Two Mexican teenage girls at their school. Investing in education for teenage girls in Latin America is regarded as the way forward for them to become future drivers of sustainable develpment in their societies. Credit: UNFPA LAC

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jul 11 2016 (IPS)

Latin America’s teenage girls are a crucial force for change and for promoting sustainable development, if the region invests in their rights and the correction of unequal opportunities, according to Luiza Carvalho, the regional head of UN Women.

“An empowered adolescent will know her rights and will stand up for them; she has tools for success and is a driving froce for positive change in her community,” Carvalho told IPS in an interview from the regional headquarters of UN Women in Panama City.

Adolescent girls and boys will have a leading role in their societies when the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development has been completed, she said. One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is gender equality. Investing in today’s girls will have “a great transformative impact in future,” she said. “Investing in education and protection against violence are important tools for fulfilling the potential of teenage girls and young women,as wellas for promoting gender equality” -- Luiza Carvalho.

The world today has a higher proportion of its population aged between 10 and 24 years old than ever before, with 1.8 billion young people out of a  total population of 7.3 billion. Roughly 20 percent of this age group live in LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, Carvalho said.

According to data given to IPS by the regional office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 57million of the region’s 634 million people are girls aged between 10 and 19, living mainly in cities.

The theme for this year’s World Population Day, celebrated July 11, is “Investing in Teenage Girls”, on the premise that transforming their present situation to guarantee their right to equality will not only eliminate barriers to their individual potential but will also be decisive for the sustainable development of their countries.

Women Deliver, an international organisation, has calculated the benefits of this investment in financial terms. For every additional 10 percent of girls in school, national GDP rises by an average of three percent; for every extra year of primary schooling a girl has completed, her expected salary as an adult grows by between 10 and 20 percent.

This is fundamental because, as Carvalho pointed out, “lack of economic empowerment, together with generalised gender discrimination and the reinforcemet of traditional stereotypes, negatively affects the capability of women in Latin America and the Caribbean to participate on an equal footing in all aspects of public and private life.”

Luiza Carvalho, regional director of UN Women for Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: UN Women LAC

That is why “investing in education and protection against violence are important tools for fulfilling the potential of teenage girls and young women,as well as for promoting gender equality,” she said.

Teenage women, she said, “are an especially vulnerable group who face special social, economic and political barriers.” Their empowerment in the region may come up against difficulties such as unwanted pregnancy, forced early marriage or union, gender violence and limited access to education and reproductive health services.”

As an example of these obstacles, the regional director of UN Women said that a Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) study of women aged 15-49 years in 12 countries of the region “reported that for a substantial proportion of these women, their first sexual encounter had been unwanted or coerced.”

Carvalho stressed that “early marriage or union imposed on girls is a major concern in the region, and it significantly affects the exercise of adolescent girls’ rights developing their full potential.”

“It is a form of violence that denies them their childhood, interrupts their education, limits their social development, curtails their opportunities, exposes them to the risk of premature pregnancy at too young an age, or unwanted pregnancy and its possible complications, and increases their risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV (human immuno-deficiency virus),” she said.

It also increases the girls’ exposure to “becoming victims of violence and abuse,” Carvalho said.

In Carvalho’s view it is very positive that all the countries inthe region have established minimum ages for marriage in their laws, but on the other hand, the laws fix different minimum ages for boys and for girls, and in certain cases such as pregnancy or motherhood, girls may legally marry before they reach the minimum age.

In Latin America, far from diminishing, teenage pregnancies have increased in recent years, due to cultural acceptance of early sexual initiation. As a result, the region ranks second in the world for adolescent birth rates, with an average of 76 live births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 years, second only to sub-Saharan Africa.

Furthermore, 30 percent of Latin American teenage girls do not have access to the contraceptive care services they need, according to UNFPA. Sexual and reproductive health face especially high barriers in this region because of patriarchal,culture, the weight of conservative sectors and the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

In Latin America, indigenous teenage girls, together with their rural counterparts, are the group most discriminated against in terms of opportunities and access to education. Credit: Rajesh Krishnan/UN Women

In contrast, the region has a good record on education. Over 90 percent of its countries have policies to promote equal access by teenagers to education. Ninety percent of teenage girls have finished their primary school education, although only 78 percent go on to secondary school, according to UNFPA.

The greatest educational access barriers are faced by rural and indigenous teenage girls, who have difficulties for physical access to some education centres. In the case of indigenous and Afro-descendant girls, this is added to inappropriate curricula or the absence of educational materials in their native languages (mother tongues). 

Carvalho highlighted as a positive element that education laws, especially those that have been reformed recently, “have begun to recognise the importance of establishing legal provisions that promote and disseminate human rights, peaceful coexistence and sex education.”

However, she regretted that “direct connections with prevention of violence against women and girls are still incipient.”

In her view, the school curriculum plays an essential role. Including contents and materials “related to human rights and the rights of women and girls, non-violent conflict resolution, co-responsibility and basic education about sexual and reproductive health,” will potentiate more non-violent societies, inside and outside of the classroom, she said.

Carvalho quoted a 2015 study carried out in 13 Latin American countries by UN Women and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which concluded that education systems are failing to prevent violence against girls.

“This is something that must be improved, because it is in the first few years of early childhood that egalitarian role modelling between girls and boys can occur and lay the foundations of the prevention of violence, discrimination, and inequality in all its forms,” she emphasised.

Carvalho said changes should start with something as simple as it is frequently forgotten: “Girls, teenagers and women are rights-holders and entitled to their rights.”

If girls are given “equal access to education, health care, sexual and reproductive education, decent jobs, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes, sustainable economies would be promoted and societies, and humanity as a whole, would benefit,” she concluded. 

Edited by Verónica Firme. Translated by Valerie Dee.

Vehicles and pedestrians mingle haphazardly on Bolívar avenue, one of the main arteries in Caracas, where traffic rules are regularly flouted. Credit: Raúl Límaco/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jan 3 2014 (IPS)

The family of Susana Suárez, a 35-year-old Venezuelan dentist, are still in shock over her death in a traffic accident in May. She and a friend were killed on their way back from the beach, and became just two more of the 130,000 victims who died on Latin America’s roads in 2013.

“I wasn’t prepared for her death,” said her sister, Lilian Suárez, with a catch in her voice. “They were coming home at around 8:00 at night in her car, and they got a flat tire just as they drove onto a bridge. They fell into the Aroa river, at a spot where the water is deep and turbulent.”

It wasn’t the first time that a vehicle fell into the river from that bridge, which is near the town of Tucaras in the western state of Falcón.

“Even a semi-trailer truck fell in once,” on a poorly-lit, badly paved and inadequately signalled spot along the road, “where there is a bridge with a weak railing,” Suárez said.

Added to the 130,000 casualties are “six million people who are injured, including hundreds of thousands who are left with a permanent disability,” Verónica Raffo, a senior infrastructure specialist at the World Bank, told IPS.

There are 19.2 road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants in Latin America, “more than three times the rate of some European countries,” she said, citing the “Global status report on road safety 2013” by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Africa, with 24 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants, and the Middle East-North Africa, with 21 per 100,000, are the other regions losing the most lives to traffic accidents.

In South America, the rate is 21 per 100,000 inhabitants.

“For young people in the region between the ages of 15 and 44, traffic accidents are the main cause of death,” Raffo said from the World Bank offices in Buenos Aires. “It is an extremely significant loss because the state invests a great deal in their health, education and well-being and loses them at their time of greatest productivity for society.”

Bernardo Baranda, Latin America director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told IPS from Mexico City that the lack of road safety “is a major public health problem.”

“Aside from the family and emotional tragedies, the most productive people are dying,” the expert said. “These aren’t accidents, they are preventable occurrences.”

In March 2010, the countries of Latin America signed the United Nations resolution proclaiming 2011-2020 the Decade of Action for Road Safety.

The governments of over 100 countries have committed to cutting down road deaths and injuries, with the aim of reducing by half the predicted increase in global road deaths by 2020. The goal is to save five million lives and five billion dollars in costs.

In Latin America, the projection was 30 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, due to the rise in the number of motor vehicles and the further decline in road safety, and the commitment is to bring the rate down to 15 per 100,000.

“But in many countries, traffic accidents are on the rise, and few have managed to stabilise or reduce the number of victims,” Raffo said.

Argentina, Chile and Uruguay have achieved good results, thanks to “strong political leadership and institutional changes to improve administration and management,” she said.

Five pillars are needed to combat road accidents, she said.

The first is “to improve institutions.” In most countries, responsibility is dispersed and there is a lack of adequate institutions, Raffo said.

Argentina is one model to be followed. In 2008, it created the National Road Safety Agency, with an observatory that monitors policies, campaigns, strategies and results, which has led to significant improvements.

Colombia ended 2013 with the approval of a similar agency, in a country where road accidents represent the second-most frequent cause of violent death, according to the World Bank.

The World Bank and regional institutions report that the countries where traffic accidents have increased since 2011 are Bolivia, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

In the latter two, the increase was as high as 40 percent, in large part due to accidents involving motorcycles, a vehicle that is in dangerous expansion, even used by parents to transport children.

Pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists account for 70 percent of the victims of urban road accidents.

“Working on road safety means working on equality, because the lack of safety mainly affects the most vulnerable users, who are also the most vulnerable segments of society,” Raffo said.

“The second pillar is safe infrastructure, roads and urban mobility; the third is safe vehicles and drivers; the fourth is educational and awareness-raising policies; and the fifth is a key issue: post-accident response, that so many lives depend on,” she said.

“These five pillars make up the focus of a safe system, which is accompanied by the concept of shared responsibility,” she added. “The state leads and coordinates, the drivers obey the rules, car-makers and insurance agencies put a priority on safety, and civil society works to bring about changes in behaviour.”

“A multisectoral strategy is needed, with very clear goals. Actions must be more forceful,” said Baranda, who called for “reliable data, reduced speeds, measures to fight drunk driving, stricter law enforcement, and prevention through education.”

One piece of good news was the creation of the Ibero-American Road Safety Observatory, which Raffo and other experts see as fundamental for the region to have monitoring, management of data, indicators and policies, and a platform for sharing successful experiences.

Although the first three years of the decade have not provided grounds for optimism, the evidence shows that there are some countries that have brought extremely high road fatality rates down, Raffo said.

“We have to stop holding the fatalistic view that because the region grew economically and the number of motor vehicles has increased as a result, the number of deaths has gone up,” she said. “Things don’t have to be this way, it’s possible to change: the case of Argentina and others show it’s possible.”

Besides, developing countries “lose between one and three percent of GDP [to road accidents], in some cases up to four or five percent; that’s an extremely high cost,” she said.

WHO figures indicate that 90 percent of road accidents occur in the developing South, which has only 50 percent of the world’s vehicles.

Bogotá is famous for its vast network of bike lanes. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Dec 17 2013 (IPS)

“I ride 43 km a day and I love it,” said Carlos Cantor in Bogotá, Colombia. “Five years ago I switched my car for a bike,” explained Tomás Fuenzalida from Santiago, Chile.

They are both part of the burgeoning growth of cycling as a transport solution in Latin America.

But in the second-most urbanised region in the world, public sentiment towards bicycles is mixed, with some seeing them as a symbol of low socioeconomic status, says the “Biciciudades 2013” study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) with regard to the expansion of this sustainable means of transport in large and medium-sized cities in the region.

The report, based on surveys and commissioned by the IDB’s Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative, found that between 0.4 and 10 percent of the population in the region use a bicycle as their main means of transportation.

Among the cities studied, Cochabamba in Bolivia heads the list, with 10 percent of the population depending on the bicycle. It is followed by La Paz, Bolivia, and Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, with five percent. All of these are intermediate cities with populations between 100,000 and two million people.

Among the big cities, in Santiago and Mexico City, three percent of the population use bicycles as their main means of transport, followed by Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, and Bogotá, with two percent.

Bogotá is known as a world leader in bike paths, with 376 km of “ciclorutas” or dedicated lanes – one of the most extensive networks in the world – and 120 km of recreational paths. In addition, car traffic is cut on some streets on Sundays and holidays.

Cantor, a 58-year-old communications specialist, took a break from his daily ride to tell Tierramérica about his experience cycling in the city. “You can go fast, because there’s no traffic; on some stretches I even enjoy the greenery and the quiet,” he said. “There’s a lot of solidarity, and you make friends.”

The Secretariat of Mobility of the Capital District estimates that in Bogotá, a city of around eight million people, local residents make about 450,000 bike trips a day. The largest group of bicycle users are manual labourers and factory workers, followed by students from lower-income families.

The recreational bike paths date back to 1974 and are used by an average of one million people every Sunday.

“I love the [recreational] bike paths, I use them every Sunday,” law student Carolina Mejía told Tierramérica. “But I don’t use the ciclorutas, because many of them havent’ been completed yet, and there are stretches that you have to share with cars and buses, and that scares me. Also, it’s not safe.”

Cantor agreed that there are safety concerns: “Every day bicycles are stolen, and there’s a brisk trade in stolen bicycles. In a question of seconds they change the colour with a spray can and your bike disappears.” But he said “people learn to use less pretentious bikes, and they put marks on them so it’s harder to sell them underground.”

Fuenzalida, 44, swapped his car for a bike in the Chilean capital “for my health,” because “you get exercise without paying a single peso in the gym” and because “it is much nicer to ride a bike than to take the subway, for example.”

The public relations specialist not only pedals to work, but also uses the bike to take his kids to school, go to meetings, or visit family members.

For people like him, the Santiago city government is implementing a “master plan” to extend bike lanes to a total of 933 km. The city currently has 215 km of bike lanes, while there are 130 km of paths in adjacent rural municipalities.

Greater Santiago is home to over five million people.

“This is one of the keys to increasing the use of bicycles, and for the city and residents of Santiago to see the benefits in the easing of traffic congestion and for health and the environment,” the Chilean government’s spokesperson Cecilia Pérez told Tierramérica.

The mayor of the Santiago metropolitan area, Juan Antonio Peribonio, told Tierramérica that the plan would be ready in 2022 and that lanes were being built to connect the existing paths. To that will be added a public system to lend out bicycles, in order to promote cycling.

But not everything is positive for cyclists. “Sometimes pedestrians, taxi drivers or car drivers insult me, they call me stupid,” said Laurie Fachaux, a 28-year-old French journalist who has lived in Chile for a few months. “They should get used to the fact that I have a right to be on the streets just like they do.”

Antonia Larraín, 37, believes that part of the problem is the lack of regulations protecting cyclists. “If an accident happens, there is total impunity,” said the psychologist, who pedals 13 km a day to and from work.

Enrique Rojas, 50, who has driven a taxi for 30 years in Santiago, reflected the other side of the coin. “Cyclists are careless, they wind in and out of the cars and don’t respect traffic signals; I have often almost hit one of them because they didn’t stop for a red light or because they were riding at night without any light,” he commented to Tierramérica.

“Cyclists should also have to take out a permit, and bicycles should have licence plates. They shouldn’t just be able to get on their bikes and not worry about anything – they leave their safety in the hands of others,” he complained.

