RIGHTS/POLITICS-ARGENTINA: Women Gear Up to Take Senate By Storm

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 11 2001 (IPS) - Thanks to a quota law that successfully boosted the presence of women in the lower house of Congress and will now be applied to elections for the Senate, Argentina’s regional leadership in terms of female participation in the legislature will be strengthened even further.

Even though the quota system reserving 30 percent of candidacies for women was only applied in the Chamber of Deputies, Argentina shot to the head of the list in Latin America in recent years in terms of the proportion of women legislators, followed by Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Colombia and Uruguay.

Since the quota law was applied to elections for the lower house of Congress in 1991, the presence of women in the legislature increased from 13 to 27 percent.

At the end of last year, President Fernando de la Rúa bowed to pressure from the women’s movement and female parliamentarians and issued a decree setting a quota for Senate elections as well.

Only two of the 72 seats in the upper house of Congress are held by women – which neither reflects the make-up of the electorate, of which women form a majority, nor the massive female participation in political parties.

But that should change next October, when the quota law – which stipulates that 30 percent of the candidates in the top slots on parliamentary lists must be women – is applied to Senate elections for the first time.

Another novelty in the elections will be the fact that all Senate seats will be up for direct popular election for the first time in history, since senators in Argentina have traditionally been designated by the legislatures of each province, which meant very few voters even knew who they were.

The new system of direct popular election was put into place by a constitutional amendment, which included another novel aspect: each party, in each province, must field at least two candidates. The party that takes the most votes will win two seats, and the second-most voted party will earn one seat.

However, female politicians fear that the quota law will be interpreted in such a way that it could fall short in its aim of guaranteeing women access to Congress. For example, if a female candidate is in third place on the list of a party that wins one or two seats in the Senate, she will be left out of the running.

Women politicians are all too familiar with the legal loopholes taken advantage of by party leaders – often with the consent of the courts – to get around the quota law.

The head of the cabinet of the Buenos Aires city government, Liliana Chernajowsky, said men often used the quota law to their own benefit: “They say ‘this spot is mine and I’ll put this woman – their wife, sister-in-law or lover – here’.”

María José Lubertino, president of the Women’s Political and Social Institute, told IPS that the campaign by the women’s movement to obtain presidential backing for applying the quota law to Senate elections formed part of a more ambitious project undertaken by local female political leaders, who pledged at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing to bring about gender equity in politics by 2005.

With the quota law, the proportion of women entering the Senate could climb to 24 percent, which would not only reinforce Argentina’s leadership in Latin America with regards to female participation in parliament overall, but would also make it the regional leader in terms of the proportion of women representatives in the Senate.

The decree that the president signed at our urging “gives political parties a chance to rethink long-standing sexist attitudes and ensure a minimum number of real decision-making spots for women,” said Lubertino, who may be one of the female candidates elected to the Senate this year.

The decree applying the quota law to elections for the Senate coincided with the last episode of the political crisis triggered by a vote-buying scandal late last year in the Senate, which shook the entire political system.

The day after the new quota law for the Senate was announced, the courts dismissed the case against the politicians accused in connection with the scandal.

Lubertino agreed that a greater presence of women would not automatically guarantee a higher moral calibre for the Senate. But she stressed that women were not so heavily rooted in some of the “mafioso” codes that have long characterised much of politics in Argentina, which has been an overwhelmingly male playing field.

The only two female members of the Senate are tired of documenting the sexist remarks and put-downs aimed against them, not to speak of a protocol that ignores their presence by referring to them by the masculine Spanish word “senador” rather than “senadora”, or as “senador y señora” (Mr. Senator and Wife) when they and their husbands are addressed as a couple.

Senator Silvia Sapag, who last year reported a case of vote- buying in the Senate, said that shortly afterwards, one senator joked in public to another that Sapag denounced the lawmaker whose vote was supposedly bought because he had not “satisfied” her sexually.

Nicknames or diminutives, gibes, excessive compliments or simple indifference towards initiatives sponsored by women legislators are all behaviours seen by many as normal in a body where women continue to comprise a tiny minority.

Elisa Carca, a member of a provincial Senate, said that in legislatures in the interior, women ran into similar sexist attitudes and resistance: “Once a leader of my party came back from a trip and gave us each a tie. I told him I would return his gesture with a bra.”

That anecdote, according to Carca, illustrates the fact that the field of politics remains a male stronghold.

The president of the National Women’s Council, Carmen Storani, said the new quota law would help guarantee equal opportunities and treatment for men and women not only in politics, but also in terms of the agenda of issues of concern to women.

For example, women are the main advocates in the areas of reproductive health, sexual harassment, abortion or education – questions that men tend to shove to the backburner, she pointed out.