The protest-party kicks off on Saturday in Plaza de Mayo.

From 10 a.m., hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets as part of the 32nd annual Pride March. The event will feature a wide range of activities, from parades, shows, and fairs to live musical performances, all of which are free and open to the public.

While the day’s largest march will be held in Buenos Aires, dozens of cities and municipalities will be celebrating as well. These include Adrogué, Bahía Blanca, Florencio Varela, Junin, Lomas de Zamora, Luján, Mar del Plata, Olavarría, Tandil, Viedma, and Villa Gesell, to name just a handful.

For Argentina’s LGBTQIA+ community, the personal is the political. So at 3 p.m., they will march to the Argentine congressional building to make their voices heard. The parade will be an exuberant line of floats, costumes, music, and dancing that shows protests don’t have to be dour.

According to a communiqué that organizers released ahead of the march, principal demands this year will be a comprehensive law to protect trans rights, an end to austerity, and a robust political opposition to discriminatory policy proposals. Marchers are also calling for:

• An end to hate crimes and discourse
• Justice for Tehuel de la Torre, a trans man who disappeared in 2021
• An end to racism, xenophobia, and sexism
• That Integral Sex Education (ESI, by its Spanish acronym) be taught in all schools
• The adoption of non-binary language
• An end to trans segregation in sports
• A firm separation of church and state
• An end to IMF payments

This year’s march arrives at an inflection point in Argentine history, as the country prepares for a run-off presidential election between Sergio Massa (Union por la Patria, UxP) and the far-right Javier Milei (La Libertad Avanza, LLA). Although Milei has not explicitly campaigned on depriving LGBT+ members of their basic rights, members of his political movement have spoken of sex in biological terms and compared homosexuals to “the lame, the blind, and the deaf.” 

“During an election year, it’s necessary to use our vote to continue building equality, with officials who will continue to accompany us on our path and defend what we have achieved,” the communique read. “We hope to celebrate everything that we have accomplished thanks to the militant commitment of our supporters in every corner of the country.”

“Now more than ever, we must stop those against equal rights!” it concluded.

Argentina’s inaugural pride march took place in 1992, near the height of the HIV epidemic, and was the first of its kind in Latin America. That event was held on July 2 to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall uprising, when queer patrons of the inn in Greenwich Village, New York, rose up against the city’s police department following a raid. 

The event was subsequently moved to November 4 to honor Argentina’s first LGBT+ organization, Nuestro Mundo, which was established in November 1967. An estimated 1.3 million people attended the march in 2022.