POLITICS-ARGENTINA: Women Push for Quota of Senate Seats

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 4 2000 (IPS) - Argentina is the Latin American nation with the greatest number of women in its Chamber of Deputies (lower house) thanks to a quota law that demands the inclusion of female candidates on party ballot lists. But now the bigger challenge comes: expanding the quota system to the Senate, where women hold just two of 72 seats.

The launching of the campaign for more women senators – which cuts across all of Argentina’s political parties – coincides with the credibility crisis in the Senate, currently immersed in a million-dollar bribe scandal that has monopolised headlines here for over a month.

“It could be that we women are less qualified to handle power. To do so you must be willing to steal, kill your mother and eat excrement,” quipped Mala Htun, a political scientist from the United States who came to Argentina to take part in the campaign.

Htun, of the New School University in New York, says the quota serves to bring the issue of gender equality to the public agenda. But women politicians here emphasise that it will also enable the passage of laws they are promoting, which often make it through the Chamber of Deputies but get stuck in the Senate due to “men’s disinterest.”

The quota law, enacted in 1991, requires that 30 percent of the top positions on the lists of a party’s candidates for the Chamber of Deputies be reserved for women, a measure that boosted the percentage of female lawmakers in the lower house from 13 to 27 percent. The Argentine electoral system is based on proportional representation.

Argentina thus became the Latin American country with by far the highest percentage of women deputies, followed by Mexico and the Dominican Republic (16 percent), Bolivia, Colombia and Uruguay (12 percent), Chile (11 percent), Brazil (six percent) and Paraguay (three percent).

But, surprisingly, Argentina is the country with fewest female senators – just three percent. Paraguay ranks highest with 18 percent, followed by Mexico (16 percent) and Colombia (13 percent), while the rest of the countries of Latin America have less than 10 percent.

Former deputy María José Lubertino, now president of the Women’s Political and Social Institute, told IPS that the strategic priority of her organisation is the implementation of the quota law in the Argentine Senate in order to meet international commitments for 50 percent parity by 2005.

All nations are far from achieving the goal of “50-50 by 2005” in representative posts, a commitment made at the 1995 World Conference on Women, held in Beijing. With that in mind, the Argentine activists are trying to reach at least 30 percent women in both houses of parliament by 2003.

The Women’s Political and Social Institute is organising workshops with female lawmakers, and party leaders and presidents, and has requested a meeting with President Fernando de la Rúa to ask him to guarantee a Senate quota by decree.

“I have no doubt that if there were more women in the Senate the bribery scandal would not have occurred, though not because of a different female ‘nature’ but because we women have been far removed from the dishonest practices that dominate politics today,” commented Lubertino.

Given that the Argentine Senate will be completely renewed in 2001, the women activists are working for policy changes so that the provincial legislatures would no longer elect the senators, who would be elected directly by the citizens instead – under the system of quotas for women candidates.

The initiative began with senator Beatriz Raijer, of the Justicialist (Peronist) Party, but her own party colleagues rejected the bill she presented. As a result, the quota activists have altered their strategy and, instead of proposing a new bill, they are fighting to expand the existing quota law to the Senate.

The resistance among male politicians is strong because there are few available spots on the ballot lists from the outset. The Constitution, ratified in 1994, establishes that, to ensure equitable representation of the country and of the political spectrum, each party in every province must present two senatorial candidates.

The most-voted party in each province wins two Senate seats, while the second-place party receives one. This complicates the adoption of the “30 percent” rule because the issue involves two candidates – but the women behind the quota campaign say the law is clear.

“The 30 percent clause should be interpreted as a minimum,” according to the law, and its appendix provides the example that when there are two posts to fill, the “minimum” is one woman candidate, points out former deputy Florentina Gómez Miranda, one of the pioneers in the fight for greater female representation in Congress.

When Raijer presented her bill before the Senate, Augusto Alasino, who was the Justicialist leader at the time, said that “a woman can only run for office when there is a list with at least three candidates, and in the Senate there can only be two.”

Several female politicians stressed that the “woman-quota” has led to a phenomena in which the wife, sister, daughter or lover of a powerful male politician obtains a spot on the ballot in order to comply with the law in the eyes of the electoral authorities.

Many politicians, women included, believe the fixed quota does not respect the competence criteria that the Constitution establishes. But the women’s groups reject that idea, saying that if half of the electorate are women, then the proportion should be maintained in the two houses of Congress.

“The true equality of opportunity for men and women will be achieved when a mediocre women can hold a post in the upper hierarchy,” is a refrain frequently heard among the female officials and lawmakers serving in the government of the city of Buenos Aires.

Carmen Storani, president of the National Women’s Council, points out that even if the quota law means progress in the national Congress, seven provinces out of 23 have only one female parliamentarian and three provinces have no women lawmakers at all.

Silvia Sapag, the other female senator alongside Raijer, also shuns the idea of a competence requirement and just recently denounced a male colleague who tried to bribe her into supporting a bill that would benefit oil companies at the expense of the provinces.

“Women participate as activists in the parties, serving in different posts until we run into the glass ceiling,” commented Sapag, referring to the cultural obstacles that are often difficult to define but which impede male lawmakers from supporting the women’s proposals.

Meanwhile, Elisa Carca, a provincial senator, is calling for changes in the legislative code, including protocol. “I am tired of receiving invitations addressed to ‘senator and wife,’ and gifts such as neckties or pocket-knives,” she laughs.