Latin America Feminism: Gains, Losses and Hard Times
Barrig, Maruja
To underscore that "sensitivity to gender" was not acceptable if it came from an authoritarian regime, women coined the slogan: "What is not good for democracy is not good for women." Peruvian...
...That presented us with an ambivalent panorama: On the one hand, with respect to rights granted from above, female citizenship formally expanded, especially in political terms...
...They generate tensions at the heart of neoliberal policies and they do not appear to improve the conditions of women in the structures of production and politics...
...But this expansion had no relation to the widening of women's economic rights, much less the widening of democratic processes, but rather coincided with their further reduction...
...Latin American feminism evolved with an acute social awareness, and two decades ago, it illuminated private life as a redoubt of multiple injustices for women...
...3 ples of legal equality The advances of women in the legal field may have an economic model resulted in a shift in the arena of struggle, from centration of wealth demonstrations and other pressure in the streets in the find that minimum 1980s to negotiations in parliament and government of women's rights...
...This article collects and updates some of the ideas from her essay, "De Como Llegar a un Puerto con el Mapa Equivocado," the introduction to the book, Las Apuestas Inconclusas: El Movimiento de Mujeres y a IV Conferencia Mundial, (Flora Tristan Center and UNIFEM, 2000...
...One of them is the way they have treated the female population as "a vulnerable group" in their programs...
...The unofficial story behind the mobilization of women's groups in each country unmasked struggles over leadership and rs e If t revealed inexperience and mistrust in dealing with public institutions that only yesterday had been part of a repressive state that refused to dialogue...
...In Peru, close to 50% of the population is classified as poor...
...As Peruvian fem "The actors of modernization hav as the actors of democratization...
...Lke the institutional ernment's policy towards women was developed in an state shaky, civil an authoritarian and anti-democratic framework, and ticipation largely a for that reason, women have gone out into the streets )nditions, first put in to protest...
...Dismissing former intelligence service agent Leonor La Rosa's accusation that she had been tortured under MonVol X)(XIV, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 20012g 8 0 B Vol XXXIV, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 2001 29REPORT ON GENDER tesinos' orders, one prominent congresswoman allied with Fujimori, Martha Chavez, asserted that the woman "had tortured herself...
...This United active participation Nations accord was the central inspiration behind the protests against the designing of national measures to prevent and punish ent Abdala Bucaram violence against women...
...These policy innovations and the contradictions they revealed stoked a debate in Peru-which was more impassioned than elsewhere in Latin America-between feminists who responded to the invi- In recent yea tation to enter government and those who rejected it...
...That process was not always light-hearted and harmonious, as some Latin American feminists remember it...
...1 1 Restrictions on reproductive rights also persist and indeed grow more stringent in some countries...
...In Bolivia, there are 390 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births...
...Sonia Montaio, "El dicho y el hecho...
...he asked in a November column in Liberaci6n...
...he 1990s have come A landmark achievement in the struggle for legal modernization of the equality was the Convention on the Elimination of All fit together with the Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW), and the creation gains for women of its committee, which successfully urged country Institution, for exam- after country in the region to sign on...
...But at the same time, acutely aware of the wide gulf between the rich and poor, these feminists demanded urgent action to improve the miserable living conditions of millions of women in their countries...
...All of these represent steps forward, the fruit of pressure from women's groups, encouragement from international aid agencies, and the hard work of the policymakers who were exposed for so many years to the resounding voices of feminists...
...What has occurred in Peru over the past decade is unique in some respects, but it may also serve as a small laboratory in which many of the debates that have shaken Latin American feminism-and their resolutions-can be put under the microscope...
...9. Author's interview, November 2000...
...The inscribed in Ecuador's 1998 Con ple, cannot be separated from the of the women's movement in the short-lived government of Preside (1996-97), which made that mov reckoned with for an array of po Congress...
...with the Ministry of Education and Culture (in Trinidad and Tobago and Uruguay...
