressed at the socio-cultural, economic, and geographic levels, making them even more vulnerable. Every day, there are more disappearances of girls and young women and systematic harassment in workplaces, such as factories and agricultural industries. This is a clear reflection of the power relations between employers and workers.
We believe that feminism with class consciousness and commitment is a fundamental way to transgress social and gender inequality, as an expression of the interests and needs of different social sectors, especially rural, indigenous, and working-class sectors in general, by achieving the abolition of all oppression derived from capitalist exploitation.
—Comrades in Costa Rica
Read ICWP’s communist analysis of sexism here and here
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