ARGENTINA-WOMEN: National Gathering Faces Hostile Reception

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 5 1997 (IPS) - The women who will gather at the 12th National Women’s Meeting in Argentina are facing a hostile reception in the fiercely Catholic and traditionalist northwestern province of San Juan, where participants have been dubbed “lesbians, transvestites and abortionists.”

The meeting, held in different parts of the country for the past 12 years, has come up against staunch resistance from authorities in the Andean province’s capital city, San Juan, the Catholic Church and women’s organisations that defend the traditional family.

In a newspaper editorial referring to the Jun. 7-9 gathering, San Juan Bishop Italo Di Stefano urged women to defend “their condition, and that of their families and their children.” He stressed that “the right to be the wife of a man, now and forever, must have an inviolable character.”

In response to the bishop’s exhortations, the Catholic organisation Pro Woman warned in the local press that the province would be invaded by “lesbians, transvestites and abortionists.”

The group held a march on the provincial Congress to demand that official support for the gathering be withdrawn, and announced that during the inauguration of the meeting on Saturday they would surround the stadium where it is to be held, and pray “to scare off the demons.”

Workshops were also held at the Catholic University, to defend the notion of the family as based exclusively on the union of a man and a woman, and reject birth control as “an attack on life and the right to be born.”

The organisers of the gathering went to the rector of the Catholic University to protest what one of them, Perla Welmer, termed a “medieval smear campaign, based on prejudice and slander.”

Teresa Duran, with the Forum for Reproductive Rights, told IPS that as early as April, the San Juan Council on Women, Minors and the Family voiced their opposition to granting “support for an event whose key themes are feminism, abortion, lesbianism and prostitution.”

Duran said the rest of the country has always revealed itself as more traditionalist than the capital. She cited a controversy recently unleashed in the northern city of Cordoba when students of an all-male secondary school and their parents resisted the entry of female students, based on the argument that the school’s educational level could drop.

The 12th National Women’s Meeting will offer workshops on gender and family, health, politics, sexuality, birth control, abortion, education, the labour market, cultural models and poverty. A plenary session held at the close will hear the conclusions reached.

Participants at the annual meetings are women politicians, trade unionists, religious leaders, professionals from a variety of fields, feminists, lesbians, experts on domestic violence and leaders of the movement for the decriminalisation of abortion, the top cause of maternal mortality in Argentina.

Since the first year, the number of participants rose from 1,000 to 15,000, but only 8,500 are expected this year according to the registration lists, thanks to the scarce publicity and the hostile reception in the host city. That hostility has already been felt in the difficulty of obtaining public spaces for the meeting, as well as hotel rooms and other lodging for registrants.

Duran insisted that in Argentina, a pluralist and democratic country, different expressions must be respected. Women in Argentina differ in many respects, she underlined, only “collectively sharing the same inequality with respect to the power of the male in society,” and holding a wide range of ideas and stances on many issues.

“We do not expect to convince anyone of anything. If there are women in San Juan opposed to abortion, they can come to the workshop where that question is going to be debated and express themselves,” she added. “What we will not allow is that discussion be prohibited.”