...In Bolivia, the Subsecretary of Women's Affairs disappeared in 1997 with the Banzer Administration and became an Office of Women's Affairs...
...These small institutional tremors in the national offices of women suggest the vulnerability to seismic catastrophes gutting the rule of law and a calcifying of authoritarianism in many countries...
...In many countries, the phrase "and of the family" has been added to the title of the national offices of women...
...This descent in the hierarchy transformed the agency from a policymaking body into a technical entity...
...The connection between the struggles for legal and economic rights grew more tenuous, just as the gap widened between both of those battles and the rapid transformations of Latin American states...
...That state of affairs does not encourage faith in dialogue with government, much less in the sustainability of the advances for women...
...You can find feminists in cement a force to be every Latin American country who point to the paslitical parties in the sage of legislation punishing violence against women y's new Constitution as their most prized achievement...
...Continuing poverty among indigenous, shantytown and peasant women presents a daunting challenge...
...eginning in 1993, feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean worked tirelessly to bring together scattered groups of women across the region and to create spaces where women could debate and articulate their dreams prior to the 1995 Beijing Global Conference on Women...
...Several national offices of women appear to duplicate the work of feminist collectives and NGOs...
...Compromisos legislativos sobre salud y derechos sexuales y reproductivos: Una revision de los cinco anlos de las conferencias de Cairo y Beijing en America Latina y el Caribe," document prepared for the Eighth Regional Conference on Latin American and Caribbean Women (Lima), February 2000...
...Peruvian women appear to have made genuine strides during Alberto Fujimori's ten years in power...
...In the Peruvian model of modernization without democracy, the Fujimori regime has done more than any of its predecessors to create women's institutions, to pass laws recognizing their rights as citizens, and to put women in prominent positions of power, even if they were authoritarian women who were unconditionally loyal to the president...
...But in either battleground, feminists are adamant that what they obtained "was ns in legal rights for not a gift of benevolent presidents," as one put it...
...Representatives of women's groups from around the world at the opening of the NGO Forum on Women in Huairou, China, in 1995...
...Those achievements were disconcerting...
...On the one hand, Latin American feminists threw themselves into the struggle for new institutional and legal frameworks that would put women's rights on the same footing as universal human rights, which until recently were seen as implicitly male prerogatives...
...8 "What has happened," Vargas asserted, "is that the Fujimori policy towards women has produced what I would call a civic schizophrenia...
...But as the Bolivian feminist Sonia Montano asserted, women's policies in Latin America have been "low intensity...
...The unstable political situation in parts of South America is coupled r the possible, a ism has become strategies of ng by the rules by others...
...The majority of Latin American countries gave women the right to vote in the 1950s, but that did not translate into a presence in public policy...
...2 Latin American feminists and feminist discourse thus carved out a place in the processes of democratization and state modernization, with feminists seeking to become part of a state that they had earlier wanted to transform...
...Botched abortions are the primary cause of maternal death in Chile and the second most common cause of maternal death in Paraguay and Peru...
...Between the sporadic victories, the boiling oil of conservative reaction is bubbling up...
...In the largely rural Andean provinces of Peru, the incidence of maternal deaths is similar to Potosi's...
...3. Author's interview with Virginia Vargas, November 2000...
...Feminists fought for the establishment of quotas for women in each party's list of candidates, winning such a law in 1991 in Argentina (30% of the candidates had to be women), and in 1996 and 1997 in the following countries: Bolivia (30%), Brazil (20%, and increasing to 30% in 2000), Costa Rica (40%), Ecuador (20%), Guyana (30%), Mexico (30%), Panama (30%), Paraguay Chilean feminists celebrating International Women's Day 2000...
...It is important, however, to add that the feminist movement does not appear to have clear proposals, much less defined strategies, for dealing with these state apparatuses...
...The Peruvian Congress passed a law against domestic violence and a quota law that obliged political parties to present women candidates in at least 30% of the races for Maruja Barrig is a feminist journalist and researcher from Peru...