But bicycle use is growing nonetheless, like in greater Mexico City, which has a population of around 20 million.

“It has been a relatively short process,” said Xavier Treviño, director of the Mexican office of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). “The greatest success has been turning cycling into an alternative means of transport, and the main strength has been promotion of cycling,” he told Tierramérica.

The most visible symbol of cycling in the Mexican capital is the Ecobici Individual Transportation System, which since its launch in 2010 has drawn 87,000 users of 4,000 bicycles at 275 stations along 22 km of paths. Users register and pay 31 dollars a year.

Mexico City also has 90 km of separated and non-separated bike lanes. “Systems like Ecobici provide incentives for continued growth. It’s positive inertia. But infrastructure is lacking. All main roads should have infrastructure for bicycles,” Treviño said.

According to Ecociudades 2013, nearly all of the 18 intermediate and six large cities studied have bike lanes, with the exception of Asunción, Paraguay and Manizales, Colombia.

But only Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Asunción, La Paz and Montevideo – the capital of Uruguay – have regulations for urban cycling, as Rojas, the taxi driver, was calling for.

With reporting by Helda Martínez (Bogotá), Emilio Godoy (Mexico City) and Marianela Jarroud (Santiago).

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Participants at the Fifth International Microfinance Forum in Caracas. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

Microfinance is essentially social, but its expansion and evolution towards diversified financial services for those who are excluded from the conventional system has compelled it to develop new codes and practices to reinforce the message that its goal is people – particularly the poor.

The Fifth International Microfinance Forum, held in the Venezuelan capital, studied the enforcement and monitoring of the new Universal Standards for Social Performance Management (USSPM) developed by the sector to ensure that internal practices and relations with clients are consistent with its mission of “changing lives.”

“Providing credit for people at the base of the social pyramid does not necessarily mean you are fulfilling a social mission. That is not enough, reality demands more,” Mario Medina, head of social assets projects for Mibanco in Peru, and one of the speakers at the forum, told IPS.

That extra mile “demands good practices in every activity, from collections and client support to how employees are treated,” said Medina, whose institution is one of the best known in Latin America for its support of microbusinesses, and which grants 90 percent of its loans without collateral.

“It was necessary to emphasise that social outcomes are also part of our income, a result, and that the returns are not only financial,” said Micaela McCandless, coordinator of USSPM activities for Accion, a global organisation that promotes financial inclusion based in Boston, Massachusetts.

McCandless told IPS that “the creation of clear universal standards to monitor social management puts the focus on people and makes all areas of the institution, including the financial area, think about the client, the services he or she needs, and also about employees who are very important within the concept of responsibility.”

The Forum was organised by Bangente, a Venezuelan microcredit organisation that serves people whose poverty level makes them “invisible to commercial institutions and unable to enter them, but who with financial support and training are able to change their lives,” Bangente president Juan Uslar told IPS.

At the Jul. 16 forum, and at later meetings between the international speakers and Venezuelan microcredit operators and clients over the next two days, the microfinance industry exchanged experiences on the introduction of the six Standards, established in 2012.

The Standards were formulated by a consensus of the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF), made up of leaders of all parts of the microfinance sector: donors and multilateral or private investors, technical aid providers, national and regional operators, certification agencies, experts and beneficiaries.

Laura Foose, the director of SPTF, said thanks to the Standards, “microfinance is rebooting,” because “there’s incredible momentum around ensuring that the client is at the centre of our work.”

SPTF was created in 2005 by several international organisations, especially the World Bank’s Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), which says 2.5 billion people lack access to affordable financial services, although they are key to overcoming poverty.

The Standards build on the work of previous initiatives, like the Client Protection Principles promoted by the Smart Campaign to define, measure and certify dual social and financial results. The campaign was launched in 2009 by microfinance leaders in countries of the developing South and the industrialised North.

Adela Sagastume, planning and marketing manager for the Guatemalan microfinance organisation Génesis Empresarial, told IPS “we saw warning signs that made us understand that the sector had entered a very complex phase that demanded instruments for everything to remain connected to our heart: social questions, the people, and the excluded.”

Ninety-two percent of Génesis Empresarial’s credits and services are granted in rural areas, 67 percent of them to women and 62 percent to indigenous people, said Sagastume, who was also a speaker at the Forum.

She pointed out that some microfinance institutions have evolved into formal banks, while the capital markets are now the largest financiers, replacing donors.

“We who were born to eradicate poverty, improve living conditions, and generate positive changes in clients and their businesses, families and communities have always been concerned with the social return on investments. But the Standards give us clear concepts and well-defined goals, and that does a great deal to facilitate management,” she said.

Moreover, “it focuses each member of the institution and its clients on the goals: for whom, and why, everything is done. The board, the human resources department, client services, the finance sector, marketing – they all line up with this focus and that helps create a convergence of efforts and purposes,” said Sagastume.

In the new scenario, Medina said, recalibrating indicators on the social aspects of practices and assessments “is essential…What is not measured, is not improved, and only when you begin to measure practices and results do you open a new and wide spectrum of aspects you can improve for people’s benefit,” he said.

His organisation, Mibanco, has gone even further than the assessment of dual social and financial results by incorporating “triple results” in its practices, goals, measurements, monitoring and assessments.

“We include the environmental component in credits and services, for the institution as well as for the clients, because without it there can be no sustainable development,” he said.

McCandless said the Standards are: “define and monitor social goals; ensure board, management and employee commitment to social goals; treat clients responsibly; design products, services, delivery models and channels that meet client needs and preferences; and balance financial and social performance.”

She stressed the importance of the decision to set the Standards for management practices and not for social results. “Experience shows that if an institution focuses on balancing financial and social performance, good financial and social results are achieved,” she said.

She added that there were “so far no comparable data to monitor and define standards for client impact,” although she ventured a guess that in the future such universal data might exist.

Marcela Máspero, the head of Venezuela’s Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, surrounded by the leaders of affiliated unions. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

Misogyny is the word on the lips of women trade unionists in Latin America when asked what they have had to fight against to win spaces in the leadership bodies of labour unions in the region.

“The problems faced by women workers are greatly aggravated by misogynistic attitudes that further block progress towards their rights and hinder the participation in decision-making posts of those who are working to modify the culture in the labour movement,” said Mexican trade unionist Martha Heredia.

“The participation of Latin American women workers in trade union leadership posts is not in line with the percentage of women who are in the labour force,” said Heredia, chair of the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA) Women’s Committee.

Heredia and the other women labour leaders interviewed by IPS pointed out that only one Latin American woman has reached the presidency of a trade union federation: Bárbara Figueroa, who since 2012 has led Chile’s Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, the country’s biggest union, with over half a million members.

Alexandra Arguedas, who heads TUCA’s gender programme, explained that to boost female participation in the labour movement, the regional confederation demanded at its second ordinary congress in 2012 that its member unions set a 40 percent quota for women in leadership structures.

TUCA is the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) regional organisation for the Americas, and the largest regional workers´ organisation. It was founded in 2008 and represents more than 50 million workers from 53 national trade unions in 23 countries.

Arguedas said from the TUCA offices in Costa Rica that the higher level of participation and representation of women workers was also a pillar of the labour movement’s internal reforms – a process of renewal and adaptation to the new economic and social realities of the structures, tasks and proposals of the trade union movement.

As part of that self-reform process, she said, “participative gender audits are being implemented as a key instrument to make the gender perspective a cross-cutting question throughout the entire trade union movement.”

Training of women is also being given a push, and delegations made up of equal numbers of men and women have started to be required for all activities.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reports that 55 percent of women in the region participate in the labour market, compared to 79 percent of men.

But the gap shrunk significantly between 1990 and 2006, with an 11 percentage point rise in female participation and a one percentage point drop in male participation.

Didice Godinho from Brazil, the founder in 1987 of one of the first women’s commissions in a regional central trade union, said the growing insertion of women in the labour market was behind the increasing incorporation of gender issues on the labour movement agenda, along with the unceasing pressure of women trade unionists.

Godinho, a social researcher who is now secretary of women’s issues in Brazil’s Central Unico dos Trabalhadores, the country’s largest union with more than 23 million members, summed up the challenges facing the objective of gender parity in the 2009 study “Latin American Trade Unionism and Gender Policies”.

Besides the patriarchal culture in Latin America, which is especially deeply-rooted in the labour movement regardless of ideological orientation, Godinho pointed out that there are hurdles to the full participation of women in trade unions, such as their role as mothers, for which the movement must find answers.

She welcomed the fact that one of TUCA’s founding principles is that the labour movement must be inclusive, and that it promotes gender equity in its leadership bodies and all of its activities. But she said that putting equality principles into practice “is a pending challenge.”

That is abundantly clear to Marcela Máspero, the most prominent female trade unionist in Venezuela, who says “it is very complicated to be a woman and a trade unionist in an environment where misogyny is embedded, and where there are doubts that we have the same commitment, willingness and capacity, even if there are no longer doubts that we have the same skills.”

Máspero, the national coordinator of the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (ÚNETE) and a presidential council member of the World Federation of Trade Unions, said gender policies like those fomented by the International Labour Organisation helped women gain space in trade unions.

But the leader of ÚNETE – which has 1.5 million members from the public and private sectors – said she doubted that quotas were the way to achieve greater participation by women in union leadership posts.

“We forge a place for ourselves in the battle, elbow to elbow with men, against the common adversary: the bosses, capital, bureaucracy, and in that battle we don’t need concessions, because women have the same values and capacities as men when it comes to participating and leading,” she said.

She noted that women trade unionists must somehow juggle their commitments as “mothers, wives in many cases, breadwinners, workers and labour or political activists.”

She added that quotas “are merely cosmetic measures if women are not given practical help in handling their multiple roles.”

Máspero said that while the labour movement in Latin America is mainly in the hands of the left, “it behaves in a retrograde manner in terms of gender, and is still dominated by a patriarchal, machista culture.

“I don’t see women heading the labour movement in Cuba, Argentina or Brazil – only in Chile has the rhetoric been translated into practice,” she said.

Heredia, who is also one of the leaders of the Mexican Telephone Workers Union and is involved in gender policy questions in her country and in ITUC, said women leaders have the challenge of “strengthening the role of female workers not only in the labour movement but also in collective bargaining.

“We must be in the vanguard in vindicating women’s rights, especially the right to decent work, which includes a living wage, social security coverage, bilateral negotiations and a gender perspective as a cross-cutting issue,” she said.

Luz Maldonado contracted Chagas disease from contaminated fruit juice in her urban upper-middle class Caracas neighbourhood. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Dec 21 2012 (IPS)

Chagas disease, the third most serious infectious disease in Latin America, is developing a “new face” and moving into urban areas, while a new treatment may offer hope for millions of sufferers.

The new face of the disease is exemplified by Luz Maldonado, a 47-year-old teacher from Venezuela. Maldonado contracted Chagas disease by drinking contaminated fruit juice, in an outbreak that infected 103 people at a school in Chacao, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Caracas. One child died, and the lives of the other people infected have been changed forever.

Micro-epidemics caused by contaminated food are a new phenomenon. And, according to the scientific sources consulted for this story, the disease is even more virulent when it is contracted this way, because thousands of parasites enter the bloodstream all at once. The largest of these incidents were reported in 2005 in Brazil, in December 2007 in Caracas, and in 2010 in the nearby town of Chichiriviche de la Costa.

Maldonado now lives with headaches, rashes, joint problems, memory loss, tachycardia, insomnia and depression, largely due to the side effects of the drugs she must take to fight the parasites.

Chagas disease is caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, a protozoan (single-celled) parasite that is transmitted by blood-sucking insects. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it affects between 17 and 20 million people in Latin America.

In addition, almost 25 percent of the region’s population is at risk of contracting the disease, which kills at least 50,000 people a year.

According to WHO, Chagas disease is one of the world’s 13 most neglected tropical diseases, the third most serious infectious disease in Latin America, after HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and the parasitic infection with the highest morbidity and greatest socioeconomic impact in the region. The only country in Latin America to be declared free of the insect that spreads the disease, in mid-2012, is Uruguay.

However, all statistics on the disease are approximate, because “many cases are never diagnosed,” Belkisyolé Alarcón de Nola, the director of immunology at Venezuela’s Institute of Tropical Medicine (IMT), told Tierramérica*.

People whose infection goes undiagnosed either do not develop symptoms, or the symptoms are attributed to other illnesses. They may die decades later of heart failure or a stroke that is never linked to Chagas disease, explained Nola, a medical doctor and researcher who coordinates the follow-up of Chagas patients in Venezuela.

Today, “the image of Chagas disease as a rural disease of the poor has been dispelled,” she said. “We can have cases at any altitude, latitude or stratum, and we need to change the way we confront its vectors.”

Urban sprawl has invaded the natural habitat of the disease’s vectors, said Nola. Caracas, located in a valley at an altitude of 1,000 meters, “has these sort of green fingers that extend into it, and these are the areas that are most accessible for the vectors to reach people’s homes,” she explained.

Logging and the clearing of forests by the slash-and-burn technique have left little food for the “chipos”, as Triatoma infestans, the insect that spreads the disease, is commonly known in Venezuela. It goes by various names in different countries of the region, including vinchuca, chirimacha and chichi, and is referred to as the “kissing bug” in English.

“We have vectors everywhere and even more so with climate change, because the warmer the earth becomes, the greater the reproduction of the insects,” said Nola.

Transmission most commonly occurs when insects infected with the parasites bite humans, ingest their blood, and then immediately defecate. Chagas disease is contracted if the parasites in the insect feces enter the organism through a break in the skin, such as when people scratch the bites, or through other openings, such as the eyes, when people rub them.

In Caracas, there is also a secondary, “poor” vector, Panstrongyilus geniculatus, “which is clumsy and takes longer to defecate,” said Nola.

But this “poor vector” is adapting. “Drawn by the lights in homes in urban and peri-urban areas, it enters through kitchen windows, wanders over utensils and food and defecates where it pleases,” she said.

In the transition to oral infection through contaminated food, “there have been many small outbreaks, many of which have gone undiagnosed.” However, there has been no other outbreak like the one in Chacao, given its fully urban location and the large number of people infected, after drinking guava juice contaminated with infected insect feces at the municipal school.

There are two strains of the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite that cause Chagas disease. One is found from Mexico to the north of South America, and the other from Brazil to the southern tip of the continent. The first primarily damages the heart, while the second also damages the esophagus and colon.

The disease has three stages. In the first, acute stage, symptoms can be very marked or very mild and easily confused with other diseases. The second, known as the intermediate or latent stage, lasts a variable period of time – sometimes many years or even decades – and is asymptomatic.

In the final, chronic stage, “the myocardial tissue is destroyed and does not regenerate, and is replaced with fibrous tissue. The heart increases in size and no longer contracts effectively; it pumps less blood into the lungs, and cardiac insufficiency gradually sets in,” explained Nola.

There are only two drugs indicated by WHO to eradicate the parasites: nifurtimox, introduced in 1960, and benznidazole, developed in 1974.

But eradication is only partial when the parasites have lodged into deep tissue and in the chronic stage of the disease.

