POLITICS-BRAZIL: Indians Make Strides in Elections; Not So, Women

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 10 2000 (IPS) - The representation of indigenous people rose threefold in Brazil’s recent municipal elections, while women made little progress even though they were favoured by a law requiring parties to reserve 30 percent of their lists for female candidates.

In the Oct 1 elections, 314 female mayors were elected — only 3.29 percent more than the 304 elected in 1996, according to the Women’s Studies and Advising Centre (CFEMEA), a Brasilia-based non- governmental organisation (NGO).

There are still six female candidates competing in the run-off to be held Oct 29 in 31 municipalities with more than 200,000 voters, in which no candidate garnered an absolute majority in the first round. One of them is Marta Suplicy, the front-runner in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

In addition, 7,001 female councillors were elected, just 7.11 percent more than the 6,536 who will be sitting on town councils until yearend.

The quota law “did not bring about the expected increase in the number of women elected this time,” lamented Sonia Malheiros, a CFEMEA technical adviser and the author of a study on the application of the “affirmative action” initiative in favour of gender equity.

In the last municipal elections, in 1996, when the law was first applied in Brazil (with a quota of 20 percent), the number of female mayors increased by 37 percent, and the number of women town councillors by 111 percent.

The effort to broaden women’s participation in political office is coordinated nationally by the movement of “Articulation of Brazilian Women”, a number of NGOs, and informal women’s caucuses in town councils and state and national legislatures.

Indigenous people, meanwhile, chalked up proportionately better results. Their presence on town councils tripled, according to the Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI), an organ of the Catholic Church’s Episcopal Conference.

The increase was the result of a spontaneous movement that emerged this year, in which around 350 indigenous people from 71 different ethnic groups scattered around the country ran in local elections, more than four times the number who stood in 1996.

But in this case, the figures are not reliable, because the movement was not a nationally organised one. So far, the CIMI has information on 58 indigenous councillors, six deputy mayors, and one mayor elected on Oct 1, but the total number of Indian town councillors is probably higher.

The Court of Electoral Justice now registers the sex of candidates, but not the ethnic origin, making it difficult to identify indigenous candidates, most of whom ran for office in remote municipalities lagging behind in communications infrastructure, explained CIMI press adviser Katia Vasco.

Furthermore, the increased participation in electoral politics by Brazil’s native communities did not arise from any centrally coordinated action or orientation by national indigenous organisations.

Reports of newly elected Indian councillors who did not figure on the list of the 315 candidates identified by the CIMI have begun to come in, Vasco added.

Both the rise in the number of indigenous candidates and the increase in their share of seats on city councils were “surprising,” said Roberto Liebgott, assistant secretary of the CIMI, which estimates that only around 20 were elected in 1996.

The fear is that many of the new indigenous councillors will continue to act in an individual, isolated manner, “without taking up the indigenous cause,” or even representing the interests of their own communities, said Liebgott, who added that this was common among Indians elected in the past.

Indeed, many of the indigenous candidates who stood for office did so as part of isolated, personal initiatives not based on any collective decision, he said.

Nevertheless, the informal “movement” reflects a growing level of organistion of indigenous peoples, and an increasingly resolute aim to fight racial and ethnic discrimination, said Liebgott. The attempt to use the political route through local town councils also indicates dissatisfaction with the results obtained so far by pressuring the national government to meet specific demands, he added.

For women, meanwhile, it was clear that the quota system did not automatically guarantee increased political representation, and that the process would be a slow one, “just as insertion into the labour market and strides in terms of education required decades of efforts,” said Malheiros.

Nevertheless, quotas consitute an important mechanism for bolstering the mobilisation, participation and training of women in electoral campaigns, drawing attention to their demands, and promoting the struggle for gender equality, she said.

But “cultural changes” are still lacking, she added — among women, to get them to vote for female candidates, and among political parties, which not only failed to meet the 30 percent quota requirement, registering less than 20 percent female candidates, but also offered the women little support in their campaigns.

In the Brazilian political system, the candidates who personally take the most votes make it to the town council or state parliament, regardless of their place on the party lists. The number of winning representatives for any political party is determined by the total number of votes taken by the party list.

Generally less well-known and with limited funds to finance their campaigns, few women are able to win more votes than their male colleagues to figure among the most-voted candidates and thus earn a seat on the town council or state parliament.

Women’s political representation has increased swiftly only in those countries which use electoral lists in which the parties themselves determine the order of the candidates — regardless of the number of votes each specific candidate takes — and in which the parties have been forced to place women at the top of the lists.