As a child, I saw on TV that a woman had won Chile’s presidency. It was the first time I remember realising that a woman could occupy such a position. I immediately ran to tell my dad the big news. His response was simple: “It is time for women.”
That memory stayed with me for more than two decades. It resurfaced recently when I found myself standing at the United Nations in front of the same woman who had once inspired me — and who now has the potential to become the next Secretary-General of the United Nations: Chile’s former President, Michelle Bachelet.
But this moment is much bigger than Bachelet.
In its 80-year history, the United Nations has had nine Secretaries-General. Every single one of them has been a man. Now, as the organisation prepares to choose António Guterres’s successor, five women from Latin America and the Caribbean are among the candidates: Bachelet, from Chile; Rebeca Grynspan, from Costa Rica; María Fernanda Espinosa and Ivonne A-Baki, from Ecuador; and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, from Guyana. For the first time, the possibility that a woman (especially one from my region) could occupy the UN’s highest office feels tangible.
This is a particularly significant moment for women who grew up in Latin America. We come from a region where the fight for gender equality is far from over. In 2024 alone, at least 3,828 women were victims of femicide, feminicide or gender-related killings across Latin America and the Caribbean — at least 11 women every day. Across the region, women continue to confront gender violence, political harassment and deeply rooted cultural barriers to equality. These realities cannot and should not be minimised.
But they are also not the only stories about Latin American women worth telling.
Too often, when women from our region enter any international conversation, we are seen through the lens of what happens to us: violence, migration, poverty, inequality and vulnerability. Those stories are real, and as a journalist who has covered human rights and social justice in Latin America, I believe deeply in telling them. But they are not the whole story. Latin American and Caribbean women are also presidents, diplomats, ambassadors, activists, negotiators and political leaders. We are not only affected by political decisions; we make them. And today, women from our region are competing to occupy one of the most consequential positions in global diplomacy.
That visibility matters precisely because women remain significantly underrepresented in those spaces. In 1945, only four of the 850 delegates who signed the UN Charter were women. Nearly eight decades later, women represented just 21 per cent of ambassadors worldwide in 2024. Research on Latin American diplomatic services has also found that the presence of women ambassadors increased only marginally over the first two decades of this century. The gap between the women we know are capable of leading and the women who actually reach the highest levels of diplomatic power remains substantial.
My point isn’t that a woman should lead the United Nations simply because she is a woman, nor that women are inherently more capable, peaceful or empathetic leaders than men. The women currently competing for the position have spent decades building careers in government, diplomacy, human rights and international affairs. Their gender is not their qualification. But after eight decades of exclusively male leadership, the possibility of a qualified woman occupying the UN’s highest office feels overdue.
And the fact that this possibility is emerging from Latin America and the Caribbean matters, too. Colonial histories, profound inequality, economic dependency, migration and unequal relationships with global powers have shaped our societies. No single “Latin American female experience” exists, and being a woman from the Global South does not automatically produce a particular politics or make someone a better leader. But the experiences from which people encounter the international system matter. An institution created to represent a world of different realities benefits when the people occupying its most powerful positions do not all come from the same traditional centres of power.
Representation, of course, is not transformation. One of the most interesting things I found while thinking about this moment was research on diplomatic appointments across ten Latin American countries between 2000 and 2018. Women’s representation among ambassadors increased only marginally overall. But under certain conditions, women presidents who actively prioritised gender parity could partially narrow that gap through their appointments. The lesson is not that putting a woman in power automatically produces equality. It is almost the opposite: representation matters most when it creates opportunities for other women and is translated into institutional change.
That distinction feels particularly important at the United Nations today. The organisation faces a profound crisis of credibility, alongside financial pressures, geopolitical divisions, and multiple conflicts that have exposed the limits of multilateralism. Electing a woman will not make those problems disappear. Neither will electing someone from Latin America or the Caribbean. Many of the UN’s deepest problems are structural and cannot be solved by changing the gender or nationality of the person sitting at the top.
But acknowledging the limits of representation does not make representation meaningless. For those of us from places that have historically had less power in the international system, seeing someone from our region at the table — and particularly at the head of it — carries meaning. It challenges the idea that Latin American women belong in global affairs primarily as the subjects of conversations about inequality, violence or development rather than as the people making decisions about them.
I understood a simpler version of that as a girl watching Bachelet on television. Seeing her did not change the inequalities around me. But it changed what I understood a woman could become. More than two decades later, after building my own career as a Latin American journalist and having had the opportunity to support the UN system from the communications side, I understand both the possibilities and the limitations of that representation differently.
A Latin American or Caribbean woman becoming Secretary-General would not mean that women in our region have achieved equality. It would happen while women across our countries are still fighting for their lives, their rights, their political voices and their place in spaces of power. Perhaps that is precisely why the moment matters.
Women do not need to prove they can save the United Nations to deserve the opportunity to lead it. And Latin American women should not have to be defined only by the struggles we face for the world to recognise the power we already exercise.
More than two decades later, I still find myself thinking about my father’s words. Only now does their meaning feel bigger. A woman from Latin America or the Caribbean could soon occupy a position no woman has held before in the United Nations’ 80-year history.
It is time for women.