Beyond Polarization: Organized Venezuelan Women Promote Their Minimum Agenda

...In the late 1970s, during the struggle to reform the Civil Code led by the Venezuelan Federation of Women Attorneys (FEVA), it incorporated the women who rallied to the Plaza el Venezolano on March 8, 1978...

...In all these missions, advocated and promoted by the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in his every speech, there are women in charge and women beneficiaries...

...Dozens of presidential precandidates were introduced after the opposition withdrew from the December 2005 parliamentary elections...

...Replacing Article 144 of the Suffrage and Political Participation Organic Act with one that ratifies equality and equity between the sexes, and establishes 50-50 quotas for women and men, alternating positions in electoral lists at all levels...

...Women know even less about the existence of a Social Services Act, passed in July 2005 and published in the Gaceta Oficial (comparable to the U.S...

...These Bolivarian women are in reality committed to the defense of Ch?vez, the most important leader of the process, and his administration...

...social security, as established in Article 88 of the 1999 Constitution...

...comedian Benjam?n Rausseo (also known by his stage name, El Conde del Gu?charo...

...The same happened in the presidential campaign: Any specific women?s claim was postponed for the sake of (Ch?vez?s) reelection or the leader?s replacement (by Rosales...

...3. Some of the pre-2006 analysis of women?s organizing in this piece is drawn from Gioconda Espina and Cathy Rakowski, ?Institucionalizaci?n de la lucha feminista/femenina en Venezuela: solidaridad y fragmentaci?n, oportunidades y desaf?os...

...Notes: 1. By chavistas I refer not only to those who have voted for Ch?vez and his supporters since 1998, but also to those who have actively supported what they call the Bolivarian and revolutionary process of the Fifth Republic, born when the 1999 National Constituent Assembly passed the new constitution of Venezuela...

...Thus, the 25% that voted elected congresswomen for the same reason they elected congressmen: because they were on the slate due to their unquestioned loyalty to Ch?vez and the process he fosters, and not because women candidates supported the minimum agenda of the Women?s Assembly, a network of civil society and state-based women?s rights advocates and organizations...

...are managed by different state ministries and currently include basic goods at low prices (Mercal...

...However, up to now the core group is still committed to act as one each time the country seems poised to believe that women have resigned themselves to forsake equality with men...

...in the poorest neighborhoods that provide three daily meals...

...In Venezuela, the vast majority cares only about the man in charge of public affairs, the president, although the higher abstention rates may have been due to the confusion created by most opposition groups that withdrew from the elections 48 hours before the campaign was officially closed...

...Following the impeachment referendum in 2004, the core group met at the Women?s Studies Center at the Central University of Venezuela...

...from the CNE or any other official or unofficial agency...

...completion of high school (Ribas...

...El Nacional, Caracas, August 28, 2006, A2...

...Article 144, its suspension and the replacement request have certainly received more publicity than the other legislation, because the issue of quotas is of particular sensitivity to female leaders of both sides, since their own political aspirations have been at stake since 2000...

...While the streets seethed with masses of people for or against Ch?vez, women from both sides remained ignorant about the Social Security Organic Act, passed in December 2002...

...It also proves that the old conviction that women are unsuitable for handling public affairs is not one held exclusively by men...

...On the side of Venezuelan men and women who support the president, now elected three times, the Bolivarian Women?s Force?a mass movement of women from the popular classes, organized through the National Institute of Women, the state women?s agency?is said to consist of 30,000 to 40,000 puntos de encuentro, or base-level ?meeting points...

...See also Bertha Taylor, ?Social Movement Continuity: The Women?s Movement in Abeyance...

...This core group of activists who have been participating on and off in Venezuelan political life since 1936 is not made of stone...

...Gioconda Espina is a longtime activist and the coordinator of the Women?s Studies Area, Economic and Social Sciences Faculty, Central University of Venezuela...

...At that time, it managed to introduce in the final text most of the demands that had accumulated since the UN?s International Women?s Year in 1975...

...The latter was approved by popular referendum on December 15, 1999...

...Questioning the reliability of the National Election Council (CNE), the opposition was certain its withdrawal would deal a lethal blow to the legitimacy of President Hugo Ch?vez?s party (the Fifth Republic Movement, MVR) and gradually isolate the president himself in the international arena...

...The goal is to carry out joint proposals and activities based on common agreement...

...would be defined as women who have spent more than 25 years as heads of their household, who are not included in any of the country?s 400 public and private social security systems, either as the main beneficiary or as the dependent of the beneficiary, and who are duly registered at the Institute for Social Services, at the new Ministry for Citizen Participation and Social Development...

...30 a?os de lucha ciudadana en Am?rica Latina (UNIFEM, Siglo XXI y Latin American Studies Association, 2006), 310?330...

...financing, promotion, distribution and management of different arts in popular culture (Cultura...

...and the newest mission that assigns a specific financial allowance to unemployed single mothers with three or more children (Madre de Barrio...

...The young woman who could not register was Belkis Ortiz...

...Creating a new penal code that would replace the current one dating back to the 19th century...

...Or that this article was suspended in 2000 by the male majorities of all parties, and that Mar?a Le?n, the president of the National Women?s Institute (now part of the Ministry of Popular Participation and Social Development), has asked that this article be replaced by one increasing the quota to 50% and that positions be held alternately by men and women...

...With all this?and despite the fact that three of the five CNE directors issued a statement suggesting that parties and electoral groups should submit a 50-50 party list alternating between male and female candidates?women from both sides did not achieve even 30% on the 2005 party lists...

...Thus, academic feminists continue to call and facilitate meetings attended by women?s NGOs and women working in different agencies and government levels, such as the judiciary and the National Assembly, who are responsible for women?s policies...

...and 20 unknowns supported by ad hoc electoral groups, a record six of whom were women...

...Moreover, in preparation for a national meeting organized to promote the writing and passing of the new law to deal with violence against women, the core group and experts on violence met at the University of Zulia?s Law School Institute...

...In Article 17, the act provides for homemakers...

...Creating a new Social Services Act that would enable the payment of monetary allowance to homemakers (based on the minimum wage...

...A longer version of this article will appear in Perfiles del feminismo latinoamericano, volumen 3, edited by Mar?a Luisa Femen?as, forthcoming from Cat?logos S.R.L., Buenos Aires...

...The suspension of these temporary protective orders by the Attorney General and the following decision in his favor by the Supreme Court was the impulse that organized women needed to propose a new law against domestic violence...

...Cuadernos del Cendes 49 (January?April 2002): 31?48...

...waiting for political opportunities to act...

...Second, Ch?vez announced on December 15 that he was about to create a single party of the revolution, to be named the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV), and that those who wanted to keep their own parties would lose their place in the government, a proposal that was taken up by the opposition...

...However, the great majority are not committed to what we Latin American and Caribbean feminists consider women?s ?minimum agenda??the demand for sexual and reproductive rights, including the voluntary interruption of pregnancy...

...At this time there are 21 missions administered by different executive ministries...

...The fact that women themselves did not oppose the old practice of supporting male leadership in creating the list that finally won on December 4 (in the case of government supporters) or the one that did not make it (in the case of the opposition)?and the fact that it was actually women who favored male rather than female candidates with equivalent merit (both in the creation of the final lists and in the process of voting for them)?shows that the subconscious will not be modified by a law, much less by a ?suggestion...

...In a joint meeting, female leaders who had reviewed how the lists were created declared that women themselves had either proposed male candidates for the leading positions and women as substitute candidates or proposed two men...

...The six unknown women candidates submitted either due to their personal initiatives or through equally anonymous electoral groups are Br?gida Garc?a, Carolina Contreras, Lourdes Santander, Venezuela Da Silva, Yudith Salazar and Isbelia Le?n...

...At Each End of the Spectrum...

...counts on the support of women themselves...

...The latter provided for temporary protective orders that allowed for distance to be put between the aggressor and his victims, orders that were suspended by the Attorney General of the republic three years ago, thereby disarming governmental entities and NGOs dedicated to providing services for abused women...

...Manuel Rosales, the governor of the state of Zulia...

...literacy (Robinson 1 and 2...

...parity and alternation between men and women in political representation...

...completion of university studies (Sucre...

...This elastic core of activists, whose most outstanding feature is that they can put aside political differences to advocate a specific women?s program, made a comeback during the writing of the 1999 Constitution...

...Without a doubt, the great majority of these chavistas belong to the nation?s most impoverished sectors...

...and social security for all women, including those who work in the large informal sector of the economy...

...This long-standing behavior of women has prompted quite a few feminists to advocate a return to Second Wave feminism?s consciousness-raising groups, so popular in the 1960s, given that the sabotage by men who benefit from maintaining women far from ?men?s business...

...Above all, they support the programs implemented by the Ch?vez administration, programs that directly benefit women, although the programs are not exclusively aimed at them, but at the entire population...

...Sometimes, new members remain as part of the core group and resurface in the next period of activism, although generally young women continue their professional careers or family lives?or both?once the critical situation is over, which is perfectly understandable...

...On the other hand, the creation of the PSUV may present an opportunity to build a powerful, unitary and autonomous national women?s organization that would orient itself directly to the macro parties and to any other institutions necessary to advance the minimum agenda...

...Now that Hugo Ch?vez Fr?as has won the presidential elections, two issues ought to immediately summon us women together: First, the approval of laws, but not the regulations that allow them to be applied, could function as a new alibi of national machismo, so we ought to insist that the authorities in charge of drafting the regulations (no longer the National Assembly) write them for the new domestic violence law, to see if the letter of the law can become social action...

...consisting of about five women each...

...Finally, it was a group of men in the leadership, and the top leader in the case of the chavista coalition, who decided which among several names would remain on the lists for each state...

...Of course, the core group?s organizing is very hard work, and today it brings together young women from new organizations that are somehow closer to President Ch?vez?s administration, and from groups that also belong to the oppositional Frente Nacional de Mujeres (Women?s National Front, including Mujeres Democr?ticas Unidas and Mujeres por la Libertad, among others...

...2. ?Corte final para el 3D: 23 aspirantes...

...However?and just as with women from the opposition, who returned from the streets to their apartments and offices after August 2004?it is unlikely that these women would agree with the urgency of decriminalizing the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, or the injustice of discriminating against nonheterosexual women seeking employment...

...And we understand this commitment, which is renewed periodically, to be a demonstration of what it has meant to live in a democracy that has suffered no interruptions since 1958...

...Before the opposition rallied behind a unified candidate, two other women were proposed: Cecilia Sosa, former president of the Supreme Court, and Rhona Ottolina, the daughter of a famous TV host and producer...

...The only year in which there were more candidates registered than in 2006 was 1988, with 24 candidates...

...This explains the triumph of machismo vis-?-vis the lucidity of feminist discourse and slogans on radio and TV...

...If, as it seems, there would be more difficulty in that case for women to make themselves heard by men from different political perspectives, then women who are outside the parties will encounter more obstacles when presenting their proposals than the women who are active in these macro parties...

...This methodology contrasts with the core group?s organizational structure in 1985 (the Coordinating Committee of Women?s NGOs), which made the decisions and afterward or simultaneously talked with femocrats (feminists with positions in the public sector or state bureaucracy...

...In 1985, while reviewing the status of women during the UN Decade on Women in preparation for the UN conference in Nairobi, Kenya, the same core group also incorporated women from other old and new organizations in what we called the Coordinadora de ONG de Mujeres (Coordinating Committee of Women?s NGOs, CONG...

...This does not mean, however, that some of those congresswomen?as well as some congressmen?could not be made sensitive to the program?s goals...

...Until only a little while ago, the core group included activists who went all the way back to 1936, such as Eumelia Hern?ndez, or 1958, such as Argelia Laya, Esperanza Vera, Adicea Castillo and Nora Casta?eda...

...in Natalie Lebon and Elizabeth Meier, De lo privado a lo p?blico...

...Nor do the majority of women know that recently, on November 25, 2006, the Organic Law on the Right for Women to a Life Free From Violence was passed, which replaces the Law on Violence Against Women and the Family...

...employment training (Vuelvan Caras...

...The question that the party women from both sides ought to ask themselves is: are there more possibilities of being heard in the majority-masculine directorate of a macro party than in the directorates of their current small parties...

...Rather, its flexibility accounts for its ability to incorporate women of successive generations as the need arises...

...US$173 a month at the official exchange rate...

...The new code should include two provisions: one on decriminalizing abortion (which would be a crime only if performed without a woman?s consent or without safe medical and hospital conditions) and one on sexual crimes (which would ratify the International Criminal Court?s definition of such crimes as crimes against humanity, as set forth in the Rome Statute...

...health and dental care provided directly in the neighborhoods by Cuban physicians and dentists (Barrio Adentro 1, 2 and 3...

...4. Gioconda Espina and Cathy Rakowski, ??Movimiento de mujeres o mujeres en movimiento...

...The Elastic Core Certainly there are women in Venezuela who form what Cathy Rakowski and I have called a ?core group.?4 This is a small group of activists that at crucial times is part of larger mobilizations, and in between those times is ?in abeyance...

...food houses...

...American Sociological Review, 54 (1989): 761?775...

...These programs, called ?missions...

...Federal Register) the following September, which in Article 41 ratifies a financial allowance valued at 60% to 80% of the current minimum urban wage to homemakers ?in need...

...Following a proposal the Women?s Assembly submitted to the National Assembly?s Family, Women, and Youth Committee, ?homemakers...

...Except for the two years of extreme political confrontation between 2002 and 2004, the core group has succeeded in working together, supporting and sustaining five specific actions: * The writing of the regulations that would allow for the application of the recent Law on the Right of Women to a Life Free From Violence...

...After the deadline for final registration, the CNE list totaled 23 candidates: Ch?vez, who on December 3, 2006, became the first immediately reelected president in the republican history of Venezuela (with 62.89% of the votes...

...Not all of them share the five demands on which the general work is based in the midst of this political hurricane?there is no consensus on abortion, for instance...

...Or that they know about the human papilloma virus rampant among younger women, or that AIDS is not only a homosexual issue and that their partners and comrades may have infected them with HPV or HIV without either of them knowing it...

...respect for all sexual orientations...

...collective violence is a lot more subdued than during the days following the April 2002 coup d?etat?especially the period of the December 2002?February 2003 oil and business strike, and the days before and after the presidential impeachment referendum on August 15, 2004...

...operation on cataracts and other eyesight problems in Cuba, a benefit also extended to other countries in the region (Milagro...

...El caso Venezuela...

...Nor do women know about the Suffrage and Political Participation Organic Act, which in Article 144 establishes that 30% of parliamentary candidates should be women...

...On December 4, 2005, the day of the parliamentary elections, abstention rates reached 75.5%, a little over the traditional abstention rate in Venezuela for any nonpresidential election...

...This is why the women of the parties that governed from 1958 to 1998 (always referred to by the president as the Fourth Republic) should be called upon, their proposals heard and they themselves positioned at the same level of those in the current Fifth Republic: because they have all, since 1958, openly condemned the male majorities in their own parties who have ignored women?s specific demands...

...opposition to any use and abuse of images of girls and women in advertising...

...It is one thing to state that you are in favor of a 50-50 slate in front of a TV camera, and a very different thing to impose this claim at electoral campaign headquarters, where the least that the majority is going to think or say is that it is a typical hysterical or vested claim...

...Complying with the laws that prohibit the use and abuse of stereotyped images of women in all kinds of advertising...