The “Marches of Women” took to the streets today in the main cities of the United States, where tens of thousands of people demonstrated in favor of gender equality coinciding with the first anniversary of the Donald Trump government.
New York was expected to be one of the most crowded, with some 85,000 registered protesters in the event on the Internet, although the organization said that the actual figure ends up being higher. According to the mayor’s office, in 2017 there were 400,000.
In the early hours of the morning there were already people moving towards the rally called west of Central Park, which was “crowded” and overflowed with “energy, empowerment and unity,” according to Efe New Yorkers Lisa and Mehely after leading the march.
Following the critical line with the Trump Administration that dominated the event this Saturday throughout the country, the women professed one of their slogans, dedicated to the president for the anniversary of his arrival at the White House: “Welcome to your first year! Why the hell are you still here? ”
In his Twitter account, Trump seemed to ignore the general feeling of the demonstrations and wrote that it was a “perfect day for all women to march”, in addition to highlighting that the US it has the “lowest level of female unemployment in 18 years”.
In spite of this fact, the vast majority of posters carried the discontent with the migratory and sanitary measures that it has promoted; demands for equal rights for women, immigrants and members of the LGBT community; and the feminist slogans and against sexual aggressions.
Near Bryant Park, where the four-hour march took place in New York, was Leslie, a woman who came, like many others, wearing the same pink cap she wore in the first march, “symbol of a new wave of feminism “born of” a vulgar comment by Trump “.
“It is an important year because we can vote to recover the House and the Senate and deny power” to the president, the woman told Efe, referring to the mid-term elections to be held in November.
Precisely, the organization of the “Women’s March”, which was focused last year in Washington DC for its proximity to the Capitol and brought together 500,000 people, sought today to turn the protests into political action, encouraging women to stand for public office and encouraging the vote.
“To send a strong message that women will lead the electoral victories in 2018, we had to go to a relevant state, we chose Nevada,” one of the organizers, Linda Sarsour, told CNN.
In Las Vegas, capital of that “hinge state” that turned towards the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, the march gives rise to the campaign PowerToThePolls (The power of votes) and will count this Sunday with representatives of organizations such as Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter to boost voter registration and political mobilization.
Other prominent cities in which thousands of people took to the streets today were Washington, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles, the latter with more notoriety, since it concentrates a good part of the national film industry.
There, actresses such as Viola Davis, Natalie Portman and Eva Longoria took the microphone to extol female empowerment and allude to the Hollywood harassment scandals uncovered in recent months, which have unleashed feminist and social protest movements such as MeToo and Time’s Up.
Between this Saturday and Sunday, there are hundreds of marches and events programmed globally around the rights of women in the capitals of countries such as Argentina, China or Canada, but also in secondary cities and at a local level. (efeusa)