Moreover, the side effects of these drugs cause collateral damage. “The ones that are most feared are the neurotoxic effects, because they cause peripheral neuropathy symptoms, such as sensations of extreme cold or heat, extreme sensitivity of the feet, and severe headaches,” said Nola.

But the promising findings of two Venezuelan researchers, Julio Urbina and Gustavo Benaim, have led Argentina and Bolivia to conduct clinical trials based on their experiments, while in Venezuela, “we hope to conduct a pilot study as well,” she reported.

Benaim, head of the cell signaling and parasite biochemistry laboratory at the state-run Institute of Advanced Studies, told Tierramérica that the goal is “to attack the parasite without affecting the human being, like current treatment methods do,” as well as “to develop drugs for the chronic stage, which are currently non-existent.”

The study is based on a specific property of Trypanosoma cruzi: its membranes do not contain cholesterol, but rather ergosterol, another sterol. “If you eliminate the ergosterol, which is indispensible for it, you eliminate the parasite,” he explained.

There are drugs that block the synthesis of ergosterol, such as posaconazole, which is approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration, although only for the treatment of fungal infections.

The researchers linked this fact with another clinical observation: Chagas patients whose arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) was treated with amiodarone showed substantial improvement. “When it is applied to the parasites it is lethal for them,” Benaim enthusiastically reported in his laboratory.

Amiodarone is already used to treat arrhythmia, and 30 percent of Chagas sufferers in the United States receive it. It is not completely harmless, since it contains iodine, but its side effects are much milder than those of current treatments, said Benaim.

“We studied the mechanism of action of posaconazole and amiodarone; both of them were already known to be sterol inhibitors, but we demonstrated that amiodarone also alters the calcium regulation of the parasites,” he reported.

“Combining them boosts their effect, makes it possible to lower dosages, and cuts down on side effects,” he added.

Another new antiarrhythmic drug, dronedarone, which contains less iodine and is more easily eliminated, was also tested in their laboratory and “proved to be very successful. It is more powerful and acts more rapidly” in destroying the parasite, said Benaim.

An article on the new treatment was published in October in Nature Reviews Cardiology. In addition to Chagas disease, it can also be effective against other diseases caused by parasites, such as leishmaniasis.

“A good sterol inhibitor can bring an end to these parasitic diseases, which are viewed as diseases of the poor, and are therefore neglected,” stressed the Venezuelan researcher. In the case of diseases like these, “it isn’t profitable to conduct research into treatments for them. That is the sad reality.”
* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Rousseff and Lula. Credit: Wilson Dias/ABR

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Oct 7 2012 (IPS)

Following the extreme neoliberalism of the Washington Consensus, which gave rise to a lost decade in social terms, Latin America is experimenting more successfully with a home-grown formula: the Brasilia Consensus, which combines the market economy and social inclusion.

Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, coined the term “Brasilia Consensus” in contrast with the Washington Consensus. It is also called “Lulaism” after former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “the Brazilian model.” And it has a growing following in Latin America among governments of both left and right.

“The Brazilian model has had a very positive impact as an example of how things can be done differently, by promoting growth without relinquishing social equity,” José Rivera, the permanent secretary of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic System (SELA), told IPS.

He said Latin America and the Caribbean “should share the regional aspiration of integration and be united in the common goal of reducing asymmetries and making progress in repaying major outstanding social debts.”

Rivera said there were “positive examples, especially home-grown ones, of governments that deal efficiently with the unpaid social debts in the region, where one out of three Latin Americans live in poverty and nearly 90 million people survive on less than a dollar a day.”

In an interview with IPS, Shifter said the features of the Brasilia Consensus “remain intact and valid,” although Lula left office in January 2011 and the international and regional contexts have worsened.

“The model has not changed, with its three central concepts: economic growth, social equity and democratic governance,” he said.

Its validity is confirmed by its spread as a governance guide for many countries in the region, whatever the political ideology of their presidents. This contrasts with the decline of other, more radical, proposals led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in the first decade of this century.

The Brazilian model takes the opposing view to the package of measures imposed by Washington-based international financial institutions and power brokers on Latin America during the foreign debt crisis that broke out in the early 1980s, and during the 1990s.

The 10-point Washington Consensus, summarising neoliberal ideology, enforced harsh adjustments to eliminate the fiscal deficit, including the redirection of spending, financial and monetary liberalisation, tax hikes, opening of markets and investments, and massive privatisation, in order to repay debt and establish a new basis for economic growth.

In practice, far from generating growth, the reforms fuelled regional deindustrialisation and caused GDP to fall for nearly a decade, marked by financial crises, several of which were of global scope.

But the worst aspect was its impact on people. During the so-called lost decade, all forms of social spending were cut, especially in education, health, housing and aid for the most vulnerable sectors, while labour conditions also worsened.

As a result, poverty and extreme poverty increased, shanty towns grew in the cities, and the informal economy and informal labour expanded, among other negative impacts.

During his eight years in power (2003-2011) Lula established a different model, based on macroeconomic and fiscal stability, an autonomous monetary authority and free exchange rates, added to aggressive industrial and domestic production policies.

Another priority of the Brazilian model is social inclusion, with wage raises, formal job creation and high spending on policies to eradicate hunger, reduce poverty, improve education and health and redistribute income across society.

The guiding principle is democracy, along with the extension of human rights, incentives for citizen participation and organisation from the grassroots up.

Shifter said Lula’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, “decided to keep a lower global profile than Lula, but the Brasilia Consensus model has not been affected.” She has “a different leadership style and other priorities,” he said.

Rousseff has implemented different policies to stimulate the economy and cushion the effect of the economic recession in the countries of the industrialised North, especially Europe. She has also taken care to reinforce social programmes in this unfavourable new scenario.

A recent statement by Rousseff underscores her position. “What I want, and what I fight for, is for Brazil to become the sixth social power,” she said, now that her country has become the sixth largest economy in the world and is heading for fifth position.

Among the Latin American countries whose governments take the Brasilia Consensus as their guide, with variations, Shifter mentioned Chile, Colombia, El Salvador and Uruguay. Other administrations adopt certain elements, while he described Argentina and Paraguay – until its president Fernando Lugo was ousted in June – as “hybrids” between Lulaism and Chavism.

He particularly mentioned the case of Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, who chose Lulaism over Chávez’s Bolivarian model, initiating the latter’s regional decline.

He also found it remarkable that Henrique Capriles, the opposition candidate in Venezuela’s elections on Sunday Oct. 7, “stressed that Lula was his model, which his platform confirmed.”

Sunday’s elections in Venezuela will determine whether the era of President Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution will continue or come to an end. The result will have an impact not only on this country but on the rest of Latin America.

In the first decade of this century, Latin America saw “a nontraumatic epochal change, sometimes manifested as constituent assemblies (to rewrite a constitution), which sought to respond to the demands of the majority and bring about political change. Chávez is its most radical expression,” said Manuel Felipe Sierra, an analyst from the traditional left and a critic of the Venezuelan president.

“This trend, which Chávez claims to have authored although it has roots and leadership in each country, has already passed, and most governments have taken a more conventional democratic route with left-wing overtones,” he told IPS.

Bolivia and Ecuador are other examples of this current, which has as its political integration mechanism the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), led by Venezuela and made up of eight Latin American and Caribbean countries, including Cuba and Nicaragua.

But the regional reform movement has another major reference point, less ideological and radical: the process led by former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), whose programme was based on economic growth with social inclusion and a strengthening of democracy.

Both self-described left-wing and right-wing governments have expressed their support for the Brazilian model, including Venezuela’s opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, who declares himself an “admirer and imitator” of Lula.

Capriles, supported by a variegated mix of 29 groups ranging from right to left, points as proof to the Zero Hunger plan he implemented as governor of the northwestern state of Miranda, modelled on Brazil’s anti-hunger strategy.

Most of the latest polls tip Chávez as the favourite to be re-elected for a third time. But growing support for his rival has made the election result uncertain.

Chávez’s style of diplomacy in Latin America has been one of confrontation with right-wing presidents, which polarised countries, governments and summits ever since he took power in February 1999, said experts consulted by IPS, including several close to the president.

“The export of the Bolivarian model, supported by the abusive use of Venezuela’s oil wealth, as well as Chávez´s style, are in decline, whatever happens on Sunday,” said Sierra.

“Furthermore, there is ‘Chávez fatigue’ in the region because of the behaviours and manners that stress even his allies, and that ceased to be useful for the collective interest,” he said.

But Roy Chaderton, Venezuela’s ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS), said that if Chávez exits the stage, “it would threaten Latin American independence,” especially from the United States, which Chávez refers to as “the empire.”

Chaderton said Venezuela had created in the region “a diversity of dependences, that make us more independent of others and more interdependent among ourselves.”

“In Latin America we created oxygen valves that help us breathe more freely, and that would close off” if Chávez loses, he said.

“These are not just any elections, for Venezuela or for the continent, because of the ideological primacy and polarisation promoted by Chávez, and because if he loses the elections it would confirm the demise of the left-wing neo-populist experiment he was trying to export,” said Teresa Romero, an expert in international relations.

In Romero’s view, even if Chávez is re-elected, “the regional climate has shifted towards the centre,” and within it “Brazil has won the leadership role, with progressive positions that are less strident and more efficient.”

Michael Shifter, the head of the Inter-American Dialogue, a U.S. think tank, said if Chávez left the government it would have “an enormous effect on the regional political scenario, because he has been the most aggressive and polarising voice in the hemisphere over the last decade.”

If change comes to Venezuela, “ideological conflicts will not disappear, but they will be less acute and better channeled,” he told IPS. In his view, Capriles would maintain normal relations with left-wing governments like those of Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua, “but not, as the phrase went in the 1990s, such carnal relationships.”

In addition to ALBA, the Chávez government promoted the foundation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), made up of the region’s 12 countries, and the oil aid organisation Petrocaribe. It also helped create the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) as an alternative to the OAS, which it considers to be dominated by Washington.

In August the government began a process of withdrawal from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which hands down binding rulings on human rights violations committed by states. The only precedent for withdrawal from the OAS human rights court was that of Peru, 20 years ago, during the regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

Capriles announced that, if he were elected, one of his first steps would be to reverse the process of withdrawal from the Inter-American Court. He also said Venezuela would rejoin the Andean Community, the regional bloc that this country belonged to since the 1960s, which the Chávez administration pulled out of in 2011. It is currently made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Chávez’s efforts in the past six years were directed towards Venezuela becoming a full member of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade bloc, which he finally achieved in June, after Paraguay’s temporary suspension from the group, made up also of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.

“These are changes of alliances based on political and ideological foundations, not on economic reasoning or geographical location,” Sierra said.

An 85-year-old woman learning how to read in Isla Borracha, Anzoátegui in 2004 thanks to the Venezuelan government’s literacy drive. Credit: Franklin Reyes/J.Rebelde CC BY 2.0

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Oct 3 2012 (IPS)

Whoever wins Venezuela’s presidential elections on Sunday Oct. 7 will do so as a result of the idea of social inclusion, which has become dominant in an electorate whose social and political features have changed radically in the last decade.

“People have changed and now they want to participate and get involved in public debate; they have matured as citizens and in democratic terms, in a political renewal that is seen above all in the popular sectors,” said Oscar Schémel, the head of the Hinterlaces polling firm that predicts the reelection of President Hugo Chávez.

“Revaluing social inclusion and the social programmes, and fostering the belief that he will put into effect promises that were not fulfilled due to the government’s inefficiency allow Henrique Capriles to benefit from the support of a cross-section of all social levels of the electorate,” said Saúl Cabrera, vice president of a polling company that predicts a victory for the opposition candidate, Capriles.

Chávez won the 1998 elections riding on the demise of the two-party model that had governed Venezuela since 1959, said Manuel Felipe Sierra, an analyst of the traditional left. “Now a counter-power has emerged, a new generation that has taken up the value of inclusion, interest in the public good and the social equity programmes,” said Sierra, a critic of Chávez, who has been in power since 1999.

Capriles, a 40-year-old lawyer, entered politics as a lawmaker when Chávez first took office as president, and his candidacy unites the opposition from left to right. He is not offering a modification of the current model, but what he calls “a rectification,” to make it more efficient, conciliatory and democratic, said analysts consulted by IPS.

“There is majority support for social inclusion, and that explains the support for the president, in spite of the discontent with his administration,” said Schémel.

He said “Capriles’ basic offer is to continue the model, but more efficiently,” and that his firm’s studies show that “he is not a threat to the model of inclusion and social programmes.”

Capriles does not generate rejection, he said, “but neither is he a convincing candidate, as he is seen as a technocrat.”

In a poll carried out by Hinterlaces between Sept. 10 and 22, six out of 10 respondents said Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution had helped Venezuela.” On this basis, the president would be reelected with a margin of at least nine to 12 percent, although Capriles is narrowing the gap in the polls.

Sierra said Capriles’ rise, shown by polls not directly linked to the government, is due to his proposal of democratic social inclusion rather than socialism, evolution rather than revolution, and conciliation rather than confrontation.

In these elections, the government “is not facing a diehard rightwing opposition or capitalism or the empire, but an alternative that, while not ideologically compatible with Chávez’s discourse, is not entirely opposed,” he said.

In his campaign, Chávez describes Capriles as a member of the haut bourgeoisie, pointing to his well-to-do family’s business interests, “fronting” for the empire (the United States) and the traditional political leadership. He makes his supporters and ministers call Capriles “el majunche,” a slang insult meaning roughly “of little account.”

Capriles served two terms as mayor of a municipality in Caracas and afterwards became governor of the northwestern state of Miranda, a social and economic microcosm of the country. He defines himself as progressive and centre-left, and says his government would be modelled after that of former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

On Monday Oct. 1, Capriles told foreign correspondents that the president had awakened “great hopes among the people for the end of social exclusion,” but had then betrayed these hopes with poor administration and corruption.

He also said that “those who have not reflected on and learned from what has happened in this country since 1998, and want to return to the past, have understood nothing,” and he repeated that if he is elected, he will strengthen the so-called social missions promoted by Chávez since 2004, even giving them legal standing.

The missions are programmes created to reduce the high levels of poverty in this oil-rich country. They include nutritional, health, educational, employment and housing plans.

These social programmes consolidated “a religious connection” between the poor and the president, and “turned Chavismo into a civil-military culture,” Schémel said.

According to official figures, between 1999 and 2010 the poverty rate plunged from 49 to 28 percent in this country of nearly 30 million people.

Capriles’ candidacy is supported by a heterogeneous mix of traditional parties, neo-rightwing groups, former guerrilla groups, progressive fronts with regional leaders, and personalities that have seceded from Chavismo.

Cabrera said that “the excitement is on Capriles’ side,” manifested in mass rallies, and is due to the candidate’s having broken with “the class struggle concept that Chávez relied on for his electoral victories after 1998.” He said the president “leverages the full weight of the state, but does not rule the street.”

Furthermore, he said, Capriles has concrete works to show, especially his social programmes in Miranda, where part of Caracas is located, such as his “Zero Hunger” plan, and his effective responses to natural disasters.