...In Peru, according to the 1993 National Census, the figure was 43%.10 The health statistics are no less alarming...
...6. Teresina Muhioz-Najar, "Las mujeres del Fujimorismo," CARETAS, August 17, 2000, http://www.caretas.com.pe/2000/1632/articulos/mujeres.phtml 7. Alesssandra Bocchetti, "Per se/per me," Sottosopra (Milan), June 1987...
...As the French academic Frangoise Collin commented in an article: "Don't grow old in the barricades or you'll grow old badly...
...After Haiti, Bolivia and Peru have the highest rates of maternal In the search fo deaths in Latin America, reflecting the general living subtle pragmat conditions, the quality and coverage of health services and lodged in the public investment in preventive feminists playi health care...
...An optimistic assessment would suggest these five years since the slight earthquake of Beijing to be only steps toward a reconfiguration of forces that will recover the enthusiasm and utopias of the past while creating perspectives and strategies that are in keeping with the difficult challenges of today: the need to deepen democracy and attain economic justice in our countries...
...5. "Participaci6n, liderazgo y equidad de g4nero en America Latina y el Caribe," CEPAL Working Document, Santiago, 1999...
...Some four million women in the region confront this risk each year...
...The convulsive political situations in Bolivia, Ecuador, au .an . Uom a, coup ie with the continuing lack of stable legal systems in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, ma foundations of the Latin America rights precarious and social par myth...
...Those efforts produced the national documents of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and led to the parallel sessions that took place alongside the official gathering of the United Nations in Beijing...
...Female followers of Fujimori were given important positions in his government and were visible in the national parliament...
...Confusing things further, the women politicians in Fujimori's administration were distinct from the men recruited by the regime: They were more hawkish, less tolerant and, above all, more loyal to the president and to his shadowy advisor Vladimiro Montesinos...
...In recent years, the fabric that originally united all feminists has at times been ripped as feminists developed the specialized skills and strategies needed to pursue one or the other set of demands...
...In the years since the burst of jubilation that was Beijing, the feminist movement in Latin America has splintered into fragments, and other hands appear to have , tension has picked up the pieces...
...Latin American feminism of the 1970s and 1980s put forward two sets of demands: equal rights for women and economic redistribution...
...Chilean feminists have arrived at a similar conclusion, maintaining relations with the state's ministry for women's affairs, SERNAM, that are more technical than political...
...Another group of feminists, the Broad Movement of Women, protested every Thursday in front of the Palace of Justice, while Women for Dignity washed soldiers' uniforms in front of the Joint Command of the Armed Forces...
...Dozens of other women's groups both in the capital and in the provinces washed the Peruvian flag to symbolize the urgent need for moral cleansing...
...Thus, in their report for Beijing+5 presented in a forum of NGOs in Lima in February 2000, the Ecuadorans called attention to how their country's women's movement today gives priority to lobbying and negotiation over mobilization and denunciation...
...Instability is a constant in our countries where not only policies, but also the structures of the state can change from one government to the next...
...4. "Avances de las mujeres en Bolivia a partir de los compromisos asumidos en la IV Conferencia Mundial de la Mujer," document published by the Committee of NGOs' Following Beijing, La Paz, January 2000...
...While the new millennium has excited some women with its promises, it has passed over thousands of others, relegating them to dailylife conditions typical of the end of the nineteenth century...
...In countries such as Chile and more recently El Salvador, abortion is not permitted even to save the life of the mother...
...It is part of the old and unresolved problem of exclusion, but nowadays these problems run freely in the face of silent or nonexistent public action to address them...
...Latin American Feminism 1. Author's interview with Virginia Vargas, November 2000...
...Another drawback has been their limited access to the real centers of power where policies are formulated, even when they have ministerial rank...
...The literacy rate among the female indigenous population, as a group, is the lowest in Latin America...
...Fondo de poblaci6n de las Naciones Unidas (FNUAP), 1999...
