Every November, the Netherlands throws itself into #OrangetheWorld. Why now? On November 25, 1960, three sisters—Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal—were strangled and beaten to death in a Dominican sugarcane field on the orders of Rafael Trujillo, the country’s dictator. Trujillo had already renamed the capital after himself and killed thousands of political opponents, but the Mirabals represented a different kind of threat: educated women who organized an underground movement, refused his advances, and refused his fear. Their murders were staged as a car accident; the battered bodies told another story. Within six months, the backlash helped bring down the regime that killed them. It was Latin American feminists who first decided that November 25 should be a day to confront violence against women.
And so, each year, from November 25 to December 10, Dutch bridges glow and ministries beam, joining a campaign born from that history. It’s global—UN Women, not Den Haag, invented it—and they chose orange explicitly as a symbol of hope for a future free from violence. It feels almost too convenient that the campaign is wrapped in orange, a colour the Netherlands already wears without thinking: for football, for King’s Day, for anything that lets us signal unity without asking too many questions.
And that’s exactly what struck me this year: as the country shimmered in hopeful orange, a second word kept appearing in the shadows of the glow. Femicide. A word that lands with a thud, refusing to be softened by warm light or national branding. A word that, until recently, barely existed in Dutch media, where the killing of women was politely filed away under familiedrama — a “family tragedy,” as if the violence were an act of weather rather than a choice.
So, just as with avocados and gold, I did what this newsletter has made into a habit: I followed the concept to its roots. And it took me somewhere the orange lights never want to point — southward, across the Atlantic, into the movements and theories that Latin America spent decades building long before the Netherlands ever illuminated a single bridge.
Because while the term “femicide” was first used by Diana Russell in the 1970s, its political meaning — the meaning now echoing through Dutch activism — was forged in Mexico and Argentina. Not as an abstract criminological category, but as an accusation. In the 1990s, as women disappeared and were murdered in Ciudad Juárez, Mexican anthropologist Marcela Lagarde named these deaths feminicidio: violence multiplied by state impunity, the kind of crime in which the killer is not just the man with the weapon, but the system that lets him walk away.
That Latin American redefinition — violence + impunity = feminicide — is precisely the framework Dutch activists have now adopted. Not metaphorically. Explicitly. Neighborhood Feminists in Amsterdam cite Lagarde by name and argue that murders like that of 16-year-old Hümeyra, who begged Dutch authorities for help before being killed by her stalker, fit the feminicide model: a death made possible by institutional failure. And more recently Lisa, 17, murdered while biking home moments after calling someone for help — a killing that forced the Netherlands to confront, once again, how easily a preventable death becomes a national “shock” instead of a structural failure.
And once you see the Latin American imprint, you begin to notice it everywhere. “Ni Una Menos” banners — in Spanish, deliberately untranslated — have appeared at feminist protests on Dam Square and Museumplein. Susana Chávez, the Mexican poet who coined “Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerta más” in 1995, was herself strangled and had her left hand severed in Ciudad Juárez in January 2011. She was 36 years old. Additionally, many serial feminicide victims in Mexico were girls aged 11–20, yet coverage routinely calls them “women”—obscuring that these were also crimes against children. The first Ni Una Menos march drew 200,000–300,000 people in one day. On June 3, 2015, hundreds of thousands flooded Buenos Aires and over 80 Argentine cities to demand an end to femicide. Argentine artists like Mercedes Azpilicueta stitched the movement into the Dutch cultural scene, literally weaving Buenos Aires protest motifs into exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum.
Today, still, one woman is killed every 10 minutes by a partner or family member. In 2024, the Dutch government finally published its own “Stop Femicide!” Action Plan — an institutional echo of a term activists had already forced into the Dutch dictionary.
But if you follow the concept the way Latin American feminists taught us to, the story doesn’t end in the Hague. The very gap the Kingdom maintains — protecting women in the European Netherlands while underfunding the mechanisms that would protect women in Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius — is not an anomaly but a textbook example of what feminicidio names. In the Dutch Caribbean, the bright orange message of “we care about women” collapses under the weight of what the Kingdom actually does. This is something I hope to delve deeper into in a future newsletter article.
In the end, the Netherlands supplies the visibility and Latin America supplies the vocabulary. One lights the buildings; the other explains why the lights were needed in the first place. And once you understand what “feminicide” actually names — the patterns, the warnings, the institutional silences — you realise the glow of Orange the World isn’t the conclusion. It’s the baseline. Because once we have both the light to see the problem and the language to name it, we finally have what every movement needs: the tools to change the story — and the responsibility to use them.
