Peruvian women appear to have made genuine strides during Alberto Fujimori’s ten years in power. A Ministry of Women and a Public Defender for Women (an adjunct to the Public Defender for the People) were created. 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 local and Congressional office. Female followers of Fujimori were given important positions in his government and were visible in the national parliament. In fact, in his third, brief administration, the Governing Council of Congress was composed entirely of women loyal to the President.
Those achievements were disconcerting. How was it possible that an authoritarian regime, which steadily chipped away at democratic rights, could seem to have such extraordinary “sensitivity to gender?” 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. Dismissing former intelligence service agent Leonor La Rosa’s accusation that she had been tortured under Montesinos’ orders, one prominent congresswoman allied with Fujimori, Martha Chávez, asserted that the woman “had tortured herself.”
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 invitation to enter government and those who rejected it. Virginia Vargas of the Flora Tristan Center, one of those who kept their distance, asserted: “For feminism, the boundary between ethics and negotiations is marked by respect for democratic values.”[1] 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. 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.”
Other organizations followed in MUDE’s footsteps. 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. 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.
Beginning 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. 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. That process was not always light-hearted and harmonious, as some Latin American feminists remember it. The unofficial story behind the mobilization of women’s groups in each country unmasked struggles over leadership and revealed inexperience and mistrust in dealing with public institutions that only yesterday had been part of a repressive state that refused to dialogue.
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 picked up the pieces. As several studies of regional feminism in the post-Beijing era suggest, not only has feminist militancy redefined itself in ways that opened the floodgates for diverse and sometimes irreconcilable strategies, 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. As the French academic Fran?oise Collin commented in an article: “Don’t grow old in the barricades or you’ll grow old badly.”[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.
Latin American feminism of the 1970s and 1980s put forward two sets of demands: equal rights for women and economic redistribution. 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. 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. Those conditions, they knew, swelled the number of maternal deaths, illiterate women, women eking out a living in the informal sector and single mothers.
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. 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. These political changes produced a pernicious acceptance of the limits of government, its restricted regulatory role and the sovereignty of the market. 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 frayed at the edges by the persistent reality of inequality among women. Continuing poverty among indigenous, shantytown and peasant women presents a daunting challenge. While the new millennium has excited some women with its promises, it has passed over thousands of others, relegating them to daily-life conditions typical of the end of the nineteenth century.
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. The convulsive political situations in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, coupled with the continuing lack of stable legal systems in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, make the institutional foundations of the Latin American state shaky, civil rights precarious and social participation largely a myth. How do we, given these conditions, first put in place and then maintain the principles of legal equality for women? And how do we, in an economic model characterized by a growing concentration of wealth and little sharing of benefits, find that minimum threshold required for the exercise of women’s rights?
For some researchers, the gains in legal rights for Latin American women in the 1990s have come hand-in-hand with the modernization of the state, and in some countries, have fit together with the struggle for democracy. The gains for women inscribed in Ecuador’s 1998 Constitution, for example, cannot be separated from the active participation of the women’s movement in the protests against the short-lived government of President Abdala Bucaram (1996Ð97), which made that movement a force to be reckoned with for an array of political parties in the Congress. As a result, the country’s new Constitution prohibits violence against women (whether physical, psychological and/or sexual), bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and asserts “the right to make free and responsible decisions about one’s sexual life.” By contrast, Peru is an example of a country where modernization has been divorced from democratization. As Peruvian feminist Vargas asserts: “The actors of modernization have not been the same as the actors of democratization. The Fujimori government’s policy towards women was developed in an authoritarian and anti-democratic framework, and for that reason, women have gone out into the streets to protest.”[3]
The advances of women in the legal field may have resulted in a shift in the arena of struggle, from demonstrations and other pressure in the streets in the 1980s to negotiations in parliament and government ministries in the 1990s. But in either battleground, feminists are adamant that what they obtained “was not a gift of benevolent presidents,” as one put it.
A landmark achievement in the struggle for legal equality was the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW), and the creation of its committee, which successfully urged country after country in the region to sign on. This United Nations accord was the central inspiration behind the designing of national measures to prevent and punish violence against women. You can find feminists in every Latin American country who point to the passage of legislation punishing violence against women as their most prized achievement. A law of this sort is the product of multiple forces rallying together—from the Catholic Church to international agencies, legislators, public functionaries, First Ladies and even the National Police (as in Nicaragua)—and the surrounding paraphernalia of slogans, publicity spots, research and government commissions.
A second important advance has been the creation throughout the region of national offices of women. 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); with the Ministry of Education and Culture (in Trinidad and Tobago and Uruguay); or integrated with other population groups or sectors (such as the Ministry of Youth, Women, Children and the Family in Panama).
