On November 25, 1960, three sisters — Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal — were found dead at the bottom of a ravine near La Cumbre, a mountainous stretch of road in the Dominican Republic.

The jeep they were traveling in had plunged 150 meters (about 500 feet) into a mangled heap. It looked like an accident — except their bodies, and that of their driver, bore signs of beating and strangulation.

The Dominican Republic was then under the rule of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, a dictator whose over 30-year regime was marked by censorship, surveillance and brutal repression. Dissidents were often silenced with impunity.

The Mirabal sisters were among them. Born into a well-off rural family, their political consciousness was sparked early by the regime's abuses — which also hit close to home.

Minerva, the first woman to earn a law degree in the country, had once rejected Trujillo's sexual advances. She was harassed, denied her license to practice and placed under constant watch.

As Historian Nancy P. Robinson wrote in a 2006 essay on the sisters, Trujillo's hatred for the sisters went beyond political to the personal. "Minerva's refusal to succumb to Trujillo's sexual advances resulted in a relentless need to humiliate," wrote Robinson, adding that Trujillo saw it as an affront to the machismo that powered his authoritarian leadership.

Rise of 'The Butterflies'

Alongside her sisters and their husbands, Minerva helped form the "14th of June Movement" — a clandestine network that distributed pamphlets, 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. Their car was intercepted by Trujillo's secret police, who strangled and clubbed them to death. Their bodies were then placed in the jeep, which was pushed off a cliff to simulate a crash.

Even though Trujillo styled himself as a supporter of women's rights — he had granted women the right to vote in 1942 and sent one of the first female delegates to the UN — in reality, women in political office in his government lacked real power or legitimacy as his dictatorship reinforced ideals of female incompetence, domesticity, and submission to men. Thus, any illusion left of his supposed progressivism was shattered after "Las Mariposas" were murdered with impunity by his regime.

Trujillo was assassinated six months later, with the sisters' murder widely seen as a turning point in his regime's downfall.

From local tragedy to global galvanization

Minerva Mirabal had often presciently remarked: "If they kill me, I shall reach my arms out of the grave and I shall be stronger."

In 1981, Latin American feminists gathered in Bogota and proposed November 25 as a day to honor victims of gender-based violence, thus founding International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Their aim was not only to commemorate the Mirabal sisters, but to underscore that violence against women is not just personal: It's connected to broader political and social systems of power and oppression.

Ten years later, the 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 November 25 to December 10, which marks Human Rights Day. These efforts laid the groundwork for future campaigns, including the 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 via banners, on social media or famous buildings bathed in orange lights.

Global pattern 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 of resistance to it.

In 2006, US activist Tarana Burke coined the phrase "Me Too" to support survivors of sexual violence — especially young women of color. More than a decade later, the hashtag #MeToo erupted globally following multiple exposures of sexual abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein. Millions shared their experiences of sexual abuse online and demanded accountability of their perpetrators.

In 2022, Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, died in police custody after being arrested for allegedly violating Iran's strict hijab law.

Her death sparked the largest anti-regime protests in the Islamic Republic's history. Led by women, the movement adopted the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" — a phrase rooted in the Kurdish freedom movement.

Both Amini and the movement were awarded the 2023 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament.

Gendered disinformation online

While the Mirabal sisters lived in an era predating social media, they knew what it meant to be watched, threatened and punished for speaking out. So have generations of women and girls who 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 2025's Orange Days.

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is increasingly being weaponized to harass, silence and harm women. AI-generated deepfakes, cyberstalking, doxxing and online threats spill into real life — fueling fear and endangering lives.

Gender equality expert Lucina Di Meco has described gendered disinformation online as "the spread of deceptive or inaccurate information and images against women political leaders, journalists and female public figures" that draws on misogyny and societal stereotypes, "framing them as untrustworthy, unintelligent, emotional/angry/crazy or sexual."

Still relevant 65 years on

In the Philippines, journalist Maria Ressa faced sustained digital attacks via bots, fake accounts and hate campaigns for exposing corruption under then-President Rodrigo Duterte.

Her peer in Brazil, investigative journalist Patricia Campos Mello, was harassed online after covering Jair Bolsonaro's presidential campaign, receiving sexual slurs, rape threats and defamatory videos accusing her of being a prostitute.

More recently, in September 2025, the femicide of two young women and a teenage girl in Argentina was livestreamed through a private social media group to around 45 people, following a dispute with a drug gang. The video was reportedly intended as a "warning" against drug theft.

The incident caused global shock waves, highlighting how this and other examples — across borders and platforms — reflect the persistence of gender-based violence. Sixty-five years after the murder of the Mirabal sisters, November 25 continues to mark a global reckoning with this reality.

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier