[DEBATE] : The Gender Agenda of the Pink Tide in Latin America

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=20&ItemID=13958>
The Gender Agenda of the Pink Tide in Latin America
by Sujatha Fernandes
	
October 04, 2007

With the election of leftist leaders in many parts of Latin America,
the subject of women seems to be coming up more frequently in public
discourse. Hugo Chávez speaks about Venezuelan women as "revolutionary
mothers," Evo Morales presents Bolivian women as combatants and
fighters, and Michelle Bachelet committed herself to addressing gender
equality in Chile. Women are in the public spotlight and active as
never before with the ascent of moderate to leftist leaders across the
region. Yet what is the impact of this increased visibility on the
lives and opportunities of women from diverse class and racial
backgrounds? How do the more left wing and radical leaders differ from
moderate leaders of the pink tide in their approach to issues of
women's rights?

The relationship of women to revolutionary movements is quite
different today to what it was in the post-revolutionary contexts of
Cuba in the 1960s and Nicaragua in the 1980s. In those earlier
contexts, political leaders created state women's agencies in order to
promote women's interests and rights within a broader project of
state-building. Women of all classes participated in organizations
such as the Federation of Cuban Women and the Luisa Amanda Espinoza
Association of Nicaraguan Women. These organizations provided
important scope for addressing gender inequalities, but women's
interests were often secondary to greater political goals of national
unity and development.

By contrast, we find that under left wing governments in Latin America
today, women are not organized en masse within state women's
organizations. Since in office, Lula Inacio da Silva in Brazil has
created the Special Secretariat on Policy for Women, but this is a
consulting body and not a mass-based organization. Evo Morales argued
against segregating women's interests by forming separate
organizations for women in Bolivia and instead created the
Vice-Ministry on Gender and Generations within the Justice Ministry.
The Chávez administration created a new National Institute for Women,
known as INAMujer, which was established by presidential decree in
2000. INAMujer works together with barrio women, but this organization
does not have a mass membership like its counterparts in
post-revolutionary Cuba and Nicaragua. INAMujer presides over such
women's groupings as the Bolivarian Forces (Fuerzas Bolivarianas) and
the Meeting Points (Puntos de Encuentro), but to date neither of these
organizations have succeeded in incorporating women to a significant
degree. Nor have women formed autonomous women's movements like Women
for Dignity and Life (Mujeres por la Dignidad y la Vida) in the
revolutionary context of El Salvador or the Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo in Argentina. Some groups like the radical Women Creating
(Mujeres Creando) in Bolivia do exist but their message has not
succeeded in appealing to broader women.

Perhaps some of these differences between earlier revolutionary
movements and the pink tide can be traced to the rise of the feminist
movement in Latin America, that grew substantially during the 1980s
and 1990s due to transnational organizing, conferences, and
networking. It has been less easy to incorporate women into mass
organizations, because many feminists want to maintain their own
identity and protect the achievements of their movement from the
tutelage of male populist leaders. In some cases, organized feminists
have acted as lobby groups to make their voices heard by new left
leaders. In Venezuela, women organized to elect women-friendly
candidates to the new Constituent Assembly that Chávez convened in
1999 and they lobbied to include articles pertaining to sexual and
reproductive rights in the drafting of the new Constitution, approved
by referendum in 1999. But at the same time, organized feminists
working within the state are predominantly middle class, professional
women with few connections to popular women. The shift in Latin
American feminism from a mass-based, often socialist-oriented movement
to small, professional cores of women can be partly traced to the
involvement of international foundations and NGOs, particularly around
the time of the Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) in Beijing in
1995. International bodies and events, while providing the catalyst
for new perspectives on gender and feminism, introduced an advocacy
logic that began to dominate emerging feminisms and distracted women
from doing broader activist work. International development agencies
promoted the turn to "gender sensitivity" and "training in gender
perspectives," which saw gender awareness as a skill that needed to be
taught by professionals, rather than in movements of consciousness
raising.

