I would like my first column of the year to be about having hope for the world despite all the battles. Perhaps I wanted to talk about love, a feeling so necessary and sometimes rare. But I think it is not possible to write about any other subject than Tainara Souza Santos, 31 years old, who died on Christmas Eve after days of fighting for her life.
End-of-year women’s gatherings across the country were marked by dismay at her death, as a collective trauma, after weeks during which we followed, with anguish, her stay in the hospital and the hope that she might survive.
After being knocked down, her attacker continued driving a long distance with Tainara tied to the car, dragged in full view of everyone. A crime whose brutality appalled the country.
The crime committed on the Tietê seafront, one of the busiest roads in the world, exposes the hatred that structures our society. On the other hand, Tainara’s strength has awakened countless women. For days, many of us felt in the anteroom of her hospital room, united in prayers, thoughts and wishes that, somehow, she would find peace.
In light of her death, as Lúcia, her mother, stated in a public message, Tainara rested. “I thank you in advance for all the messages of prayer, affection and love you have had with me and my daughter. She has just left this cruel world and is with God. It is an immense pain. But the suffering is over and now it is time to seek justice,” he said.
Tainara was a young woman, with dreams, affections, connections and plans that we will never know because she was denied the most basic right, that of staying alive. After the holidays, we start the year with a desire that no longer fits into euphemisms: what we want for 2026 is to be alive. This is not an abstract ideal, but a minimum requirement in a country that continues to naturalize the death of women.
In 2025, the state of São Paulo recorded the highest number of feminicides and attacks against women in its history. The data, by itself, is already unbearable. But when these statistics gain names, faces, and interrupted stories, we see a repeated pattern of violence, neglect, and social permissiveness.
To say that we want to be alive in 2026 is to demand effective public policies, investments in prevention, real protection of women in danger, rapid accountability of aggressors and a profound transformation of the entire consciousness and political practice of men.
Maybe this column is, yes, about love. Love for the women who are gone, for those who fight to be here. Continuing to fight and demand change remains an act of hope. Hope must be combined with our strength not only to mourn losses, but also to shout at the top of our lungs that we have the right to life. Tainara will never be forgotten by those who nourish within themselves the necessary revolt which transmutes pain into struggle.
In 2026 we will have presidential elections. May we know how to guide ourselves by truth and not by false promises and late stirrings. Let nothing distract us, the non-issues that go viral and only serve to feed polarized sides or inflate egos, topics manufactured so that we place our attention in directions that do not lead us to life. We must also not let ourselves be taken in by easy speeches or by certain profiles that exploit women’s lives to gain likes without the slightest commitment to the feminist struggle.
We don’t want vague comments on platforms or outrage that are not accompanied by effective actions. We must be careful to know how much of the public budget has been specifically allocated to policies that can guarantee our survival.
We can no longer look at men’s politics naively or like football fans. It takes courage, responsibility and intellectual honesty to say that, regardless of political party, the last few years have been devastating for women. May we rest from the year 2025 which marked us with the indifference of the State to our demands so that we continue to claim our possibility of a life without violence.
May we know how to build our uprising for Tainara and may many of us understand our collective strength and the dimensions of that strength. There is no political project possible in Brazil without the centrality of our agenda. Yes, this column is about love, about this feeling which is sometimes rare, but which grows and blossoms each time one of us does not lose hope for all of us.
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