On November 25, 1960, three sisters – Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal – were found dead at the bottom of a ravine near La Cumbre, a mountainous section of road in the Dominican Republic.
The jeep they were traveling in fell into a crumpled heap 150 meters (about 500 feet) below. It looked like an accident – there were marks of beating and strangulation on his body and the body of his driver.
The Dominican Republic was then under the rule of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, a dictator whose more than 30-year rule was marked by censorship, surveillance, and brutal repression. Dissidents were often silenced with impunity.
The Mirabal sisters were one of them. Born in an affluent rural family, his political consciousness was triggered by the abuses of the regime – which had an impact even closer to home.
Minerva, the first woman to earn a law degree in the country, once rejected Trujillo’s sexual advances. He was harassed, refused a license to practice, and kept under constant surveillance.
As historian Nancy P. Robinson writes 2006 essay on sistersTrujillo’s hatred of the sisters went beyond politics and became personal. “Minerva’s refusal to submit to Trujillo’s sexual advances resulted in her needing to be constantly humiliated,” Robinson wrote, adding that Trujillo saw this as an affront to the masochism that drove his authoritarian leadership.
Rise of the ‘butterflies’
Along with her sisters and their husbands, Minerva helped create the “June 14th Movement” – a clandestine network that distributed leaflets, organized resistance cells and exposed the regime’s crimes.
The sisters’ code name was “Las Mariposas” or “The Butterflies”. Minerva and Maria Teresa were arrested and released several times for their resistance activities.
On the day they died, the sisters were returning from visiting their imprisoned husbands. His car was stopped by Trujillo’s secret police, who strangled him to death. Their bodies were then placed in a jeep, which was pushed off a cliff to give the appearance of an accident.
Even though Trujillo presented himself as a supporter of women’s rights – he gave women the right to vote in 1942 and sent one of the first female delegates to the United Nations – in reality, women in political office in his government lacked real power or legitimacy because his dictatorship reinforced ideals of female incompetence, domesticity, and submission to men. Thus, any remaining illusions of their alleged progressivism were shattered after their regime brutally murdered “Las Mariposas.”
Trujillo was assassinated six months later, with the sisters’ murder widely seen as a turning point in the fall of his regime.
From local tragedy to global galvanization
Minerva Mirabal often presciently remarked: “If they kill me, I will take my arms out of the grave and I will be strong.”
In 1981, Latin American feminists gathered in Bogotá and proposed November 25 as a day to honor victims of gender-based violence, thus establishing the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Their aim was not only to remember the Mirabal sisters, but to underline that violence against women is not just individual: it is linked to broader political and social systems of power and oppression.
Ten years later, The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership launched a 16-day campaign highlighting the need to eliminate gender-based violence, which now runs annually from 25 November to 10 December, marking Human Rights Day. These efforts laid the groundwork for future campaigns, including UN Women’s “Orange the World” initiative launched in 2014.
Orange was chosen to represent hope and a future free from violence. It has become a visual cue – be it through banners, on social media or famous buildings bathed in orange light.
Global patterns of oppression
The femicide of the Mirabal sisters was not an isolated tragedy – it was part of a long, global continuum of violence against women and resistance to it.
In 2006, American activist Tarana Burke coined the phrase “Me Too” to support survivors of sexual violence – particularly young women of color. More than a decade later, the hashtag #MeToo spread globally following multiple revelations of sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein. Millions of people shared their experiences of sexual abuse online and demanded accountability for perpetrators.
In 2022, Zina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, died in police custody after being arrested for violating Iran’s strict hijab law.
His death sparked the largest anti-regime protests in the history of the Islamic Republic. Led by women, the movement adopted the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” – a phrase rooted in the Kurdish independence movement.
Both Amini and the movement were awarded the 2023 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament.
gender based disinformation online
While the Mirabal sisters lived in an era before social media, they knew what it meant to be watched, bullied, and punished for speaking out. Generations of women and girls also face violence, whether at home, at work, on the streets of peaceful cities or in conflict zones.
Today, they also face digital violence – the focus of Orange Days 2025.
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is increasingly being weaponized to harass, silence and harm women. AI-generated deepfakes, cyberstalking, doxxing and online threats are spreading into real life – fueling fear and putting lives at risk.
Gender equality expert Lucina Di Meco describes online gender disinformation as “the spread of misleading or inaccurate information and images against female political leaders, journalists and female public figures” that is based on misogyny and social stereotypes, “framing them as untrustworthy, stupid, emotional/angry/crazy or sexual.”
Relevant even after 65 years
In the Philippines, journalist Maria Ressa faced sustained digital attacks through bots, fake accounts, and hate campaigns for exposing corruption under then-President Rodrigo Duterte.
His colleague in Brazil, an investigative journalist patricia campos meloAfter covering Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign, she was harassed online after receiving sexual insults, rape threats and humiliating videos accusing her of being a prostitute.
Recently, in September 2025, the murder of two young women and a teenage girl in Argentina, following a dispute with a drug gang, was livestreamed to about 45 people via a private social media group. The video was reportedly intended to “warn” against drug theft.
The incident caused a global shock wave, highlighting how this and other examples – across borders and platforms – illustrate the persistence of gender-based violence. Sixty-five years after the murder of the Mirabal sisters, November 25 remains a symbol of the global reckoning with this reality.
Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier