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Presentes was conceived in Buenos Aires from the beginning as a regional media outlet. We were born in 2016, a year after the first mass march for the Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) movement in Argentina and after femicides finally became a topic of public debate: they reached the mainstream media, and the term "crime of passion" no longer had a place.

At that time, before becoming co-founders of Presentes, we worked at Infojus Noticias, a public digital news outlet specializing in judicial and human rights news. We met there and shared our daily work, covering gender and sexual diversity issues, among other topics. In December 2015, Mauricio Macri took office, and his government dismantled that outlet, along with other public media outlets. Almost all of us were laid off, and we began to think about an independent journalistic project. 

With this premise and the idea of ​​a "news agency"—we imagine ourselves as a sort of wholesale producer of news about sexual diversity for the media—we proposed a regional project, initially covering four countries: Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, and Chile. They are four very different countries, but where common patterns often emerge. In this context, Argentina is a pioneer in access to rights for sexual diversity (it has had an advanced gender identity law since 2012, a political victory for LGBT+ groups).   

Building a specialized media outlet with a regional perspective was a way to focus and, at the same time, expand: our territory is gender and diversity, and from there we began to tell the stories of the countries where correspondents were established, with the difficulties that come with having such different realities and legislation for LGBT+ people. 

The Latin American perspective

At Presentes, we're interested in strengthening our Latin American perspective. As communication has become globalized and correspondent offices have disappeared, it's increasingly difficult to understand other realities from the region's perspective. We increasingly learn about what's happening in El Salvador from CNN or international news agencies based in Europe or the United States. This poses a significant challenge for independent Latin American media. And although Presentes is a small outlet, we're committed to addressing it: sharing the networks woven from our identity.

For example, the transvestite theory network that secured the arrival of muxe activist Amaranta Gomez Regalado from the Mexican Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the trial for the transvesticide of Diana Sacayán Or the appointment of Argentine transvestite activist Marlene Wayar to the trial for the extrajudicial execution of Vicky Hernández, a Honduran trans woman murdered during the coup d'état in Honduras, before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the same capacity to explain the structural violence that permeates the lives of transvestites in the region.

That's why in 2018 we decided to expand our coverage of the Southern Cone and also cover the northern triangle of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. This has been a huge challenge, and to this day, despite having highly committed journalists in those countries, we face the challenges of distance and cultural differences. 

In 2019, we took another important step and created a coordination center in Mexico, a country that is key to our regional coverage due to its diversity, cultural richness, and size.

Engaging in dialogue and trying to show what's happening in different parts of a continent is our greatest challenge. Also, speaking about the diversity of diversity. Being an LGBT+ person in Argentina, where there's a legislative framework that's cutting-edge in the region, isn't the same as being an LGBT+ person in Honduras, where being LGBT means living at risk in a country with high rates of violence for the entire population. 

One way we've found to generate a more fluid dialogue with activists (many of whom are sources and producers of Presentes stories) and journalists is through our training workshops on how to cover news about sexual diversity from a human rights perspective. Since 2016, we've coordinated workshops for more than 1,000 people across Latin America . Our goal, in addition to reporting on diversity, is to improve journalistic practices and generate an impact in other media outlets. Thanks to these workshops—both in-person and online—we've built networks in several countries and learned from colleagues and activists.

Telling a change of era

We are aware: we are chronicling a changing era. And we do so by giving prominence to the voices involved and discriminated against, including those underrepresented in other media. We are talking and looking with others, forging alliances with crucial groups in building a different kind of communication for a different reality. We feel that vertigo, the joy and responsibility of trying to do it well, as best we can, and sometimes also the frustration. 

Because there are certain threads that connect the political, cultural, social, and economic fabric of patriarchy and its oppressions, and they aren't so clear at first glance, nor are they being reported by mass media in a way that respects a human rights framework. Trans people continue to be killed in identical ways in El Salvador, Mexico, and even Argentina: while in prostitution or sex work, on the street, with atrocious cruelty. And they continue to be discriminated against when they go to a hospital and are refused treatment. 

We're also witnessing the ups and downs of media discrimination, which takes on different nuances but draws a common pattern when it uses headlines that stigmatize and criminalize certain identities. So we don't just want to chronicle this changing era, but do it a little better. 

We also know that we are witnesses and protagonists of the different tensions within feminisms. We see how, unfortunately, many sectors still fail to engage with the sexual diversity agenda, and others, in the worst cases, have become explicitly trans-exclusionary spaces, falling into the biologicalisms that have done so much harm to us as a movement throughout history. We also witness the virulence on social media, the lack of nuance in the discourses that tend to polarize between "them" and "us." Every day, we ask ourselves how to participate in the public debate without adding more noise to the clamor on social media. It's not easy. We don't have many answers, only some personal guidelines and those of the media itself. 

Open the agenda, broaden the worldview

In the last year and a half, just before the pandemic hit, we set out to expand the sexual diversity agenda to other topics. We saw, and continue to see, with concern how Indigenous women's issues—Indigenous issues in general, but particularly those of women territorial defenders—were suffering from almost the same problems we detected years ago with LGBT+ news: from invisibility to stigmatization, including exoticization.  

We therefore set out, little by little, to open Presentes up to these issues in the midst of the pandemic. We wanted to make visible the violence we've suffered, but also the key roles we play as defenders of the earth at a global moment when Indigenous Peoples are virtually the only ones with a comprehensive worldview of the problem we are facing as humanity. 

At the same time, the networks of Indigenous and rural women with whom we are in contact tell us about the need, even within their communities, to talk about sexual diversity and make space for all these intersections. The word "intersectionality" sometimes seems to fall short. We started small, like everything at Presentes. Last year, we participated in the campaign to raise awareness of "chineo" (the rape of Indigenous children by Creoles in northern Argentina), a practice that has been present and unpunished since colonial times . We then investigated how Indigenous women in Paraguay and Argentina experienced the pandemic. This year, we will continue our coverage and investigations from these two countries with the firm intention of decolonizing our own journalistic practices.

Last wishes 

Day-to-day life can sometimes be tough, but we have an incredible, intergenerational, diverse, and powerful team. And over time, we've learned to divide our roles. It's the team that provides strength and support when plans fall apart or when we have to deal with complex issues, whether online or in life. Some days we laugh at the versatility required to run a regional media outlet. The time differences, the stories and cell phone messages that arrive from early in the morning, the paperwork for making international transfers and payments.

We're working every holiday because, except for May 1st and January 1st, when we're off work, the rest of the non-working days vary from country to country, and things tend to happen all the time. And there are also, and above all, the close relationships built over these almost years. With the team and also those relationships with the correspondents in other countries, whom we've never met in person, but it's as if we knew each other. We fantasize about getting together someday for a beer in a bar in Jujuy or Guatemala City, or meeting with our allies and admirers Pikara Magazine , somewhere in Bilbao. Presentes was born from a journalistic desire but also from a network of affections. To this day, and not without many ups and downs, this emotional dimension sustains us as a media outlet and as people.

*This article was published in Pikara Magazine's special feature on feminist journalism.