By Katherine Aguirre
In early December 2025, women specialists, public officials, researchers, and professionals who have been working for years on arms control, citizen security, and organized crime analysis gathered in Lima, Peru, to take part in the Women Forces of Change Symposium, organized by UN Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNLIREC). This was a space for substantive discussion rather than a ceremonial gathering: participants shared diagnoses, institutional experiences, and recent evidence on the factors driving armed violence in Latin America and the Caribbean.
GENSAC took part in the discussions, using the occasion to distribute the new edition of the Armas & Género bulletin, a joint production of GENSAC, Amassuru, and SEHLAC, aligned with the same purpose as the event: strengthening the regional debate by incorporating technical analysis and gender perspectives in a field historically dominated by partial viewpoints.
At the symposium, GENSAC was represented by member Katherine Aguirre, co-founder of Amassuru and researcher at the Igarapé Institute, who participated in the roundtable “Rising militarization and its implications for the 2030 Agenda and gender equality.” In her remarks, she emphasized the urgency of incorporating feminist perspectives in arms control and security debates, noting that these agendas still reproduce patriarchal structures that exclude essential women’s voices.
Folade Mutota, Executive Director of the Women’s Institute for Alternative Development (WINAD) of Trinidad and Tobago, and GENSAC’s Regional Focal Point for the Caribbean, also participated in the panel on integrating disarmament and arms control into the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Mutota highlighted the progress and limitations in implementing these agendas within the complex context of inequality, limited development, and violence in the Caribbean.
Folade and Katherine also participated in the Peace Circles, a collective reflection space on peace and security for and by women from Latin America and the Caribbean. Speakers emphasized women’s networks as a vital tool for protecting, supporting, and strengthening those working on security, disarmament, and organized crime analysis in the region. It was noted that GENSAC acts as a regional bridge, capable of articulating knowledge, supporting leadership, promoting applied research, and creating the conditions for more women to participate and remain safe in spaces historically dominated by men.
The program included panels on women’s leadership in small arms control, nuclear disarmament, militarization, and gender inequality, as well as “WomenTalks” featuring experiences from Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, and the Caribbean. The Círculos de Paz, held in parallel in Spanish and English, offered a constructive space for women from across the region to reflect on what security means in their territories and how they sustain practices of peace in contexts of increasing violence.
The debates led to the conclusion that speaking about women and disarmament is not symbolic or a slogan. It stems from a clear diagnosis. For decades, analysis on arms was built from masculinized parameters: male firearms owners, violence between men, male-led institutions, and policies formulated from traditionally masculine interests. Within this framework, women were positioned almost exclusively as victims. Today, this approach is insufficient and distorts reality. In Latin America, arms affect women in differentiated ways both in the domestic sphere and in communities, and women also play multiple roles that have been systematically underrepresented: whether in public security forces, criminal investigation, community prevention, or public policy design—and, in certain cases, even within criminal structures. Ignoring these complexities means designing policies without situational perspective.
These ideas are also reflected in the Armas & Género bulletin, beginning with a dialogue with scholar Peter Squires, which effectively summarizes the urgency: reducing the discussion to the dichotomy between female victimization and supposed “armed empowerment” discourses does not explain regional realities. Women’s relationships with weapons are mediated by inequality, social norms, power dynamics, domestic violence, illegal economies, and institutional responses that do not always protect them. The central question is not whether women face risks, but how weapons shape those risks, and what this implies for security policymaking.
At this point, GENSAC’s work contributes an additional layer of rigor. While Fuerzas de Cambio makes histories, leadership, and trajectories visible, GENSAC contributes technical tools that demonstrate why gender-responsive arms control is not an “alternative” approach but an operational necessity. This is not merely a theory. Recent seminars organized by GENSAC in Panama with institutions from Mexico and Central America showed that incorporating gender analysis in issues such as tracing, Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) authorizations, Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials obligations, or marking mechanisms improves the accuracy of risk assessments and institutional capacity to prevent diversion.
In Lima, the distribution of the Armas & Género bulletin complemented this effort. Its content offers updated data on femicides involving firearms, firearms dynamics in the home, marketing targeted at women, women’s participation in armed institutions, and diverse state responses. The bulletin reinforces, with evidence, what many already know through experience: arms do not affect all people equally, and public policy loses effectiveness when it ignores these differences.
Both processes converge in a fundamental conclusion. The idea that greater access to firearms increases security—a discourse widespread across the Americas—has no empirical foundation. Wherever more arms circulate, homicides, domestic violence, suicides, and lethal conflicts increase. And as the analysis in the bulletin warns, proposing that women arm themselves to “balance” risks only reproduces the logic of threat: in practice, weapons often turn against those they are supposed to protect.
If the aim is to design effective policies, gender neutrality is not a valid starting point—it is a bias. Women face, analyze, and respond to armed violence from different positions, and failing to recognize that means ignoring key information for decision-making. Evidence generated by women experts, researchers, organizations, and networks like GENSAC must occupy a central place in public debate and in the design of security policies.
The meeting in Lima left an unequivocal message: speaking about arms without incorporating gender is omitting half the problem. And, speaking about gender without understanding the actual functioning of the arms market, its regulation, and its impacts is to give up influencing one of the major challenges determining security in the region.
