WOMEN-LATAM: A Call to True Citizenship

By Estrella Gutiérrez Reprint | | Print |

Estrella Gutierrez

CARACAS, Jan 24 1996 (IPS) - Active citizenship will be the core manifesto for Latin American and Caribbean women’s groups as they begin following up on the progress made at the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China last September.

Women in the region want to escape from being seen as silent objects to become “active subjects participating in making decisions on their destiny and that of their societies–an essential characteristic of true citizenship,” Venezuelan campaigner and university professor Nora Castaneda told IPS.

In an avalanche of national, regional and subregional meetings after the Beijing meeting, Latin American women decided that nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) should monitor the fulfillment of government commitments made at the conference “step by step.”

Latin American and Caribbean authorities have asked the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to evaluate the Beijing agreements during the 1996-98 period.

Uruguayan campaigner Lilian Celiberti told IPS that the regional women’s movement had decided to “maintain specific supervision and pressure mechanisms on ECLAC and the United Nations in general,” in order to see the pro-women agreements realised in concrete actions.

Castaneda, who is a member of the Continental Women’s Front, said the core campaign on citizenship would be coupled with the search for female leadership, both in order to promote the commitments made in Beijing and funding for them and the aims of the NGOs themselves.

The concept of female citizenship being promoted by women’s groups means greater participation in public decision and policy making, which, according to campaigners, would result in better governments and broader democracy in the region.

Male-dominated governments in the region are being questioned about corruption, violence, narcotraffic and poverty, as Celiberti pointed out, adding that the region has many pressing problems, but that the “the capacity of civil society, and in particular women, is still too weak to really affect political and economic decision making.”

Consequently, in her opinion, groups of organised women “have an enormous responsibility to push for the most important points achieved in the run-up to Beijing: the possibility of constructing a political women’s movement with clear objectives and clear leadership.”

“We have to promote female citizenship and female leaders” Castaneda summed up.

Preparations for Beijing promoted the formation of a regional women’s movement that included feminists, NGOs and grassroots movements and that demonstrated a strength and unity lacking in the official government delegations at the conference.

Castaneda and Celiberti both said the present challenge was to keep this “rich and complex” process going by resolving issues such as how to institutionalise these new and diverse relationships and to promote unity in international fora and agendas.

At the Beijing conference, the greatest advances were in the “traditional feminists’ agenda,” said Castaneda, “because what we did not achieve we discussed,” especially the commitments to reproductive health issues.

However, the social and economic demands of the Southern movements were not so well received: “the so-called alternative agenda, put forward by poor women, was ignored,” she said.

“The proposals on the feminisation of poverty, the double and triple female working day, indigenous and black women’s issues were not looked at and this agenda is still pending,” she said.

But, “the learning experience of 1994 and 1995 taught us a lot and improved our negotiating capacity. We now know that unity and the common issues do not exclude diversity and specific campaigns,” she said.

“For example, for black women, identity and poverty are fundamental, but not for Argentinian women, but the two planes, the common and the specific, can coexist and feed rather than limit the movement,” she said.

The post-Beijing outlook will also focus more on collective rather than individual rights: “This means going macro to defend socioeconomic, legal and ethical rights,” said Castaneda.

Other additions to the Latin American feminist agenda include the right to non-violence, as opposed to focussing simply against violence and calls for more gender-differentiated statistics included in human development indices, including “female- citizenship indices”.