Cabrera’s polling firm, Consultores 21, was the first to tip Capriles to win in a “very tight” contest. Their poll published in the last week of September attributes 48.9 percent of voter intentions to Capriles, compared with 45.7 percent for Chávez.

Three other polls released on Sunday Sept. 30, the last day they could be published, favoured Capriles with up to 53 percent of voter intentions, although most firms predicted that Chávez would win, but with a much narrower gap between the candidates.

Another factor, said Cabrera, is that Chávez managed to offer something new in each of the previous elections. “But after 13 years, he has nothing new left to offer,” he said.

The 58-year-old president’s struggle with cancer since last year has also affected the campaign, although it has been underplayed, Cabrera said.

“Images of Chávez looking tired and puffy, with bags under his eyes,” are in contrast with “the electorate’s ideal image of him,” he said.

Arely Domínguez, right, and other members of El Guapo at the inauguration of the bankomunales exhibit. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Oct 2 2012 (IPS)

“We were used to losing, so a group of us said to ourselves: let’s lose something here,” said Carmen Caravallo, describing the start of a “bankomunal”, a self-managed microfinance fund based on investment, in her rural community in eastern Venezuela.

Ten years later, Caravallo and the other members of the bankomunal in Llanada de Puerto Santo, in the state of Sucre, “are getting used to winning,” she told IPS. “Now we are a family, and we have learned to be responsible; we have improved our lives with money that belongs to us, and strange as it may seem, we feel we are very much in charge,” she added.

Bankomunales, present in 14 countries on four continents, are the brainchild of Venezuelan social entrepreneur Salomón Raydán, who demonstrated that the poor can be self-financed, after Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, the father of microcredit, had shown that they could be financed.

The 54-year-old Caravallo, who is in mourning after the recent death of one of her three children, said the road has been “slow, hard and paved with mistrust.” But after three years “people began to make a profit, and saw that we were reliable and responsible.”

In her community of 1,000 people, in one of the poorest states in the country, she is treasurer of the local bankomunal, which began with 20 members and now has 107 as well as “a long waiting list to join.”

Similar experiences have been repeated in 180 bankomunales throughout Venezuela, which have a combined total of 25,465 members who contributed a minimum of 2.30 dollars to become both investors and clients.

Raydán, a philosopher and sociologist by training, told IPS the idea was born 15 years ago, out of his experiences as an adviser for small farmer financial assistance programmes and from what he learned about the way of life of poor rural communities.

Poverty is defined by the irregularity of income, more than the lack of it, he said. “Insecure and fluctuating resources do not allow the poor to face spending that is needed for survival, and so poverty takes root,” said Raydán, the head of the Foundation for Rural Finance (FUNDEFIR).

“Eighty percent of poor people in the world have access to credit through informal systems,” mostly self-managed in their communities, he said.

“But these sources are insecure and they do not add value for their users. They need to be adapted to offer more transparency, training, security and efficiency, so they become more formal, although that doesn’t mean they need to be regulated according to the rules of the state that has excluded them,” said Raydán.

These mutual credit associations began to operate in 1997, granting multiple and variable loans, in contrast with traditional systems that make rotating loans of fixed amounts, which are widespread in poor areas of the developing South.

Furthermore, “their members are not just savers, but investors; they are active, not passive,” he emphasised.

“Only 2.5 percent of the poor population of the world has access to banking services, and microcredit systems serve 105 million people, while the demand for microfinance is two billion people,” he said.

Venezuelan microinvestors acquire a certificate of assets worth 2.30 dollars. No one can acquire more than 15 percent of the total assets, members of different bankomunales who have arrived in Caracas for a photo exhibit about the system tell IPS enthusiastically.

Members are the leading lights of the show launched in September in a gallery in the capital city, where powerful images are shown of open-air meetings or gatherings in borrowed spaces – meetings of credit committees and activities involving the granting or payment of loans.

There are also images of members on cultivated land in both rural and urban areas, grocery stores set up in homes, other small shops, home renovations, sewing or repair workshops, and minifactories producing different products. Other members are depicted next to children wearing new school uniforms, or holding up new kitchen utensils.

Credits are granted for “any legal purpose,” in general to be repaid in three to 18 months, with interest decided by each organisation. Loan amounts vary: a new association may only lend up to 100 dollars, while a more established one may have a ceiling of 2,000 dollars.

All decisions are made at well-attended meetings, and the credit committee gives its decision on each request within 24 hours. “We know each other and we know everyone’s payment capacity; we work on trust,” said Arely Domínguez, head of the bankomunal in El Guapo, a village that was reborn from tragedy.

In December 1999 a flood burst the dam near the village, located 125 kilometres from Caracas, in the north-central state of Miranda. The low-lying land in El Guapo, home to some 3,000 people, was flooded.

FUNDEFIR was one of the organisations to come to their aid, and a year later Domínguez and 34 others founded their bankomunal, which now has 117 members and makes an average of 10 loans a week, totalling 6,000 dollars.

First of all, like everyone else involved in the initiative, they received training and advice from FUNDEFIR. “We learned how to balance our accounts, write budgets, do audits, assess risks and use computers,” said Domínguez, a 49-year-old schoolteacher with two daughters.

Up to August, bankomunales had granted 275,631 credits to 84,884 people, for a total 3.6 million dollars at the official exchange rate.

In El Guapo, the bankomunal operates in the building of a cultural association, but most of the associations meet in members’ houses. Officers are elected at general meetings and work on an honorary basis.

The vast majority of members are women, but the number of men is increasing. One-third of loans are requested for consumption, one-third for enterprises and one-third for emergencies, especially health problems.

Every loan is backed up to at least 40 percent by certificates of assets of the member and his or her sponsors, “to be in the safe zone,” a mantra repeated by the members. “There are hardly ever any problems, but on the second default, they are out,” Caravallo said.

Profits are calculated monthly and distributed to the members annually. “One of the principles of bankomunales is distribution rather than accumulation,” said Raydán. “The profits have little economic importance, but a great deal of educational importance.”

It is “a financial education programme, not a microfinance programme, and the profits help generate a sense of entrepreneurship,” he said.

The model has spread to Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Peru, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Portugal, Senegal and Indonesia.

The Spanish version, Comunidades Autofinanciadas, won the 2009 prize for the best microfinance programme in Europe, while FUNDEFIR’s system was voted in 2010 one of the 25 social projects in the world most likely to be globalised, by Ashoka Globaliser, an international foundation that promotes social enterprise.

FUNDEFIR has financial support from Total Oil and Gas Venezuela, a subsidiary of the transnational French oil corporation Total, which works in the east of the country.

Diana Vilera, the sustainable development manager, told IPS the company “seeks to promote projects that are a tool for people to be lifted out of poverty.”

“Oil companies take a lot out of the planet and the environment, and we have a duty to contribute whatever we can, beyond the business angle,” she said.

Nora Castañeda, in front of a sign containing one of Banmujer’s slogans about small-scale loans in a socialist, feminist economy. Credit: Raúl Límaco/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Aug 9 2012 (IPS)

“Our raison d’etre is incorporating women in development, and especially in the benefits of development,” says Nora Castañeda, an economist who has headed the Banmujer bank in Venezuela since it was founded in 2001.

Castañeda, who describes herself as a socialist and feminist, has dedicated her life to defending women’s rights. And she continues to fight for that cause in the Banco de Desarrollo de la Mujer (Women’s Development Bank – Banmujer), which she defines as “a different kind of bank,” in the broader context of the world’s microcredit institutions.

Her lengthy career includes founding the Women’s Studies Centre at the Central University of Venezuela and coordinating the participation of the local NGOs in the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, in 1995.

Banmujer, the only public bank of its kind in the world – which targets women, offering them services completely free of charge – has granted 150,000 small loans for a total of 10.7 million dollars.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: What characterises Banmujer as a microcredit institution?

A: There are several kinds of microfinance institutions, but Banmujer is different from all of them, because making a profit is not our raison d’etre. But there is a more important aspect as well: incorporating women in development, and especially in the benefits of development. And you can’t do that with microcredit alone.

Q: How did the idea emerge?

A: The road to Beijing, and the conference itself, were the starting point. Women’s organisations concluded there that if something was in threat, it was the economic rights of women, and that without them, there were no human rights.

If the economic foundations of society do not change for women, especially the poorest women, there is no empowerment, and gender parity laws remain a paper promise.

Q: So microcredit is a means to an end?

A: Definitely. The bank was not set up just to grant microloans. If we merely did that, we would simply be reproducing the triple shift that women face (childcare and housework, outside employment, and community involvement), although only one of these is paid, and badly.

Incorporating women in the benefits of the economy will not just be brought about by means of microcredit, but by improving our quality of life, by strengthening family solidarity, and through work, honesty and sharing.

We started to work in that direction, with a very collective learning process, very South-South, very characteristic of our Americas. We had to learn and unlearn at the same time. There are values that are anti-values, and we had to think differently, at the risk of being seen as backwards, full of complexes, or marginalised.

Q: Could you mention an example of something you had to unlearn?

A: We had to unlearn what a bank is, because we had been told that it was a financial institution whose goal is to make a profit. We discussed the model that we wanted a great deal, and decided that we had to prioritise and focus on the poorest women, and address the feminisation of poverty.

Q: What model did that process come up with?

A: The solidarity model, based on cooperation and mutual aid. A model based on the idea that the people who manage and administer are public servers of others. It wasn’t easy, we made mistakes. Your proposals aren’t always understood from the outside; things don’t always work the way you think they will.

It’s a new path, and there has been trial and error, in practice. And there is also the very important time variable: these are slow processes, and it is hard to adapt and understand how things work.

Q: What brings women to the bank?

A: We decided that it was the bank that had to go to the women. We set up small teams of local women, with one leader, in each state.

We also established strategic alliances with organised communities, other state institutions, women’s organisations, and churches.

We go to the communities, we offer support, we ask for a simple working plan, and, first and foremost, we offer training. All of the women must attend at least three workshops, because they could receive money and not be successful in their endeavours due to reasons connected to the poverty in which they live.

Poverty cannot be fought only with money. To overcome it, you need to work with solidarity-based organisations, which can even be families themselves. Men can be involved, as long as the coordinator is a woman and men are a minority. The thing is, even in that situation, the men take charge, and the women accept it, because it is the way things usually work.

Q: What is the aim of the training?

A: We are trying to turn the women into grassroots economists; we want them to ask themselves academic-style questions, such as what to produce, how, where, when and for whom, as part of a two-way exchange of knowledge, which we all have, but not in a systematised format.

We also replace market analysis with a participative community diagnosis of the needs of the neighbourhood and community, or we carry out a cost analysis, which incorporates women as workers and sets an adequate amount of surplus value.

The aim is for people to be economists, because it is too serious a question to just leave to economists.

There is also follow-up and technical support, and it is all free of charge. That also sets us apart.

Q: How many people has Banmujer benefited?

A: Directly: about 150,000 people, 10 percent of whom were men. Behind each person there is a family with an average of five members.

Q: How does the loan process work?

A: We have managed some 467 million bolivars (10.7 million dollars at the official exchange rate) in 11 years. The support given provides ongoing results.

We have granted 150,000 loans. But this has indirectly favoured a large number of other women, as the loans have a multiplication effect in the surrounding community.

That is the aim of the workshops. Our mission is to learn, and to be recognised as something positive that is worth emulating.

Microcredit is a tool, and the cross-cutting aspect is a change of values. We told the president (Hugo Chávez): microcredit is an excuse for reaching women, and with them, through them, and for them, organising ourselves as a people. And he told me: ok, but you give them the credit (laughs).

Along the way, we decided to prioritise agriculture, including urban and peri-urban, to address two overlapping phenomena: the feminisation of the countryside and of poverty.

Q: What are the conditions of credit and payment?

A: The loans are for 48 months and are 6,000 bolivars (1,400 dollars) per person for groups of up to nine people. The interest rate ranges from zero to six percent. There are no profits – it’s non-profit, but the aim is also to be non-loss.

We are a bank subsidised by the state, which is unique in the case of women, to help meet the Millennium Development Goals (a series of development and anti-poverty targets adopted by U.N. members in 2000), including the elimination of poverty and the empowerment of women. We maximise cost savings as much as possible, so that our balance sheets never reflect a loss.

This way, the women receive more and more money. Those who pay back the loans are given a new one; that’s why they are all keen on keeping up on their payments. The women are constantly paying back their loans; sometimes instead of making the entire payment, they pay just part of it, but later on they catch up.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 27 2012 (IPS)

“It changed our lives” is a sentiment frequently heard from commuters who use Metrocable, the aerial cable car system that connects one of the poor hillside neighbourhoods in the Venezuelan capital with the city’s public transport system.

The Metrocable system that has connected the hilltop neighbourhood of San Agustín with the Caracas metro since January 2010 is the second mass transit aerial tramway in Latin America, after the one that has been operating in Medellín, Colombia since 2006. And in July 2011, a third system began to operate in Rio de Janeiro, linking hillside favelas or shantytowns with the rest of the city.

“Metrocable has boosted our dignity,” María Eugenia Ramírez, 51, a cable car security guard who lives in San Agustín, told IPS. The poorest part of her neighbourhood lines a steep slope in the hills that surround the valley where Caracas is located at 1,000 metres above sea level.

“I wasn’t prepared to walk through the air,” says Ramírez, who has seven grandchildren and has already lost two of her four children.

Naiger Hernández and Doralis Viera also remember their first vertigo-inducing rides in the cabins that carry commuters between the system’s five stations in nine minutes.

“In the cabins you run into people you didn’t know and people you knew before but had lost touch with. Now we have that day-to-day contact again, neighbourly relations,” said Ramírez, one of the neighbourhood leaders, at a weekly meeting of community councils held to organise activities around Metrocable.

Since 2006, the community councils have been the key component of “people’s power”, promoted by the government of populist left-wing President Hugo Chávez, who has been in office since 1999.

There are already 35 community councils in the district, and the plan is to reach 38, Alfredo Mariño, an architect who coordinates the San Agustín integral development plan, which is associated with a Brazil-Venezuela presidential agreement signed in 2009, told IPS.

The plan is aimed at creating a methodology for tackling the issue of informal or unplanned neighbourhoods, in contrast with “the ‘formal city’,” he said.

“These neighbourhoods are urban manifestations of a highly unequal system, which relegates large segments of the population to living conditions that at times are subhuman, where they have to subsist by creating their own habitat,” Mariño said.

The hilly southern part of the neighbourhood, San Agustín del Sur, was the site of the first self-construction project in Caracas, and offers favourable conditions for implementing a broad experimental multi-project plan like the one coordinated by Mariño, or a new transportation system such as Metrocable.

The neighbourhood, which is home to just over 45,000 people, has a population density far lower than that of other poor districts lining the hillsides. It also preserves part of the original greenery, and its soils are relatively uneroded.

At the same time, Mariño pointed out, the neighbourhood has “a strong urban cultural and social tradition.” San Agustín was settled mainly by people from a region with a large black population, which helped strengthen the community’s sense of identity, in its efforts to reinforce the dignity of a marginalised culture.