...The sign at right reads: "I am the perfect woman: I clean, iron, cook and play the orchestra...
...Alongside this, the regime adopted manipulative and clientelistic policies towards poor women...
...A Ministry of Women and a Public Defender for Women (an adjunct to the Public Defender for the People) were created...
...Thus in the Andean region, celebrated victories such as the creation of government institutions to serve women and quota laws to increase their political participation have become NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30REPORT ON GENDER frayed at the edges by the persistent reality of inequality among women...
...In the 1990s, for example, 70% of the Bolivian population was considered poor, climbing to 95% in rural areas...
...The situation in rural areas is even more troubling...
...Virginia emerged b Vargas of the Flora Tristan Cen- achievement o ter, one of those who kept their distance, asserted: "For femi- and the persis nism, the boundary between ethics and negotiations is inequality of marked by respect for democratic values...
...Avances de las mujeres en Bolivia a partir de los compromisos asumidos en la IV Conferencia Mundial de la Mujer," document published by the Committee of NGOs Following Beijing (La Paz), January 2000...
...It is not responsible for the quality of the women who attain power...
...9 11 of the aforementioned gains for women can obscure the pile of small victories in eliminating or correcting certain laws in the quest for equality as well as in the multitude of helpful government programs mainly in the area of women's health...
...with precarious social conditions across the region that call into question the legitimacy of states that have been unable to respond to the basic needs of their people and have postponed the promise of democracy for decades...
...For instance, in 1997, Salvadoran lawmakers eliminated the four legal options for abortion from the country's penal code after intensive mobilizations by pro-life groups...
...Women for Democracy (MUDE), a small group of feminists allied with human rights activists, leaders of grassroots organizations, housewives, political party militants and students, denounced these government measures that seemed to fulfill feminist objectives...
...As the Italian activist Alessandra Bocchetti once reminded us, "A body of a woman does not guarantee the thinking of a woman, and nor can many women together guarantee it...
...How do we, given these cc place and then maintain the princij for women...
...To cite one example, the budget of the former Subsecretary of Women's Affairs in Bolivia depended on international funds for 92% of its budget in 1995, 98% in 1996, 97% in 1997, and 90% in 1998.4 This scarcity of economic resources at their disposal sharply contrasts with the broad mandates that these offices have...
...8. Letters to the editor, Liberaci6n (Lima), November 22, 2000...
...In Potosf, Bolivia, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 can reach 600...
...The author thanks both institutions for granting permission to reprint excerpts...
...Asked at the start of Fujimori's aborted third term in office about the authoritarianism of the four women from the president's party who headed the Governing Council of Congress, feminist Ana Maria Yafiez of the Peruvian NGO Manuela Ramos declared, "I prefer four authoritarian women to four authoritarian men...
...inist Vargas asserts: A second important advance has been the creation 'e not been the same throughout the region of national offices of women...
...Cumplimiento de los acuerdos en Bolivia" in Las Apuestas Inconclusas: El movimiento de mujeres y la IV Conferencia Mundial de la Mujer (Lima: UNIFEM and Flora Tristan Publications, 2000...
...The third visible sign of the progress of women has been the growing participation of women in legislatures and local governments, traditionally male bastions, thanks to the passage of affirmative action measures...
...These political changes produced a pernicious acceptance of the limits of government, its restricted regulatory role and the sovereignty of the market...
...The total percentage of maternal deaths caused by unsafe abortions is higher in Latin America and the Caribbean than any other region of the world...
...By contrast, Peru country where modernization has democratization...
...And how do we, in characterized by a growing conc and little sharing of benefits, threshold required for the exercise For some researchers, the gai Latin American women in t hand-in-hand with the m state, and in some countries, have struggle for democracy...
...7 The presence of these arrogant and powerful Congresswomen who were loyal to Fujimori prompted the opposition journalist C6sar Hildebrant to demand an explanation from Peruvian feminists...
