With a historic vote this month allowing gay couples to marry and adopt children, Argentina joined a vanguard of nations — nine, to be precise — granting gays and lesbians these rights. It’s a stunning development on a continent where not long ago such a bold measure would have been unthinkable.

Only the legalization of abortion anywhere in Latin America would be more momentous.

Incredibly, in this day and age, abortion is legal in only one nation in Latin America, Cuba. Five countries — Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic — ban it under all circumstances, even when the mother’s life is in danger. A law making abortion legal in Mexico City is under attack by the Roman Catholic Church. But abortion is not the only women’s rights issue in Latin America. Although many governments in the region describe themselves as progressive, the daily lives of millions of women in Latin America remain mired in poverty, male dominance and discrimination because of lax enforcement of social reforms and legal measures.

Still, Argentina’s vote to allow same-sex weddings is nothing short of a social revolution, a possible sign that perhaps the campaign for women’s rights cannot be too far behind.

Argentina’s recent turbulent past and brutal oppression and persecution of gays and lesbians hardly foreshadowed the Patagonian nation’s new global status as a champion for them. Decades ago during the “dirty war,” a state-sponsored campaign of terror against leftists after the coup of March 1976, gay bars in Buenos Aires were closed, and more than a thousand gay men were persecuted, arrested, kidnapped, tortured and killed. The stories of the hundreds of thousands of “disappeared” — gays and straights — haunt the country even today.