Before the cable car system began to operate, local commuters had to climb down hundreds of steps every day, or ride in jeeps that operate as collective transport on the neighbourhood’s steep roads, to reach the metro station or the largely unregulated system of often rickety buses and vans that wind their way through the chaotic traffic in Caracas.

“I used to get up at 5:00 in the morning to reach work at 8:00. Now I rise at 6:30, and I don’t come home exhausted from climbing the stairs,” said Viera.

San Agustín del Sur “is an enclave isolated by different barriers, a kind of ghetto,” said Mariño. “We are seeking to replace the exclusion with inclusion on multiple levels.”

“Inclusion” is a buzzword frequently used by experts and users of Metrocable when they talk about what the system has achieved – and which aspects of the project have gone unfulfilled, such as the promise of social services like day care centres and shops that were to be given a space in the stations – now that it transports an average of 15,000 people a day.

Since June 2011, riders have had to pay for a ticket, at a price equivalent to 23 cents of a dollar, integrated with the metro ticket system.

“One condition set by President Chávez was that the construction project had to include the local people from the neighbourhood, as did Metrocable itself: all of its workers are from San Agustín,” said cable car operator Jenny Álvarez, a 35-year-old mother of two.

Ramírez stressed that “many fathers and young guys who were using drugs were given the opportunity to work on the construction project, and now they are men leading decent lives.”

She added that “the community takes care of Metrocable; no one touches the installations.”

Caracas, a city of five million people, was the most violent capital in the Americas in 2011, with a murder rate of 108 per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations. Most of the homicides occur in poor neighbourhoods.

In response to criticism of the cost of the system and the relatively limited number of people using it, Ramírez replied that “if this had been built in ‘las lomas’ (the hills where the wealthier neighbourhoods are located) it would have been fine, but since it was built in the ‘cerros’ (the steeper hills) where the ‘barefoot blacks’ live, they’re opposed to it,” she said, referring to opposition-aligned media and experts in a country marked by extreme political polarisation.

In Caracas, the hills are known by different terms depending on the social strata: they are called “cerros” when they are the site of shantytowns; “colinas” when the residents are middle class; and “lomas” when the neighbourhoods are upper middle class.

Odebrecht hired paintings by Natalya Critchley, a British artist who has lived in Venezuela for over a quarter century, for display in the Metrocable stations.

Critchley, who is known for her paintings of industrial landscapes, told IPS that Metrocable is “a non-invasive transport system, with a low impact on space.

“However, it should not only be limited to that, but should serve to influence public spaces, apply green technologies, create infrastructure, like a boulevard, and generate activities to benefit the barrio, including a tourist route. The view of the city from the stations is amazing, and it is not adequately exploited,” she said.

But until all of that happens, cabins named after Venezuela’s 23 states, and basic values – like inclusion, patriotic fervour, ethics, equity, freedom, solidarity or peace – are already part of the urban landscape, visible, as they shuttle up and down, from roads and highways down below.

“Sometimes I think of giving it all up,” Aura Canache, a small farmer in Venezuela, told IPS. “My neighbours get loans and aid, but I never have. The farm assistance plans are for men, although there are many women living off the countryside too.”

Aura Canache, in front of one of her sheep enclosures on her small farm. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

Millions of women farmers in Latin America have similar reasons to feel discouraged, because while women farmers and rural workers become more and more numerous, there is a lack of public policies recognising them and addressing the change.

“There is no doubt that there has been a feminisation of the rural labour market in Latin America,” Fernando Soto, senior policy officer at the FAO regional office in the Chilean capital, told IPS.

But that feminisation is taking place in a sector marked by deep-rooted inequality, which Soto illustrated by citing a few examples taken from studies that amply reflect this situation.

In Mexico, “women in rural areas work an average of 89 hours a week, while men work only 58,” he said, adding that the situation is similar in many other countries throughout the region.

Nevertheless, “nearly 40 percent of these women do not have their own incomes, while only 14 percent of the men are in that situation,” said the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) officer.

“A good part of the work of rural women is invisible, and it is an enormous amount of work,” he said.

This situation will be discussed by the delegations attending the 56th session of the
Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to be held at United Nations headquarters in New York Feb. 27 to Mar. 9.

The priority theme at the meeting will be “The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.”

International Women’s Day, celebrated Mar. 8, has a similar slogan this year: “Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Poverty”.

The executive director of U.N. Women, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, said the agency she heads “looks forward to continued and greater collaboration with the U.N. system and other partners to remove the obstacles that exclude rural women and to advance laws and policies that promote their rights, opportunities and participation.”

Canache, on her farm that is less than one hectare in size, located 130 km east of Caracas in the farming region of Barlovento, knows nothing about the meeting in New York. But she is very familiar with the realities that will be described and discussed there.

The Venezuelan farmer, who has 50 head of cattle, 50 sheep and 40 horses, as well as rabbits and two fish farming ponds, has to plough everything she earns into running her farm near the Capaya river, which flooded her land in 2010. On that occasion, a number of her animals drowned, and she had to rebuild some of her farm buildings and clear her dirt roads.

“The climate is getting crazier and crazier, but the last two years the weather was horrible, and that drives up costs and losses,” she says.

Canache, a youthful-looking 73-year-old who employs three farmhands, became a farmer when she was widowed a quarter century ago, after her four children had completed their university studies in Caracas.

“I live for my animals and my farm. But it is too hard to see that for those who give out the (public and private) loans and assistance for agriculture, I don’t exist, while the men who are my neighbours were given huge loans after the flood, and tractors as well,” she says.

“Just imagine what I could do with a tractor!” she says.

“With financing, better roads and some technical support, I could produce a lot more, hire more people and things would not be such a struggle. They discriminate against us, even though we women farmers are more responsible and more reliable in paying off our debts than men. I would give up food from my table to meet my payments,” she says.

Bachelet said that if women had equal access to resources like credits, seeds and fertilisers, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent, which would boost agricultural output in the developing South by four percent and would lift 100 to 150 million people out of hunger.

Soto explained that a recent study by FAO on conditions among women working in fruit production, one of the fastest-growing agricultural sectors in Latin America, found that that they suffered from increasingly precarious labour conditions and growing social vulnerability.

The study, carried out in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, but whose findings are considered representative of the region as a whole, concludes that this is due to three main reasons: the informal nature of the work; the fact that the women earn minimum wage or less, despite an increased workload; and the lack of health coverage and labour security.

FAO studies on the link between the rural labour market and poverty, conducted in 13 Latin American countries, show “a lack of public policies, institutions, and oversight of compliance with existing standards and laws,” Soto said.

“A greater state presence is needed, so that distributive mechanisms can function,” because “while agriculture in Latin America is modernising, growing and generating income, it is not being distributed, but is increasingly concentrated,” the FAO expert added.

If the rural labour markets “worked better for women, without a doubt that would reduce poverty among them and improve their living conditions,” he said.

Figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) indicate that rural poverty represents more than half of all poverty in most countries in the region, and in some countries the proportion is much higher: 72 percent in Guatemala, 69 percent in Costa Rica, 67 percent in El Salvador and 59 percent in Paraguay.

Like in other developing regions, family farms are the main providers of food in Latin America, supplying nearly half of what the region’s 600 million people eat.

The work of women on family farms in Latin America tends to be unpaid, Soto said. The women occasionally engage in paid non-agricultural work as well, and they also are responsible for raising the children and “other caregiver tasks that fall to women because of the patriarchal values that prevail” in the rural world, he added.

Among the specific challenges facing women in the rural sector is the problem of access to land, FAO and other organisations point out. Only 11 percent of rural women hold land titles in Brazil, 22 percent in Mexico and 27 percent in Peru, according to studies.

But there are reasons for optimism, because efforts to promote women’s inclusion in rural production are sprouting up, in areas like microcredit, “which has specific products aimed at the inclusion of women,” Soto said.

The growing incorporation of women in agricultural production is key to pulling rural households out of poverty, and it depends on a set of public policies working in a coordinated manner in the labour market, production, and access to credit and resources – “and on greater shared responsibility in child care,” Soto said.

At the 56the session of the CSW, the Latin American government delegations will have two weeks to demonstrate that they are listening to voices like that of Canache and millions of other women who constantly run up against hurdles in the countryside.

* With reporting by Marianela Jarroud in Santiago.

Lorena Barba, specialist in gender-responsive budgeting. Credit: Courtesy of the interviewee

By Estrella Gutiérrez and - -
CARACAS, Nov 28 2011 (IPS)

Gender responsive budgeting (GRB), a U.N. Women tool to curb inequality, “helps you think about people…and to use resources in a more effective manner,” says Lorena Barba.

Lorena Barba, specialist in gender-responsive budgeting. Credit: Courtesy of the interviewee

Peru has focused on incorporating a gender perspective in major investment projects that are a top priority for the government and that receive international development aid, in order to extend a gender focus to all public policies and to international cooperation.

Bolivia’s approach is based on grassroots, local experiences in which women have played a key role.

And Ecuador has a new constitution that requires that planning and budgeting focus on reducing inequality, partly with the help of a classification system to identify and promote gender spending.

Q: Can you explain why U.N. Women’s Andean regional office puts a high priority on GRB to promote equality, development and international cooperation? A: GRB is an extremely useful tool for the region, for states, and for public policies, because it helps you see clearly the results of development and what kind of development is being pursued. It also helps you identify the biggest inequalities, in order to find effective ways to combat them.

Gender-responsive budgeting and planning helps you think about people, because public policies, when they are analysed only from a macro viewpoint, have visions and methodologies that lead you, for example, to see all families as the same, without perceiving the differences in terms of access to work, income, and social programmes between family members.

A gender perspective makes it possible to visualise the deep inequalities between men and women, and between different people, and to gain a deeper understanding of the causes.

That helps identify the gaps and the best strategies to combat them. Gender-responsive budgeting and planning helps use resources in a more effective manner; it does not necessarily mean increasing funds but using them more efficiently.

Q: So it’s about redirecting resources to promote equality, principally gender equality? A: Yes. Many experiences around the world have shown that programmes with a gender focus bring about better results – not just social programmes, but programmes involving infrastructure like roads, or water supplies, where the impacts and results improve a great deal when a gender perspective is incorporated.

GRB requires involving women in designing programmes, in access to funding, in decision-making – or in simple questions like keeping in mind where and when meetings are held and the need for places for children to be taken care of while their parents are busy in these activities.

This is the main reason women don’t participate: because they can’t be somewhere at a specific time, or, if they can make it, they have to take their children along.

Q: What is special about the process in Peru? A: What Peru is doing is interesting in terms of effectiveness of development aid. They investigated which projects receive the largest amounts of international cooperation funds and which ones have the greatest influence on gender rights.

The programme, which has the support of the European Union, looks at how key national policies and programmes are established while strengthening national planning and budgeting systems and mechanisms, in line with international aid.

A very interesting job is being done with the Finance Ministry, Congress, the International Cooperation Agency (APCI) and the Defensoría del Pueblo (ombudsman’s office) to identify how to reform processes so that gender issues are prioritised.

Peru has a law requiring that public institutions invest in gender equality and report on how they are doing this. And the Defensoría del Pueblo monitors compliance with this, while the Finance Ministry is heading up a process with different ministries to strengthen the incorporation of a gender focus in strategic programmes and key inter-sectoral plans.

This process is aimed at getting major investment projects that are a top priority for the government and which will receive the largest share of national funds and international cooperation to adopt a gender focus so that spending on these projects will contribute to closing the gender gap.

Q: What stands out about the model followed in Ecuador? A: In Ecuador, earlier moves to incorporate gender in planning and funding were strengthened by the 2008 constitution, which stipulates that planning and budgeting must focus on closing gaps and fomenting equality.

The constitution thus strengthened the work that was being done, by requiring public institutions to make an effort to reach these national development objectives.

Q: Even the Finance Ministry established a gender equity office. A: Yes, and now that the office exists, budgeting is approached differently.

The office strengthened a budget monitoring financial tool that stipulates that all public institutions must assign resources to gender equality policies, and that the Finance Ministry is to follow up on the use and implementation of these funds.

These steps helped get other institutions to use and strengthen this tool, such as Congress, which has to study and approve the budget. The gender classification system is extremely useful for that task, because it makes it possible to carry out a specific analysis of where expenditure is going and helps lawmakers in their role of overseeing other institutions.

In addition, since this process involves public information, it helps women’s groups carry out their social oversight work.

Q: And what is the trademark of the Bolivian model? A: The process went from the local to the national levels in that country, and with a major effort by women’s organisations, the result of which was a national taskforce on GRB that includes women’s groups and women delegates of local governments.

This is an inter-institutional experience where it is mainly women who participate at the grassroots level directly in their local areas. They have taken part in training and awareness-raising processes, and have managed to influence planning by their local governments, to get them to address their demands. Grassroots-level work is the outstanding factor in the case of Bolivia.

Q: What has especially moved you about these processes? A: One of the things that really affects you is how people’s lives are changed, at a personal level. GRB really raises people’s awareness, and also provides a great deal of training.

It’s amazing how the training and GRB work make people aware of conceptions about roles and stereotypes that we all carry with us, and bring about change in people. You see it in public employees, how the way they work changes and how their relationships with their partners, their kids and their colleagues change.

It’s not an overnight change. But at least they start thinking about what they do, how they treat the people around them on a daily basis, and about discriminatory attitudes that they didn’t even notice before, due to a lack of knowledge and sensibility.

It also happens with local women, who at the beginning of the process could hardly speak in public and express what they thought, but now have no problem asking the mayor why he didn’t do what he promised.

Now they value their own knowledge, because helping to empower them on the basis of what they already know and do is more important than filling them up with new knowledge.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jun 13 2011 (IPS)

“Women didn’t want to be slaves any more, or work professionally at what they were trying to liberate themselves from,” renowned Venezuelan chef Helena Ibarra told IPS, explaining why women have taken so long to compete in a workplace as symbolically feminine as the kitchen.

Helena Ibarra during a break from the kitchen. Credit: Courtesy of Helena Ibarra

She spent part of her childhood and youth in France, where she took a degree in land-use planning, and had “the privilege” of being awarded the accolade of three Michelin stars, along with colleagues who included disciples of Paul Bocuse, the father of nouvelle cuisine.

She recently launched her book “La cocina extra-ordinaria” (Extra-ordinary Cuisine), which describes her culinary offerings. Her gastronomical metaphors appear in chapter headings like “La naturaleza” (Nature), “El imaginario” (The Imaginative World), “Emociones” (Feelings) and “Helena en el país de las maravillas” (Helena in Wonderland).

Recipe titles in the book include “Merienda de locos” (The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party), “Encuentro del sombrerero y la mariposa” (The Hatter and the Caterpillar) and “Mirando a través del espejo” (Through the Looking Glass).

Q: Some say women have been marginalised from professional cooking because it takes strength, long hours on one’s feet and a great deal of sacrifice. Others say women wished to avoid doing in the public domain what they were required to do in private. What is your analysis? A: They didn’t want to be slaves any more. When the world of work opened its doors to women, they turned down cooking because they weren’t interested in it.

To them it was a chore and an obligation that they wanted to be free of; they wanted to be something other than cooks in the new world of work they had conquered. They did not want to inherit the slave status of their mothers, whose undervalued work it was to cook and raise their children.

