WOMEN-LATAM: Andean Women Flex their Political Muscle

By Estrella Gutiérrez Reprint | | Print |

Estrella Gutierrez

CARACAS, Sep 23 1997 (IPS) - Feminist leaders from the Andean Community are seeking greater participation in politics and a more equal share in the decision-making process in their countries to correct the current lack of balance between the sexes.

Women’s groups from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela met during a meeting this month in Caracas to discuss the issue of participation in power and vowed to defend the proposed quota systems for guaranteeing representation in Legislative Assemblies.

“Against the wind and tide, and at full speed, we women must defend the quotas as a positive measure and promoted it on a global scale to break the glass ceiling that is imposed upon us by a patriarchal system,” said Venezuelan Evangelina Garcia Prince.

Debate over approval of quotas of between 25 and 40 per cent women in district electoral contests is being heard in all six countries.

The greatest advances have been in Peru, where the quota rule already has been approved and is waiting to be put into effect, and in Venezuela, where the measure has been passed by the House of Representatives as part of the country’s electoral reform, but still needs Senate approval.

Garcia Prince and other Andean leaders said that the quota system would not be worth much if it failed to position women to be elected, or if the women selected did not adhere to the ideas of proponnents of change who wanted the present patriarchal system to be more egalitarian.

“It would be unacceptable for positions legislated by the quotas to go to women who act as pawns in the men’s political chess game,” declared Garcia Prince, leader of Venezuela’s Social Democrats.

“We don’t know the political ‘software.’ ” she added, saying that women must learn the ways and means to achieve success in this world, to have relevant abilities, to know which tools to use for making change, and to be systematic (in their efforts).

Luz Salgado, promoter of the project and President of the Peruvian Women’s Parliament, explained that a 25 percent presence of women in the electorial lists for the races for elective office had been approved, with the exception of the list for the presidential ballot. She thought that percentage would be sufficient to “open the door” and that the offices in which women are not represented were not important, because they were concerned with open lists, those in which the voter indicates the name of his choice.

Maria Guzman, the president of the Venezuelan National Council of Women, was less than happy with the quota because of the significant masculine majority in the Parliament. Although the quota of women is 30 per cent, it is limited only to the “closed lists” and doesn’t require that women be placed in positions of real power.

In Venezuela, half of the House of Representatives is elected from lists of nominees, and the other half are “closed district lists”, which are among those that must legally include women. But that doesn’t add up to a formula that keeps women from occupying the most recent offices.

Jimena Rojas of Bolivia, in a comment common among the Andean leaders, said that what is being attempted is the conquest of a whole citizenry, something that begins through a presence in public office. with power to promote an more egalitarian system which is respectful of the differences between the sexes.

Rojas, who coordinated the Women’s Secretariat until the (new) government’s arrival in August, said that in her country the subject of quotas is still in the preliminary stages of discussion, but empowerment of women in the public sector makes it such that quotas have to become a reality soon, despite the “cave men”.

Olga Sanchez of Colombia, the National Director of Equality for Women, stated a common concern: “More important that having access to power, is to get familiar with it so that women can rise to power.”

“It is not enough that we should be at the center of power, if we are in a subordinate role,” she emphasized, to indicate that women must access power with the goal of redefining the way that decisions are made and society is framed.

In Colombia they are discussing making the quota 30 or 40 percent of the elective offices. They present a choice between men and women in the offices to promote equality, said the Director of Homes for Women, Norma Enriquez. She said that the feminist movement for a long time has decided to stay apart from power, but now it understood that, only by being within power, can we “promote equality and representation for women.”

But she stressed that “there are women that have a woman’s body, but not a woman’s mentality”, and that the movement that wants to achieve power must promote women who are representative and activist, and who develop projects in favor of equality between the sexes.

Elsa de la Torre of Ecuador said that in her country there are no discussion yet of quotas, but that the women’s movement understood clearly that a law for equality was an indispensable tool for consolidating the leadership of women.

All delegates agreed that, beyond personal ideology, any woman who rose to power through the quotas should have a common platform, promoting equality for their gender, and supporting any concrete project that helped their countries go in that direction. That would avoid cases such as in Argentina where, although the country is in the vanguard of the quota system to promote women to power, a majority of the women who reached Congress were very conservative politically, and placed obstacles in the path of projects supporting women’s equality.

Garcia Prince, who has worked in a post equivalent to the Minister of Women’s Affairs in Venezuela, and on gender issues at the United Nations, said that the quotas do not negate the individual value of women as leaders, “neither can they be misused such that one woman becomes interchangeable for another.”

She reiterated her belief that women, besides being representative, must be committed to the interests of their gender because “male power hierarchy” prefers “non-combative women” and rejects the ones who know their own minds and struggle for change.

“We have to build a new paradigm of power that is non- combative, where the hierarchy is based on a sense of organization, not domination,” she said (FIN-IPS-eg-ag-ip- pr-dp-mk-97)