WOMEN-LATAM: New Reporters’ Network Against Censorship, Sexism

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jul 30 1999 (IPS) - A new Network of women Journalists from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean aims at forging spaces in the media to highlight issues that are generally silenced or relegated to the alternative press.

Women’s political and civic participation and violence against women and girls will be the focuses of the first on-line information-sharing campaigns among the members of the Network, who will attempt to get the distributed information picked up by local media.

Another key aim of the project is to generate information on discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnic group, religion or sexual preference, based on the argument that everything that is silenced is, to some extent, censored.

The Network, created Jul 23, groups women journalists from Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama.

But it is open to all professional reporters interested in working on the basis of a non-sexist outlook – the first agreement adopted at the Second Gathering of Journalists from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, which took place Jul 22-23 in Guatemala City.

Since then, communications have begun flowing among the members of the project, who are interested in exchanging and generating information shedding light on the social conditions experienced by women.

Mexican reporter Lucia Lagunes described the new project as “a conscious action that will contribute to transforming the conditions of inequality and discrimination experienced by over half of the world’s population.

“Informational spaces have become sounding boards for the various sectors in power – economic, political, ideological and religious. The media exercise that power, not only though what they report, but through what they omit,” she asserted.

Lagunes is head of information of the non-governmental association Communication and Information on Women (CIMAQ), which emerged in 1988 and groups communicators in Mexico City and in 30 of Mexico’s 31 states.

CIMAQ will initially act as a vehicle for delivery of information among the links in the new Network, while coordinating the information-sharing campaigns to be carried out from August 1999 to July 2000.

One of the strategic objectives outlined by the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was increasing women’s access to and participation in the expression of ideas and decision- making in the mass media.

In order to accomplish that aim, the Conference recommended that governments stimulate and recognise women’s communication networks, including on-line networks, as well as other new technologies applied to communications, as a means of spreading information and the exchange of ideas.

A precedent for the new Network was the First Gathering of Women Journalists from Central America held early last year in Guatemala City, which led 25 female communicators to join together and create the Guatemalan Network of Reporters.

And last October, the Mexican resort city Cancun hosted media representatives from 20 Latin American and Caribbean nations in an event sponsored by CIMAQ and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

A women’s movement does exist, “and we must report on it. We cannot work if we do not rediscover that movement,” said CIMAQ director Sara Lovera.

Lovera also pointed to the need for an extremely professional exercise of journalism, with an emphasis on investigative reporting, as a route towards gaining credibility and space in the mass media.

The Network’s first two journalistic campaigns will be supported by the Guatemala-based on-line magazine Tertulia and feminist supplement La Cuerda, and the Costa Rican daily El Imparcial.

With respect to violence against women and girls, the aim is to gather information from all of the countries where Network members are based, in order to draw up three major reports to be released next November, with the support of the Cuban office of the Inter Press Service (IPS) international news agency.

Key moments for the campaign on women’s political and civic participation will be the coming elections in Guatemala (November), El Salvador (March 2000), the Dominican Republic (May 2000), Mexico (July 2000), and Nicaragua (November 2000).