What interest could they possibly have in peeling potatoes and doing the dishes, when they had to do the same things at home? Women have yielded professional cooking to men, because it wasn’t part of our liberation process. And that’s why we took so long to fight for our place in it.

Q: Throughout history, women have been found in the kitchens of inns and boarding houses, but not in palace kitchens. Why? A: Because women had no access to power, except as witches. Even today, a woman is admired and revered as a sorceress.

When a woman wanted power, she was called a witch. And then there is the question of money. Restaurants were conceived as businesses, and running them required a chef, or boss, which is what the word means.

He could serve bad food or treat the staff poorly, but his mission was to make a profit. And one boss has to measure up to another boss. Women weren’t allowed to reach that position, even though the chef might have been recreating his mother’s recipes.

Moreover, mothers base their actions on concepts that are very different to those of a business. Love has no cash register, and women experience cooking as something creative and linked to their emotional life, even when they are chefs.

Beyond gender roles, there is an intrinsic bond between mothers and cooking. Women are the ones who breastfeed and enact the symbolism of nutrition, food and tastes; this is undeniable in our culture, no matter who does the cooking at home.

Q: Bocuse often says that women are the primary cooks, although top chefs’ associations exclude women. Is there misogyny in haute cuisine? A: When I am asked to describe myself, I say I’m the long-lost daughter of Sigmund Freud (the father of psychoanalysis), and as such, I would say that in a world controlled by men, they are quite incapable of handing over to women the realm of cooking, so closely related to creation, to the emotions and to human origins and pleasure.

That is why they try to keep professional cooking a closed circuit, because of the power factor.

Men conquered the kitchen, which was the realm of women, while women were leaving it in order to conquer the male world of work.

But a major change has occurred, because there were no women chefs before and now they do exist, just as there are more and more cooking schools with equal numbers of men and women students, including schools for haute cuisine.

Nowadays, when women’s identities are much more robust than men’s, and when it is hard to find a chef to bring home or take to bed, even in the world of gastronomy male power is in retreat, and women are making strides.

Q: Experts talking about your cooking use terms like feelings, subtlety or seduction, which they rarely use about male chefs. Does cuisine have a gender? A: Above all, it’s the way men perceive women, it’s a cultural question: they find it hard to talk about us while stripping us of what they admire about our gender.

I defend certain issues because I am a woman, but I have some very “masculine” products, dishes with a precise goal and phallic shapes, like the “tepuy” (mountains with vertical sides and flat tops, found in Venezuela’s Guayana massif) in its jungle, which is in great demand from men.

When they call me seductive, I think it’s fabulous, but the term is theirs. In “Helena in Wonderland”, my most creative work, there are aggressive dishes such as bleeding ribs, which are very much my own creations, but do not fit the image required of me. There is no such thing as female or male cuisine, but I affirm my femininity and I do not disguise it or assume masculine characteristics when I enter the kitchen.

Q: You are critical of Spanish chef Ferran Adriá’s “molecular gastronomy”. A: In my view, understanding technical processes, like how molecules work, has to be at the service of playing with the creative universe.

Adriá is a genius, but he represents the peak of a man’s magic without accepting his female side, without breaking with the intellectual and technical discourse that arises from the laboratory, which has given cuisins a new language, but which fails on the human plane.

They say his cooking is a unique experience that must not be missed, but people do not go back again. And if cooking is love, what a pity that it should be for one night only. In my view, behind every male chef there is a frustration, which Adriá expresses.

Freud said men wear aprons to play at being women. And cooking is complex, it requires a comprehensive sensitivity which includes the feminine, and to do that men must break with the obsession of being better than their mothers, in the sense that she makes delicious beans, but hasn’t a clue about creating this foam that I know how to make.

Q: But a lot of young men are choosing to go into gastronomy. Is this a break from their traditional role? A: Yes, of course. They are appalled by conventional careers and prefer this creative path which was previously forbidden to them. Young people are also liberating themselves from their historic burdens in the kitchen.

Let us not forget that food is power and a business, and cooking is a very complex profession, which directly provides pleasure, but is also about providing nutrition and improved living conditions.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jan 28 2011 (IPS)

The digital revolution is turning people into producers, as well as consumers, of media content. But this new reality has yet to be fully assimilated, and journalists face questions and uncertainties about their social role, their duties and also their rights.

In the view of Brazilian university professor Rosental Calmon Alves, the world is experiencing “a revolution with very few historical precedents, comparable to the one brought about by (Johannes) Gutenberg,” the 15th century inventor of the printing press.

Alves is a prominent advocate of network journalism and a promoter of what he calls a “media ecosystem,” very different from the dominant system in the 20th century, in which the multimedia digital platform will be more powerful than newsprint.

One element of this “ecosystem” is the change from a “media-centred” system to a “person-centred” one, in which every person is a potential participant, says the Brazilian cyber enthusiast. “We have entered the ‘prosumer’ society,” made up of producers who are also consumers of media content, he told the Spanish newspaper El País.

The prosumer society has multiple forms of self-expression, and it is still early to tell which of these will survive the founding of the new era. Social networks stand out, particularly Twitter, which is based on ordinary citizens creating online information.

What are the rights and responsibilities of professional communicators with regard to the social media? Are journalists barred by their profession from expressing themselves on networks like Twitter? Can media owners set limits on what reporters say as private individuals online?

Latin American experts gave IPS their views on these and other questions of topical interest to journalists.

Javier Darío Restrepo of Colombia, regionally recognised in the field of journalistic ethics, established one premise: “Ethics do not change with technological changes.

“Principles that were valid for Gutenberg are still valid for web surfers. They must be applied more rigorously by the latter, in fact, because netizens have a more powerful instrument. The greater the technological power, the greater the responsibility demanded,” he said.

“I have an ethical commitment to truth as both a journalist and a twitterer,” he added.

As for the responsibilities of journalists who twitter, there are differences between what they publish in the media they work for and what they tweet, said Restrepo, who is head of the ethics department at the New Ibero-American Journalism Foundation (FNPI).

“In a newspaper, a reporter writes in the name of a media outlet that has real credibility, conferred by its readers. On Twitter, he or she speaks as a private individual; this reduces his or her responsibility, but not his or her commitment to the truth,” he said.

In Restrepo’s view, whenever journalists communicate, they must bear in mind that “they are not free to say whatever they want, but what they ought to say,” and “neither their freedom (of expression) nor their rights are absolute. They are always limited in practice by the rights and freedoms of others.”

Margarita Torres, a professor of communications at Mexico’s Ibero-American University, said journalists have the same rights as other citizens to use social networks, but added that “protecting and respecting their own profession will set limits” to their use.

Torres finds it hard to separate journalists and human rights. “I can’t just set aside the idea of integrity,” said this member of the Red de Periodistas de a Pie (On-the-Ground Journalists’ Network) which is very active online.

“The human rights of journalists cannot be curtailed; they should be the same as those of any citizen. But at the same time reporters are ‘guardians’ of the much-trumpeted right to information, with all this implies,” Torres said.

When journalists use networks like Twitter, they must remember that their followers — in this case, the general public — want “reliable information,” told more boldly, perhaps, “but reliably,” said Torres, an expert on social responsibility among communicators.

She gave examples of cases in which followers have demanded corrections of mistaken information given by journalists through their personal Twitter accounts, and of others working in conventional media who have been called to account, over the social networking sites, for editorial decisions made by their publication.

In regard to the rifts and conflicts that have emerged between journalists and the media outlets that employ them because of their personal expressions on Twitter and other networks, Torres added to Restrepo’s ethical mantra the tool of self-regulation, particularly in promoting transparency.

The codes of ethics and internal regulations of media outlets provide a route map. But when a journalist’s point of view collides with that of the publication he or she writes for, they will not prevent firing or disciplinary action for what is said in a personal capacity in cyberspace or in opinion and analysis columns in the publication itself.

The problem, according to Torres, “is that the media have not been required to have clear labour and ethical policies, and now additional policies relating to social networking sites are needed.”

One of the most famous cases of a reporter being sacked by her employer because of opinions expressed in social media is that of CNN journalist Octavia Nasr, who was fired in July because she expressed sadness at the death of Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah on her personal Twitter account. And there are hundreds of other cases, on every continent.

Raisa Uribarri, a professor at the University of the Andes in Venezuela, pointed to another problem faced by journalists who express their personal opinions on networking sites or in the blogosphere: the political or economic powers-that-be can use their views to blacken the reporter’s reputation.

“The tracks you leave of your private life on the networks create opinions that may work for or against you when the chips are down,” said Uribarri, who described the case of a journalist who asked Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez an awkward question.

Government-aligned media and officials used opinions critical of the Chávez administration, posted by the journalist on Twitter, to discredit her, said Uribarri, who is an expert on communications and new technologies, as well as a journalist.

“Because they are so easy to use, social network services have contributed to journalists’ exposure to the public, not as workers for a particular media outlet but as private citizens with their own opinions which, obviously, do not necessarily coincide with the editorial stances of the media for which they work,” she said.

Ideally, in Uribarri’s view, this mismatch should not create any more difficulties for journalists than their ethical commitments, but media reprisals against employees have been documented “when they express different opinions, in a personal capacity and outside the outlet in question.”

The question of what to do was answered by Uribarri with questions of her own: “Shall we practise self-censorship? Shall we be like angelic creatures, devoid of opinions? Shall we stop using the social networks, or only post about topics other than our professional work? Shall we lead parallel lives on the networks? Would the media find this acceptable? Shall we hide behind a shield of anonymity? Is that ethical?”

She also related an incident from a recent international web seminar on journalists’ identity management on the net. A young Latin American woman, recently graduated in social communication, who has been active online for years and has an established online identity, asked the debating thread: “Does this mean that when I start working for a media outlet I won’t be able to be myself?”

Uribarri offered her own recipe: “I am very careful about every tweet, every update on Facebook and every line in my blog. Because yes, I am a citizen, but I have special responsibilities because of my profession.”

Excerpt:

“One day more, one day less,” says María Lourdes Afiuni when she says hello or goodbye to her thousands of followers on Twitter. The Venezuelan judge has spent the last eight months in prison, because she decided that a defendant should be released on bail pending trial.

María Lourdes Afiuni, handcuffed, under guard and on trial. Credit: Courtesy of Andrés Bello Catholic University Human Rights Centre

United Nations agencies, judicial bodies and regional and international human rights organisations, as well as the European Parliament and other legislatures, have been calling for her release since she was arrested in her own court on Dec. 10 and later taken to a prison where 14 of the inmates were sent down by her.

The U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), for example, deemed her arrest “arbitrary” in its June sessions in Geneva. It also expressed regret that Afiuni is in prison for implementing a resolution of the UNHRC Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Activist Ligia Bolívar told IPS that this is an emblematic case because Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez “sent a very clear message to the judicial branch about his power to condemn a person on a national radio and television broadcast, and woe betide anyone who should grant freedom pending trial to a judge imprisoned for doing exactly that.”

Banker Eligio Cedeño had spent two years and 10 months in preventive custody on corruption charges when Afiuni granted him conditional release, on the grounds that the criminal code sets a 24-month limit for pretrial detention. She also based her decision on U.N. rules and an opinion on the case by the UNHRC Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

The judge released Cedeño on two conditions: he was banned from leaving the country and had to turn over his passport; and he had to appear before the authorities at 15-day intervals. But a few days later the defendant fled to the United States.

Cedeño is accused of fraud and embezzlement of 27 million dollars, that were granted by the administrative commission controlling foreign exchange for the purpose of importing computers, which are alleged not to have entered the country. Until the scandal broke out, he was regarded as close to the leftist government.

Since Afiuni’s arrest, Attorney General Luisa Ortega has repeatedly stated that the judge herself was guilty of corruption, abuse of authority and aiding Cedeño’s escape. She added that under Venezuelan law, corruption is considered treason against the state.

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Gabriela Knaul, described Afiuni’s detention as “unacceptable” and “intimidatory.”

Bolívar, head of the Human Rights Centre at the Andrés Bello Catholic University, the local organisation that is most closely following the case, says that Venezuela has taken one step further in the direction of what some experts and activists call “rebellion” against international justice bodies.

Even before Chávez became president in 1999, “Venezuela ignored recommendations and rulings by international and regional human rights bodies,” Bolívar said.

Later, “the national justice system overthrew international sentences, such as when the Supreme Court determined that a theoretically unappealable decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, ordering the reinstatement of several judges, was unenforceable,” Bolívar said.

“Now another step has been taken: whoever enforces a legal decision by international bodies goes to jail,” she said. In her view, that is why there has been “an outpouring of international pronouncements in favour of Afiuni since Dec. 16.”

Supreme Court president María Estela Morales has said “our jurisdiction will not be handed over to any foreign power,” and called the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “one of those international bodies that disguises itself as a protector of basic rights, to serve its own interests.”

She has also frequently said that “the separation of powers weakens the state,” and has proposed amendments to some parts of the 1999 constitution that are “in contradiction with the Chávez regime.”

Morales and Ombudswoman Gabriela Ramírez have rejected accusations from human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that Afiuni is in danger and is being discriminated against at the women’s prison in Los Teques, on the outskirts of Caracas.

Investigation of the case was completed in late May with the decision to put Afiuni on trial. The court accepted the prosecution’s argument that there is no evidence of enrichment or a promise (by Cedeño) to pay the defendant, but claims that Afiuni did receive other illegal benefits.

Motions for dismissal of the case, release on bail, house arrest or other forms of restriction without confinement to keep her safe from attack by other prisoners, have all been denied by the trial judge, Alí Paredes, on the grounds that “it’s not the season for precautionary measures,” according to the complaint lodged by Theresly Malavé, one of Afiuni’s lawyers.

On Aug. 6, Afiuni’s defence lawyers asked the Supreme Court to recuse judge Paredes, who had announced a trial date for Aug. 10 and refused to form a three-person tribunal, with two citizens chosen by lot, to try the case.

They alleged Paredes had shown “manifest partiality,” and supported their claim with documents apparently taken from the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) web site, in which the judge stated that “I would give my life for the revolution and I would never betray my commander Chávez.”

Alberto Arteaga, a criminal lawyer and one of the architects of the 1998 criminal code, said the case “is a devastating blow to a system of justice based on guaranteeing civil liberties, the presumption of innocence and the avoidance of undue delay.”

According to Arteaga, several of Afiuni’s rights have been trampled on, beginning with her arrest, which would only have been justified if she had been caught redhanded accepting a bribe.

“She was handcuffed and detained in her own courtroom, for doing something that was within her competence as a judge, and now she is facing the absurd charge of corruption without any financial benefit,” he told IPS.

In Venezuela there is no “non-material” corruption, he said. The code stipulates fines for acts of corruption “according to the benefit obtained,” so there must be economic gain, he explained.

Afiuni is being held in isolation in a cell measuring six square metres in a special part of the prison, and cannot take part in prison activities, for her own protection, as more than once an inmate has entered her cell with a homemade weapon.