...In the post-Beijing era, one outside observer characterized the implementation of the Beijing conference's "Platform of Action" in Colombia as an undynamic process that reflected the differences between the groups and conflicts among the leadership within the women's movement...
...Those conditions, they knew, swelled the number of maternal deaths, illiterate women, women eking out a living in the informal sector and single mothers...
...When Andr6s Pastrana became president of Colombia in 1999, the Office for the Equality of Women in Colombia was turned into a Presidential Advisory Board for Youth, Women and the Family, losing its former potential...
...T e situation that I have described in this article is not new, nor does it come blown in by the winds from the North...
...Didn't these quotas and gender obligations allow the infiltration of the contraband of believing themselves above the law and the owners of a special statute...
...And in Chile, conservative forces stymied passage of a divorce law and kept in the civil code the statutory definition of the husband as the "head" of the family...
...To which Yafiez replied: "The mechanism of quotas is only a means to promote the entry of women into power...
...6 That remark ignited a heated debate, including among women...
...local and Congressional office...
...She is a founder of the Women for Democracy collective...
...Other organizations followed in MUDE's footsteps...
...In the search for the possible, a subtle pragmatism appears to have become lodged in the strategies of feminists playing by the rules proposed by others...
...In the years since Beijing, tension has emerged between the advances of women in achieving legal equality and the persistent social and economic inequality in our countries...
...Translated from the Spanish by Deidre McFadyen...
...As several studies of regional feminism in tween the the post-Beijing era suggest, not legal equality only has feminist militancy redefined itself in ways that opened ent economic the floodgates for diverse and sometimes irreconcilable strate- iur countries...
...In fact, in his third, brief administration, the Governing Council of Congress was composed entirely of women loyal to the President...
...In Peru, there are 265 such deaths per 100,000 births...
...These were internal cracks in the institutional structures created for women, but were also external shocks...
...There are, however, numerous problems with these government institutions for women...
...Lastly, their budgets are usually small, meaning that these offices rely on international aid...
...2. FranCoise Collin, "Una Herencia sin Testamento," in Feminismos Fin de Siglo, special edition of Fempress (Santiago), December 1999...
...To underscore that these policies were not acceptable if they came from an authoritarian and anti-democratic regime, they coined the slogan: "What is not good for democracy is not good for women...
...Why was the worst of the Fujimori Congress and the most glaring moral wretchedness female...
...As a result, the countr prohibits violence against womei psychological and/or sexual), bai the basis of sexual orientation, a to make free and responsible de sexual life...
...ministries in the 1990s...
...gies, but also the linguistic codes-those countersigns that we activists used to identify ourselves-have been picked up by officialdom and endowed with new meanings, almost with the consent of feminists...
...A law of this sort is n (whether physical, the product of multiple forces rallying together-from rs discrimination on the Catholic Church to international agencies, legislaad asserts "the right tors, public functionaries, First Ladies and even the cisions about one's National Police (as in Nicaragua)--and the surroundis an example of a ing paraphernalia of slogans, publicity spots, research been divorced from and government commissions...
...The 1992 national census in Bolivia found that 50% of rural women could not read...
...And as some critics complain, there have been changes in some sectors of the women's movement in the region that have stressed technical issues and have changed its behavior...
...How was it possible that an authoritarian regime, which steadily chipped away at democratic rights, could seem to have such extraordinary "sensitivity to gender...
...Women are underrepresented in local government and in national parliaments, representing until recently in the latter about 10% of the office holders...
...20%), Peru (30%), the Dominican Republic (25%), and Venezuela (30%).5 For feminists, affirmative action corrected an injustice against women...
...This is one of the most dramatic representations proposed of social injustice and the inequality among women, as a report of the United Nations Population Fund asserts...
...or integrated with other population groups or sectors (such as the Ministry of Youth, Women, Children and the Family in Panama...
...The Fujimori gov- These have taken different forms within each government: as an extension of the Ministry of Work and Social Welfare linked to the wide field of "culture" (in Guatemala, Guyana and Jamaica...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 5
