Ministry of Women: Yes or No? A Question That Makes Us Lose the Forest for the Trees

The president's announcement about the possible elimination of the Ministry of Women in Panama has provoked various reactions in just a few days. Different voices have spoken out, presenting varied opinions and strategies. To achieve results, it's fundamental that we women prioritize political sensibility and reach agreement, preventing partisan interests from predominating and harming our progress.

It's no secret to anyone that the Ministry of Women was born crooked. Let's begin making self-criticisms from feminist honesty. As we know, it was created on March 8, 2023, right in the lead-up to the electoral contest.

A History of Broken Promises and Defective Design

But this isn't the first time Panama promises gender institutionality and sabotages it from its conception. The history of the national mechanism for women in Panama is a catalog of good intentions turned into structural failures. From 1997, when the National Women's Directorate was created under the Ministry of Youth, Women, Children and Family, to the National Women's Institute (INAMU) in 2008, each transition promised greater autonomy and resources, but delivered more bureaucracy and less real power.

INAMU, which should have been the solid precedent for the Ministry, functioned for a decade with miserable budgets, insufficient personnel, and contradictory mandates. How could an institution combat machista violence when it didn't have resources to open shelters? How was an institute going to promote women's political participation when it didn't even have territorial presence?

This is the historical trap that gender mechanisms face in Latin America: governments create them to simulate commitment, but design them to fail. They assign enormous responsibilities—eradicate violence, close salary gaps, transform cultural patterns—but deny them basic tools: sufficient budget, real ministerial rank, intersectoral coordination capacity and, above all, genuine political will.

What we see in Panama isn't exceptional. From Mexico to Argentina, women's ministries and institutes face the same structural barriers that condemn them to failure:

• First, financing as punishment. Budgets for gender policies are always the first to be cut and the last to be increased. While defense and security ministries receive billions, gender mechanisms survive on crumbs. In Panama, the Ministry of Women's budget represents less than 0.1% of the national budget. How can millennial patriarchal structures be transformed without a real budget?

• Second, the trap of rank without power. Creating a ministry sounds important, but if it doesn't have real coordination capacity with other ministries, if its decisions can be vetoed by the Ministry of Economy, if it doesn't participate in central budgetary decisions, then it's just a pompous title for administering marginal programs.

• Third, personnel as political spoils. Leadership positions in these ministries become electoral bargaining chips. Partisan militants without feminist training are appointed, technocrats without political commitment or, worse yet, conservative women who see gender as "social aid" for the poor. The result: institutions led by those who don't understand—or despise—their transformative mandate.

• Fourth, fragmentation as a weakening strategy. Instead of creating comprehensive institutions, governments fragment gender policies into multiple dependencies: one institute for violence, another for political participation, programs scattered across different ministries. This fragmentation isn't accidental: it's a strategy to prevent the articulation of an integral vision of transformation.

The Mechanism Between Women's Demands and Real Power

Were two periods as the National Women's Institute enough to make the leap toward a Ministry? Or was it rather a symbolic political move that responded more to electoral moment needs than to a true will for transformation? The Ministry itself begins weakened because the last two INAMU directors had temporary designations, with directors more political than technical, and with little strategic clarity about their direction.

Thus arrived the long-awaited Ministry, a mechanism hoped for by many women, but without solid structure or real power. We want a strong, solid, transformative institution with indispensable citizen participation in its management, audits of its performance with women's participation. But President Mulino has said it won't happen. So, faced with this refusal, what to do? Continue pushing against a president we know who he is and how he acts, or be strategic and analyze what can be achieved in this situation without losing our political compass?

The current president isn't a neutral actor. He has publicly declared that his government is "of businessmen and the private sector," that he wants to "learn from Javier Milei" and eliminating Ministries is shrinking the State (government structure). For AfroResistencia, it's more about coherence with a model that breathes classism, racism and sexism, that despises the working class and criminalizes social movements. A president who, when he makes a decision, doesn't back down; making it a political act coherent with a neoliberal, patriarchal and authoritarian power project.

In an international context of fundamentalist advance and 'cultural battles' that seek to erode rights, and in a national scenario of democratic regression—where protest is criminalized and the public is dismantled—discussing the Ministry of Women as an isolated issue is falling into the trap. Losing this framework isn't a naive error: it's a leap into the void that condemns gender policies and women's rights to the precipice.

The Substantial Contents to Fight For

From Latin American critical feminisms, this juncture demands more than resistance: it demands profound revision. As Rita Segato warns, gender isn't just identity, but technology of power at the service of a colonial and capitalist order. If the Ministry of Women reduces 'gender' to a reified discourse—without dismantling institutional racism, class exploitation or structural violence—then its existence is limited to administering the tolerable: palliative programs that don't alter the concrete lives of racialized, impoverished or territorialized women.

That's why it lacks social support. It's no coincidence: when a ministry is born to simulate inclusion while shielding the patriarchal State, its crisis isn't financial, but political. How to inhabit—or subvert—an institution that was designed to fail?

Sonia Correa alerts us: gender has been kidnapped by conservatism and neutralized by state bureaucracy, converted into an empty signifier that questions nothing. And here's Ochy Curiel's radical question from decolonial Afrofeminism: what political subject names that "woman" that the Ministry invokes?

When its policies don't include lesbians, trans women, racialized Black women, Indigenous women in resistance, impoverished women who sustain life in informal markets, precarious migrants or those deprived of liberty by a punitive State... then it's not a Ministry of Women: it's another apparatus of patriarchal, white and neoliberal power that administers our exclusion while simulating representation.

This isn't an 'inclusion' problem. It's evidence that you can't dismantle patriarchy with the tools of the bourgeois-colonial State.

And we can't ignore the most obscene thing: the complicit silence of the Ministry's current leadership. A silence that isn't neutral—it's institutionalized political violence.

How to explain that whoever should embody women's defense becomes mute, precisely, when the government decides its disappearance? It's the perfect trap: they expect us—the usual ones—to put our bodies and voices to defend an institution that doesn't even raise its voice when they repress teachers, drag Indigenous women or beat university students.

Defend what exactly? An empty acronym? A building that stays silent when they shoot at our sisters? Don't confuse us: our struggle isn't to maintain institutional fictions, but for the concrete lives of women this Ministry abandoned.

The debate isn't whether the Ministry should exist or not. The burning question is: What institutional—or counter-institutional—tools do we need to radically confront the framework that today violates citizen freedoms in Panama?

We're not talking about reforming what exists, but imagining another institutionality: one that doesn't reproduce the State's colonial power, that doesn't reduce feminism to focused policies for the poor, that doesn't dialogue while racialized women continue giving birth on waiting room floors.

Reducing the debate about the Ministry of Women to an administrative question or one of 'fiscal efficiency' isn't naive: it's an act of political sabotage. Transforming a structural dispute—the struggle against neoliberal patriarchy and its complicit State—into a mere discussion about operational expenses, is a trap to depoliticize our rage.

We won't defend hollow acronyms while dismantling advances. We won't negotiate with those who measure in accounting balances what for us is a matter of survival. Today the dilemma is clear: either we cling to institutional shells that already betrayed us, or we build feminist power from territories, streets and bodies that resist.