Her case also reflects the grave situation of criminal justice in Venezuela, according to the non-governmental Justice and Peace Support Network, which published a document Jul. 30 reporting that there are 807 criminal judges in the country, of whom 482 are not tenured, which makes them insecure and hinders them when it comes in imparting justice.

Each criminal judge handles an annual average of 316 cases, nearly one a day, in a country with one of the lowest proportions of criminal judges in Latin America, at 2.84 per 100,000 population.

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, May 26 2010 (IPS)

The Venezuelan government put a chokehold on the foreign exchange system by closing down the “parallel” currency market, which in a country so heavily dependent on imports may stifle an economy already plagued by recession, inflation and shortages of certain products.

The unofficial “permuta” market, in which stocks and bonds could be traded for dollars in stock exchanges and brokerages, was closed May 17 and will be replaced by a system of exchange rate bands under the control of the Central Bank (BCV), due to become operational in the first or second week of June.

“A police-style clampdown is being imposed on an economic problem, and that is no solution at all,” economist Eduardo Semtei told IPS, commenting on the raids and closures of a score of brokerages after leftwing President Hugo Chávez’s blanket accusation of speculation and money laundering.

While the “permuta” market is closed, only a trickle of dollars will be available from the Foreign Exchange Administration Commission (CADIVI), which trades currency on the legal market. In 2009 CADIVI only covered 65 percent of the 38.4 billion dollar cost of imports. The only alternative will be the black market.

In 2003 stiff exchange rates controls were introduced in Venezuela, and were tightened in 2009, when any distribution of information about the parallel “permuta” market was made illegal. That year, GDP contracted by 3.3 percent, but that did not assuage the appetite for dollars.

Semtei, a university professor belonging to the traditional left who supported the government until 2007, said that the problem is that the administration does not have enough hard currency income or international reserves to meet its own obligations in 2010, let alone to satisfy demand from private companies and individuals.

The government must pay out some 18 billion dollars this year, to service a new short-term loan taken out for arms purchases worth close to 30 billion dollars, to repay accumulated debts owed to external contractors for major infrastructure works and to fund its new oil partnerships, among other commitments.

Given this situation, Chávez and his cabinet further toughened the law on illegal exchange of dollars, making the BCV the exclusive agent for the parallel market, and increasing fines and prison sentences for illegal trading and for reporting unofficial exchange rates, even over the internet.

The president blamed firms exchanging bonds for dollars on the parallel market for this year’s 25 percent rise in the relative value of the “permuta” dollar against the bolívar, the local currency.

“We’re going to hit them with everything we’ve got,” Chávez said, accusing “those bourgeois” of criminal speculation. High-ranking officials added that this oil-producing South American country was facing “a financial coup.”

But in fact, swapping bonds for “permuta” dollars was a mechanism created by the government itself to supply the demand CADIVI could not meet. And the chief source of dollars was the state oil company PDVSA, which obtained more bolívars to the petrodollar to pay for its overheads.

In 2009 the “permuta” market traded 22.3 billion dollars to importers and others unable to get them from CADIVI. This contributed to a 25 percent hike in prices last year which put the Venezuelan economy into stagflation, a combination of recession and high inflation.

In January the government devalued the bolívar to partially correct its overvaluation. Instead of the single fixed official exchange rate of 2.15 bolívars to the dollar, two new exchange rates were introduced, at 2.60 for state imports and medicines, and 4.30 for other purposes.

But CADIVI was still a bottleneck for getting hard currency, so “permuta” dollars had a greater effect on the real economy. During Chávez’s 11 years in office, Venezuela has become heavily dependent on imports from abroad even for basic food supplies, because of the decline in domestic agricultural and manufacturing production.

Dependence on oil revenue also increased. Crude contributed 68 percent of government income in 1999, compared to 94 percent last year, when oil exports totalled 54.2 billion dollars.

Since April, the dollar on the parallel market has climbed to twice the official exchange rate of 4.30 bolívars, while in the first quarter of this year GDP fell by 5.8 percent, compared to the same period last year. Accumulated inflation to April 2010 was 11 percent, and foreign reserves were depleted by 7.8 billion dollars, down to a level of 27 billion dollars.

“The government is just pressing on with more of the same, and the rigid exchange rules will only worsen the distortions in the economy,” like unemployment, said Semtei.

Shortages of basic food items like milk, cereals, flour and meat “are going to become more acute under the new system,” said Semtei. In local shops, average stocks last no more than 45 days, partly because owners are afraid of being accused of hoarding.

According to José Manuel Puente, a professor at the Institute of Higher Administrative Studies, the soaring cost of the dollar is “an expression of serious macroeconomic imbalances,” and the exchange rate will stabilise only when these are corrected.

“The government is reaping the consequences of a very inexpert and ideologically dogmatic economic plan,” which heightens the perception of risk so that the dollar becomes a shelter for everyone, from small savers to companies, Puente told IPS.

The quandary is that “whatever it does, the government does not inspire confidence,” said Domingo Zavala, the head of BCV until 2007 and a renowned leftwing economist who is critical of the government.

Semtei recalled that Chávez has repeatedly said that economics is not politics, and what is important is politics, “but now economics has caught up,” just in time for the parliamentary elections due this year on Sept. 26.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Mar 10 2010 (IPS)

Although most of the governments in Latin America today are described as progressive, abortion is only legal in one country, while in five countries it is banned under all circumstances, even when the mother’s life is at risk.

Brazilian women protest Catholic Church's stance on abortion. Credit: Courtesy of Fórum de Mulheres de Pernambuco

Such laws have simply forced the practice underground, making unsafe abortions the second leading cause of maternal mortality in the region.

“Machismo plays a key role. Our societies are so patriarchal that it just isn’t that difficult to deny that right,” Uruguayan sociologist Moriana Hernández told IPS. “If there was social awareness about equality, it would be much more costly for progressive governments to deny rights linked to gender equality.

“It’s easy to negotiate over the bodies of women because of that patriarchal influence,” said Hernández, who heads CLADEM’s (Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women) campaign for non-sexist and non-discriminatory education.

So abortion has become a bargaining chip between government leaders and conservative sectors, even though everyone knows that abortions are commonly practiced in the region.

There are more than four million illegal abortions a year in the region, linked to over 4,000 avoidable deaths. And in some countries, like Argentina, there are nearly as many abortions as births.

In the view of Hernández and other analysts, setbacks to or the lack of progress with respect to women’s right to choice are the result of a fundamentalist offensive by the Catholic Church to keep Latin America a land free of abortions – legal ones, at least.

“The Church has always been on the watch against abortion, but now it has become an issue that irritates it beyond all measure – and not only abortion but also sex education, when actually there are no new, or radical, proposals being set forth,” said Hernández.

Over the last decade, Latin America has shifted to the left. At the start of 2010, there were 11 countries with governments seen as progressive: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela; five with administrations considered rightwing or centre-right: Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, Panama and Peru; and two with centrist governments: Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

But at the same time, a total ban on abortion, even in cases of rape or a threat to the mother’s life, was adopted in Nicaragua in 2006; in Uruguay a presidential veto overruled the legalisation of abortion in 2008; and in the Dominican Republic, the right to life from the moment of conception was enshrined in the constitution in 2009.

In fact, the best news on the right to choice came from two countries governed by the right: in Colombia, the Constitutional Court legalised “therapeutic” abortion in cases of rape, incest, fetal malformation or for the life of the mother in 2006, and in Mexico, first trimester abortion on demand was legalised a year later in the capital city – albeit by the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution’s (PRD) majority in the local assembly

However, the five Constitutional Court magistrates who voted in favour of the verdict in Colombia were immediately excommunicated by the Church.

And the law making abortion legal in Mexico City triggered a “furious backlash” by the Church, which has prompted 17 of Mexico’s 32 states to adopt even stricter anti-abortion laws, said Hernández.

Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato, a researcher at the University of Brasilia, attributes the Church’s fervor to reasons other than the defence of life. “If it really cared, the Catholic hierarchy would be fighting on other fronts with the same vehemence, defending life,” she argued.

“Its concern at this point is to mark the permanence of its influence” over states in the region, and thus it is caught up in a kind of competition for authority with the feminist movement in Latin America, she said in an interview.

“I’m still the boss here and I make sure that my ideological profile is reflected in the laws, and I am going to win,” is the message from the Church leadership, according to the anthropologist.

The renewed push for even tighter restrictions on abortion “is a war of influences,” she said.

In Segato’s opinion, because the laws criminalising abortion have a purpose other than the stated one, they end up being ineffective in their supposed aim. “Catholics, non-Catholics, evangelicals – women from all these groups are having abortions every day, because they don’t feel it is a criminal or ethical offence,” she said.

Hernández said the Church is especially nervous because of the growing and increasingly visible awareness in the region on the importance of the right to choice, “which was unthinkable 10 or even five years ago.

“It has always been a key aim on the feminist agenda, but for years a popular movement aware of its importance was lacking. It was a neglected issue,” she said.

The activist sees the negotiation over women’s bodies in the criminalisation of abortion as linked to the problem of gender violence in the region, which is “huge” despite the fact that the Americas has the only continent-wide treaty on violence against women (the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women) and that every country has laws, in some cases even highly advanced, to fight domestic violence.

“A society that accepts men’s violence against women cannot be asked to oppose a woman’s being blocked from deciding on her pregnancy, another issue involving her body,” the veteran feminist activist reflected.

The fury with which that violence has been expressed and the renewed offensive against any steps towards making abortion legal have picked up as challenges to “patriarchal power” gather strength, said Hernández.

For that reason, it is important to take a deeper look, “because there haven’t only been setbacks.

“There are ups and downs, as shown by the case of Mexico, and there is a risk of oversimplification if we only measure progress by what governments do, without looking deeper, at political and social developments and the action of different movements and interest groups,” she said.

“We have never before seen such a broad debate on the right to abortion, and it is growing day by day,” said Hernández. She added that one result of thise is the combativeness shown by women in the region on the Day for the Decriminalisation of Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean, celebrated every Sept. 28 since 1990.

Hernández cited Uruguay as an example of the complex nuances of the issue. In November 2008, socialist Tabaré Vázquez of the leftwing Broad Front coalition, whose five year term as president ended Mar. 1, vetoed the legalisation of abortion, one aspect of a broader law on reproductive health, which had been approved thanks to his own ruling coalition’s majority in Congress.

But a focus only on the veto itself ignores other important elements, like the facts that a majority of senators and deputies approved the decriminalisation of abortion; at least 63 percent of Uruguayans are in favour of legalisation, according to opinion polls; and the country’s trade unions, traditionally a very male-dominated area, staunchly supported the law.

There were practical advances as well: the final version of the law maintained the requirement that doctors and health centres must provide information on safe methods to terminate a pregnancy, even if they cannot themselves practice or offer them; and any woman with abortion-related complications must be given medical treatment without questions and without being reported to the authorities.

When progressive presidents like Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Argentina’s Cristina Fernández, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega or Ecuador’s Rafael Correa seek to ingratiate themselves with the Church and other conservative groups by taking a hard line stance on abortion, they generate contradictions with their own political and social support bases that will become unmanageable for themselves or their successors in the long run, said Hernández.

“Latin American societies are ripe for the decriminalisation of abortion. That is an unquestionable fact,” she stated. However, it is an issue “on which no one is going to budge without being forced to do so, and this also depends on creating a critical mass of men in favour of women’s right to decide.”

What the laws say

Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic ban abortions under any circumstances, with no explicit legal exceptions, even in the case of a risk to the mother’s life.

But in Honduras, although the penal code provides for no exceptions, the Code of Medical Ethics allows termination of a pregnancy if the woman’s life is in danger.

Cuba is the only country in the region where abortion on demand up to the 12th week of pregnancy is legal, as it has been since 1965. And the abortion rate is less than 21 per 1,000 women of reproductive age, 10 points lower than the regional average.

In Argentina, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Venezuela, abortion is allowed to save the pregnant woman’s life. Argentina also makes an exception in the case of women with mental disabilities, while in Venezuela, women who undergo abortions to preserve their honour or that of a spouse or other relative are subject to more lenient penalties.

In Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala and Uruguay, abortion is also permitted in cases of rape or incest, and Uruguay allows for another exception as well: economic hardship.

Colombia, Mexico and Panama also allow abortion in cases of fetal deformities.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, May 8 2009 (IPS)

“People have to imbibe with their mother’s milk the idea that women have an equal right to participate in politics,” says Gladys Acosta, UNIFEM head for Latin America and the Caribbean, who underscores that politics is the key that opens all doors to equality.

Gladys Acosta, UNIFEM chief for Latin America and the Caribbean Credit: Courtesy of UNIFEM

In this interview with IPS on a visit to Venezuela, Acosta says access to education is the biggest achievement of women in Latin America, but one that is overshadowed by inequality in the labour market and workplace.

With respect to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to be met by 2015, the worst progress in the region has been made towards reducing maternal mortality, while strides have been made in cutting infant mortality rates, says Acosta, who also discusses the third MDG – gender equality and the empowerment of women.

IPS: The international community began to tackle discrimination against women in the 1970s. What has been learned in these three decades? GLADYS ACOSTA: After 30 years, it is clear what the situation is and what needs to be done; analysis should continue, but we know enough to act. And what is clear is that systemic action is needed, because discrimination is systemic.

Isolated action does not break the phenomenon of discrimination. It is not enough, for example, to only focus on the issue of violence against women while ignoring the incorporation of girls and women in education, their access to health services, to politics, the achievement of the labour standards to which they are entitled.

Discrimination has an inertia of its own; discrimination is what emerges if nothing is done.

IPS: In what area have women made the most progress in Latin America? GA: Indisputably in education. The wave of democratisation that put an end to the military dictatorships in Latin America prompted the massive insertion of women in education. In fact there is a risk that women will outnumber men in the educational system.

The problem now is in the sphere of work. The wages and salaries earned by women are still far below their abilities and contributions.

The idea that women’s salaries are complementary to those of men is still prevalent, when reality has shown that women heads of households already represent 30 percent of the total in the region, and that even women who have husbands are sometimes the heads of their families.

Women have to be considered a labour force that is equal to men in every respect, while dismantling visible and invisible barriers. But in this and other spheres, reality is distorted by stereotypes, and as a result, misguided solutions are applied.

IPS: Could you mention an example of that outdated perception in the field of labour? GA: Migration. It continues to be seen as a male phenomenon, but it has become more and more a female one, and women now account for nearly 50 percent of all migrants. And we’re talking about highly skilled migration. It’s not true that the women leaving are domestic employees, for example; what is happening is that in the destination country, they often take jobs far below their qualifications and skill levels.

The result is that countries are losing educated female workers, who could contribute a great deal with their work, and who end up in another country in better-paying but lower-skilled jobs.

The investment in that person is lost, and it is a process with a specific gender aspect. Of course, there is also brain drain among men, but in the case of women, they had just begun to reach the educational and labour systems and now they’re leaving.

UNIFEM’s conclusion is that the phenomenon of female migration has to do with a failure of accountability in terms of labour policies, because if there were labour policies aimed at holding onto educated women, they would not leave.

IPS: Are public policies on women in Latin America still full of flaws? GA: There are many gaps, because what should be done is not done, the necessary follow-up is not carried out, and the authorities are not held accountable for enforcing the laws.