Rather than allying themselves with middle class feminists, or joining
state women's organizations, poor, indigenous, and urban barrio women
work alongside men in the context of local community organizations,
many of which have long histories. In Bolivia, mining women
historically played an important role in movements against the
military state in the 1970s. Popular and indigenous women are
organized within the Bartolina Sisa Federation of Peasant Women, and
local committees and councils that were formed during the movements
against water and gas privatization. Cocaleras (women coca growers)
have organized in unions to defend their right to produce. In Brazil,
women organized in black women's coalitions and they have been
important protagonists in the landless laborer's movement (MST). One
of the slogans of the MST is, "Constructing new relations of gender,
Defying relations of power." In Venezuela, during the guerrilla
movements of the 1960s, the struggles against urban remodeling in the
1970s, and hunger strikes in the 1980s, urban barrio women engaged in
organic forms of community activism jointly with the men in the
barrio. Barrio women draw on these long established community networks
as they participate in Chávez's social programs like soup kitchens and
literacy missions. Indigenous women in Venezuela in areas such as
Zulia have also been involved in long-term struggles for the defense
of their livelihood and natural resources, that have continued under
Chávez.

Yet while poor and indigenous women tend to work in local spaces and
engage in struggles outside of the state, many still strongly identify
with government-directed programs and leaders such as Chávez and
Morales. Poor women activists feel a sense of importance as a result
of these leaders' emphasis on the protagonism of the popular classes
as a motor force for change in society. The presence of black and
mestiza women on billboards describing the missions in Venezuela is a
radical departure from standard commercial advertisements, such as the
ads for Polar beer dotting the city landscape, that present highly
sexualized portraits of women in skimpy bikinis, with European
features and long flowing blond hair. Chávez and Morales speak
endearingly to women, referring to them in affectionate and familial
terms. In interviews in Venezuela, I frequently heard barrio women
credit Chávez for their involvement in politics. But at the same time,
they would often criticize or disagree with him, arguing with him on
the television or even in some cases trying to approach him at public
events to convey their complaints.

The experiences have been different on the more moderate end of the
pink tide spectrum. Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Michelle Bachelet
in Chile both came to power as part of coalition governments that
included conservative factions, and more importantly, close
relationships with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. While during
earlier periods, Ortega's Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)
and Bachelet's Socialist Party were strong antagonists of the Catholic
church, in the 1990s, under conditions of "reconciliation," these
parties began to repair their ties with the Church establishment. The
effect on women's rights, particularly reproductive rights, has been
negative. Just before the November 2006 elections in Nicaragua, Ortega
and his wife Rosario Murillo came out in support of banning
therapeutic abortion, thereby removing the last option for women who
want to terminate pregnancies that put their health at risk.

Likewise, more than a decade of rule by the center-left Concertación
government in Chile has also led to a conservative approach to issues
of sexual and reproductive rights. Bachelet has been beholden to some
of these same policies, but at the same time, she has spoken openly
about gender equality. She may be more constrained in her
possibilities for action than other leaders such as Chávez and
Morales, but she has also been forceful about opening up a debate
about women's rights.

The presence of Bachelet as one of the sole women leaders in the pink
tide, and in the  Americas more generally, raises the thorny question
of women's leadership. On a wall in the Bolivian city of La Paz, there
is graffiti that reads, "There will be no Eva out of Evo's rib."
However, it is not only an issue of women in high ranking positions,
but their role in the everyday community-based organizations,
indigenous movements, and union movements. While women are often
central participants in these movements, they have not always taken up
leadership roles. During my work in Venezuela, I observed that while
women were the majority of those active in the health committee or
soup kitchens, leadership was often still in the hands of one or two
male members of the community. This is changing, and as issues of
gender equality and leadership are being raised in assembly meetings,
committee collectives and communal councils, women are assuming
greater levels of leadership. But along with this leadership there
needs to be a change in the gender division of labor, so that women do
not end up bearing the triple burden of housework, wage work, and
activism.

Sujatha Fernandes: sujathaf at yahoo.com

-- 
Yoshie