There are, however, numerous problems with these government institutions for women. One of them is the way they have treated the female population as “a vulnerable group” in their programs. Another drawback has been their limited access to the real centers of power where policies are formulated, even when they have ministerial rank. Lastly, their budgets are usually small, meaning that these offices rely on international aid. 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. Several national offices of women appear to duplicate the work of feminist collectives and NGOs. 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 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. 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. Women are underrepresented in local government and in national parliaments, representing until recently in the latter about 10% of the office holders. 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 (20%), Peru (30%), the Dominican Republic (25%), and Venezuela (30%).[5]
For feminists, affirmative action corrected an injustice against women. 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 María Yañez of the Peruvian NGO Manuela Ramos declared, “I prefer four authoritarian women to four authoritarian men.”[6] That remark ignited a heated debate, including among women. 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.”[7]
The presence of these arrogant and powerful Congresswomen who were loyal to Fujimori prompted the opposition journalist César Hildebrant to demand an explanation from Peruvian feminists. “Why was the worst of the Fujimori Congress and the most glaring moral wretchedness female?” he asked in a November column in Liberación. “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?” To which Yañez replied: “The mechanism of quotas is only a means to promote the entry of women into power. It is not responsible for the quality of the women who attain power.”[8]
“What has happened,” Vargas asserted, “is that the Fujimori policy towards women has produced what I would call a civic schizophrenia. 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. Alongside this, the regime adopted manipulative and clientelistic policies towards poor women. 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. 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.”[9]
All 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. 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.
But as the Bolivian feminist Sonia Montano asserted, women’s policies in Latin America have been “low intensity.” 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. In the 1990s, for example, 70% of the Bolivian population was considered poor, climbing to 95% in rural areas. In Peru, close to 50% of the population is classified as poor. The literacy rate among the female indigenous population, as a group, is the lowest in Latin America. The 1992 national census in Bolivia found that 50% of rural women could not read. In Peru, according to the 1993 National Census, the figure was 43%.[10]
The health statistics are no less alarming. In Bolivia, there are 390 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births. In Peru, there are 265 such deaths per 100,000 births. The situation in rural areas is even more troubling. In Potosí, Bolivia, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 can reach 600. In the largely rural Andean provinces of Peru, the incidence of maternal deaths is similar to Potosí’s. After Haiti, Bolivia and Peru have the highest rates of maternal deaths in Latin America, reflecting the general living conditions, the quality and coverage of health services and public investment in preventive health care. This is one of the most dramatic representations of social injustice and the inequality among women, as a report of the United Nations Population Fund asserts. [11]
Restrictions on reproductive rights also persist and indeed grow more stringent in some countries. 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. Some four million women in the region confront this risk each year. Botched abortions are the primary cause of maternal death in Chile and the second most common cause of maternal death in Paraguay and Peru. In countries such as Chile and more recently El Salvador, abortion is not permitted even to save the life of the mother.
Between the sporadic victories, the boiling oil of conservative reaction is bubbling up. 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. In many countries, the phrase “and of the family” has been added to the title of the national offices of women. 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.
These were internal cracks in the institutional structures created for women, but were also external shocks. 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. In Bolivia, the Subsecretary of Women’s Affairs disappeared in 1997 with the Banzer Administration and became an Office of Women’s Affairs. This descent in the hierarchy transformed the agency from a policymaking body into a technical entity. When Andrés 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.
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. The unstable political situation in parts of South America is coupled 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. That state of affairs does not encourage faith in dialogue with government, much less in the sustainability of the advances for women.
The situation that I have described in this article is not new, nor does it come blown in by the winds from the North. 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 evolved with an acute social awareness, and two decades ago, it illuminated private life as a redoubt of multiple injustices for women. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maruja Barrig is a feminist journalist and researcher from Peru. She is a founder of the Women for Democracy collective. 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). The author thanks both institutions for granting permission to reprint excerpts. Translated from the Spanish by Deidre McFadyen.
NOTES
1. Author’s interview with Virginia Vargas, November 2000.
2. Fran?oise Collin, “Una Herencia sin Testamento,” in Feminismos Fin de Siglo, special edition of Fempress (Santiago), December 1999.
3. Author’s interview with Virginia Vargas, November 2000.
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.
5. “Participación, liderazgo y equidad de género en América Latina y el Caribe,” CEPAL Working Document, Santiago, 1999.
6. Teresina Muñoz-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.
8. Letters to the editor, Liberación (Lima), November 22, 2000.
9. Author’s interview, November 2000.
10. “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; Sonia Montaño, “El dicho y el hecho. 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 Tristán Publications, 2000).
11. Fondo de población de las Naciones Unidas (FNUAP), 1999; “Compromisos legislativos sobre salud y derechos sexuales y reproductivos: Una revisión de los cinco años de las conferencias de Cairo y Beijing en América Latina y el Caribe,” document prepared for the Eighth Regional Conference on Latin American and Caribbean Women (Lima), February 2000.