Public policies are still welfare-, rather than socially-, oriented, and that is very evident at times of crisis like today. Health, education and work must be strengthened, and welfare-oriented policies should be reserved for very specific segments of society and periods of time.

But if the view of women is that they are a vulnerable sector of society, public policies are going to be misguided.

IPS: You emphasise that strengthening women’s rights has a positive repercussion on other rights. GA: Of course, because promoting women’s rights has a positive cross-cutting effect on all other rights, and that is also true in the case of the MDGs (adopted by the international community in 2000).

For example, children’s rights cannot be defended without defending the rights of women, because a woman who is not aware of her rights is not going to be able to properly defend those of her children.

And in the area of child malnutrition, it is extremely clear that women with more information and a higher educational level have a better understanding of what their children should eat. In general terms, better educated women take better care of their children.

With respect to maternal mortality, it is clear that lower levels of education among mothers correlate with higher death rates.

Politics is a little blind, the state needs a clearer view of what is going on with women, a superdynamic sector.

IPS: Can political participation by women correct that shortsightedness? GA: Political participation is a central factor. People have to imbibe with their mother’s milk the idea that women have an equal right to participate in politics. And women must clearly understand that political participation is a key – a key to having a voice, a key to exercising full citizenship.

Several things have to be done at the same time. Laws on violence must be passed, because that is really an enormous obstacle for political participation, for development and for individual human beings.

But at the same time, progress has to be made in terms of women gaining a greater voice in politics, because that is where decisions are made, and this has to happen at all levels of the state: in the executive, the judiciary, where electoral rules are made – everywhere.

Only a small group makes it into positions of political power. Women already have the necessary critical mass to accelerate access to their rights, and the best accelerator is politics. Their presence in the realm of political power is essential.

IPS: Are quota laws the right instrument for fuelling that increased presence? GA: Quota laws (reserving a proportion of candidacies for women) are affirmative action measures, they are temporary, and men who get so nervous about these laws should be told the following: the day that parity is achieved, the quotas will be gone.

The biggest problem is that progress is so slow. At this pace, around 40 years will be needed to reach that parity. Tools to speed things up are needed, and that’s what quota laws are.

IPS: What is the role of men in achieving gender equality? GA: They have a fundamental role to play. The participation of men is needed to dismantle gender inequality, at the level of politics as well as in society and in the home.

Patterns have to be modified; the chip has to be reset. A woman and her partner, both of them working and both of them educated – there is no reason why she should be solely responsible for the domestic chores.

It’s a question of sharing roles, and that doesn’t happen yet anywhere in the world. Men “help out,” they don’t share, and the lower you go on the social ladder, the worse that is.

Women in lower income sectors have to secure the food as well as prepare it, get clothing for the kids, raise them, take charge of the home, bring in money. The burden is exhausting for them, and especially when tasks that should be the responsibility of the state have been left to families.

IPS: With regard to the MDGs, and to gender equality in particular, in what aspects is the region doing the best and in what aspects is it lagging? GA: There are countries that are going to reach important goals. But one goal that is very difficult to fulfill is the MDG on maternal mortality.

The average maternal mortality rate in the region is 130 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to nine in Europe and other developed countries. That is a huge gap.

The goal to be met by 2015 implies a drastic reduction, which many countries are not going to accomplish because if discrimination has an inertia of its own, that is even more true of maternal mortality.

The reason for that is prejudice. Maternity is seen as a natural phenomenon, and deaths in childbirth, because there have been so many, are also seen as natural.

It is necessary to closely follow what is going on with maternal mortality, because it has an enormous effect on countries like Guatemala, where 70 percent of births take place at home, but also on countries like Argentina, where 95 percent of births occur in health facilities.

Maternal health policies must once again become a priority. Bolivia and Ecuador have provided an example to be followed, by offering free maternal health coverage: the health system has the obligation to provide care to any pregnant woman. That is how it should be; it is unacceptable for maternal health care to depend on a woman’s ability to pay.

More progress has been made in reducing the infant mortality rate, a problem that has not completely been resolved, although huge strides have been made on that front and much more has been invested in that area.

IPS: Do the mainstream media reflect the growing role of women as actors and protagonists in society? GA: No, the mass media have not undergone the necessary shift; their agenda very much revolves around commercial questions, and is based on stereotypes. One example: anything related to violence against women is treated as crime beat news. They have to discover that there is potential in a market of thinking women who are demanding another kind of offer.

Even the world of fashion has made much faster progress in internalising the idea of the liberation of women, and has made them freer in their clothing. The media, on the other hand, remain trapped by stereotypes. They only see women in very specific roles, as victims or villains.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jan 4 2008 (IPS)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez carried out his most sweeping cabinet reshuffle yet, with the declared intent of giving a new boost to his “socialist revolution” after his first electoral setback, in December’s referendum on constitutional reforms, and of leaving behind the radical image that contributed to that defeat.

Chávez made changes in 12 key posts in his 28-member cabinet, while naming a new vice president, Ramón Carrizales, a fellow retired military officer, who up to now was minister of housing.

The new vice president has a low political profile, by contrast with his predecessor Jorge Rodríguez.

The president said the changes form part of what he described as “a new stage of the revolution,” based on what he called “the three ‘R’s’: Revisión, Rectificación y Reimpulso (roughly: revision, rectification and giving a new impulse to)” of his socialist project, the latest initiatives of which were rejected by voters in the Dec. 2 referendum.

This new stage, said Chávez, will be marked by “less theory and more praxis,” and will abandon what he referred to as “extremist currents” in his government, “because we are not, and cannot be, extremists.”

He also said that by means of the three ‘R’s’, he plans to seek alliances with the middle-class sectors and the business community.

“We cannot follow strategies that have failed worldwide, like the elimination of private property,” said Chávez, announcing the cabinet overhaul in a telephone interview with the public VTV station – a channel he frequently uses to inform the public of his decisions.

The constitutional reforms that the president, who has governed Venezuela since 1999, attempted to push through would have promoted several different forms of ownership, such as collectively and communally owned property, besides private property.

The gradual disappearance of private property was one of the main arguments set forth by the opposition against the reforms, along with the rejection of the attempt to make it possible for the president to run for reelection indefinitely.

Among the changes carried out by Chávez, the ones that stand out the most are the naming of moderate figures to the posts closest to the president, like minister of communications and head of cabinet.

Both the new cabinet chief, Jesse Chacón, and the new minister of information and communications, Andrés Izarra, have already held important cabinet positions.

In his first press conference in his new post, Chacón said that those who are leaving the cabinet include the ministers of finance and planning, Rodrigo Cabezas and Jorge Giordani. The latter is considered the president’s economic mentor.

The 12 new ministers, who were appointed partly as the result of tensions within the cabinet and other high-level government posts, have a more technical profile than the majority of their predecessors, and most stand out for their successful performance and concrete results achieved in their previous positions.

Also removed from the scene was minister of interior and justice Pedro Carreño, responsible for citizen safety in a country where violent crime is seen as the most pressing problem.

In 2007, 12,000 to 13,000 people were murdered, including 107 in Caracas in the last weekend of 2007 alone, according to newspaper reports.

Besides being the target of criticism for failing to make a dent in the soaring crime rates, Carreño was one of the most radical voices in the government, along with vice president Rodríguez, who Chávez has now put in charge of heading the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

The founding congress of the party, which was created to merge all of the political currents that support Chávez, will be held on Jan. 12, after two previous failed attempts in 2007.

To head the ministry of the interior and justice, Chávez named one of the military officers with whom he led an aborted 1992 coup, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, one of the president’s confidantes, who organised the operation for the release of three hostages by Colombia’s FARC guerrillas, which was aborted on New Year’s Eve.

Analyst Luís Vicente León, director of the one of the country’s leading polling firms, Datanálisis, said the profound changes carried out by Chávez in his cabinet should not be read as an in-depth transformation of his “Bolivarian revolution” or as a step backwards.

“What Chávez is focusing on is basically the perception of his government project, seeking to distance it from the radical image imbued by Chavista factions, which the president himself has fuelled,” León told IPS.

The defeat suffered by Chávez’s proposed constitutional reforms at the polls forces him to seek “a reconnection with Chavista supporters and with the ‘neither-nor’ voters who had always followed him but who were scared off in December by the radicalisation of his project, and by the arguments of the opposition,” said León.

The “neither-nor” is the term used to refer in Venezuela to the significant proportion of voters who do not consider themselves either Chavistas or opposition, but who have helped ensure the president’s successive victories at the polls.

According to analysts, more than three million voters who a year before had guaranteed Chávez’s reelection with a landslide victory of 63 percent of the vote turned their backs on him in December and did not take part in the referendum.

León said that by overhauling nearly half of his cabinet, the president “did not distance himself from his actions, but from his words, and from the risks of future radicalisation that have been perceived and encouraged by his fiery rhetoric.”

“Things went badly for him with that radical stance, and he is seeking a more moderate image, while taking advantage of the moment to punish obvious failures, such as that of Jorge Rodríguez,” who led the Chavista team’s campaign in the referendum on the constitutional reforms, said the analyst.

Opposition commentator Italo Luongo called 2007 Chávez’s “annus horribilis”, because of the mass protests against the government’s refusal to renew the broadcasting licence of the popular RCTV opposition-aligned TV station, the resurgence of a new anti-Chávez student movement, the image of authoritarianism depicted by the international media with respect to the proposed constitutional reforms and his own speeches, and the end of his image of being unbeatable at the polls, after his dozen or so electoral victories over the past decade.

According to León, the government committed “too many errors (in 2007), and now Chávez needs to stop scaring people and to once again seduce his voters, in order to rebuild his majority support, by distancing himself from ideological extremes, even if that causes him problems among his more radical followers.”

And although Chávez has implemented a broad range of social programmes that have brought health and dental care, subsidised food, literacy courses and other initiatives to the poor, he must now respond to people’s demands that he address lingering problems like high crime rates, inflation, food shortages – triggered by price controls and in some cases hoarding by producers – and other issues that affect people’s daily lives.

León believes the search for greater efficiency, along with a toning down of radical ideologies, lie at the core of the ministerial changes. “Chávez has to return to a policy of alliances, because his hegemonic project suffered a defeat,” he said.

This new strategy lies behind the announced changes in the leadership in the single-chamber parliament, in which Chávez’s allies hold all of the seats because the opposition boycotted the elections, but which has suffered some splits because of the president’s attempt to unify all of the parties in the PSUV.

Chávez wants the government, the PSUV and parliament to become “useful instruments,” said León, because regional and municipal elections will be held in late 2008, and will be decisive in showing whether or not the president’s weakened support at the polls in December was merely circumstantial or not.

Chavistas govern 20 of the country’s 24 states and a majority of its towns and cities, but the newly revived opposition is in a position “to win for sure,” will be highly motivated to vote, and “the issue of efficiency or inefficiency will play a key role in the elections, as will the reduction in tension,” said the analyst.

Earlier this week, Chávez issued an amnesty to members of the opposition who were jailed or indicted for participating in the failed coup that ousted him for two days in April 2002.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jun 4 1999 (IPS)

A recent historic victory by Venezuela’s indigenous peoples, the direct selection of three representatives to sit on a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution, is in jeopardy of being distorted by “maneuvres by the ‘white man’,” activists warned this week.

The three delegates of Venezuela’s 28 indigenous groups were chosen in an extraordinary assembly in late March “in accordance with their usage and customs,” as initially established by the rules governing the election of delegates to the Constituent Assembly, to be installed in August.

But in April, the National Electoral Council (CNE) modified the rules, stipulating that it was to regulate the selection of delegates. The CNE has not yet approved the decisions adopted by the late March congress, in which 330 delegates from 60 indigenous organisations participated.

“We are asking that our accords be respected,” Jose Poyo, chairman of the National Indigenous Council of Venezuela (Conive), told IPS. “We feel defenceless and caught up in uncertainty.”

Conive, which coordinated the process for the selection of indigenous representatives, was created two decades ago as the umbrella group linking Venezuela’s indigenous associations.

Poyo is one of the seven indigenous leaders hoping to be elected Jul 25 to one of the remaining 128 seats on the Constituent Assembly, since he was not chosen by the congress as one of the three direct representatives.

One of the selected delegates, Noeli Pocaterra, described the situation as “a lack of respect by the CNE, because it was informed that the congress would be held, was invited to participate, and could have said ‘stop the process’.”

Pocaterra belongs to the Wuayuu ethnic group which accounts for 53 percent of the country’s nearly 400,000 native inhabitants (of a total population of 23 million). The Wuayuu inhabit the northwestern oil-rich state of Zulia, as well as the Guajira region shared by Colombia and Venezuela.

The other two representatives chosen were Guillermo Guevara, a member of the Karina ethnic group and the coordinator of the indigenous organisations of the Amazonas region in southern Venezuela, and Jose Luis Gonzalez, a Pemon leader from the Gran Sabana region in the east.

The three are well-known activists in the indigenous struggle, with great clout in their regions as well as influence at an international level. Pocaterra is vice-president of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, and Guevara is vice-president of the regional Indigenous Council of the Amazon Basin.

“The aim is for the selection to be according to the usage and customs of the CNE, not of our peoples,” maintained Gonzalez, who formed part of a delegation of indigenous people from throughout the country who came to Caracas to meet with the electoral authorities and demand that they approve the decisions of the congress.

Guevara explained by telephone from the state of Amazonas, 1,000 kms south of Caracas, that “we felt that these three posts indicated the existence, for the first time, of an interest in settling a debt to our peoples, in terms of participation.

“But ‘the white man’ wants to disregard the decision. The (political) parties and other interests want to impose figures who have been ‘criollizado’ (coopted by ‘white’ society) and serve their game,” said the Karina leader.

A new election of indigenous representatives “would play into the interests of a few indigenous and supposedly pro-Indian figures linked to the most corrupt sectors of the AD and Copei,” stated a document in which Conive, dozens of other organisations and indigenous chiefs demanded that the CNE respect their rights.

AD (Democratic Action) and Copei are the two parties that maintained hegemonic power for 41 years, until they were swept aside by President Hugo Chavez, a 44-year-old retired lieutenant- colonel who remains hugely popular.

A Constituent Assembly to politically redesign the country was the main platform of Chavez’s campaign in the elections that brought him to power on Feb 2. Since he became a candidate, he has promised indigenous groups that they would enjoy special representation – unprecedented in Venezuela.

The constitution of 1961 – to be rewritten during the Constituent Assembly’s 180 days of functions – established a regime of exceptions and other mechanisms to protect indigenous rights. Nevertheless, indigenous rights continue to be ignored and disrespected.

Chavez’s plan to grant special representation to indigenous people was widely supported in the consultations he carried out in order to fix the rules governing the election of delegates to the Constituent Assembly, which were approved by more than 80 percent of voters in an Apr 25 referendum.

The indigenous peoples had begun their own constituent process since the triumph of Chavez, who was elected with the fervent support of the dispossessed, thanks to a nationalist discourse with a profound social content, at the head of an alliance of nearly the entire left, as well as former coup makers.

Shortly before the referendum, the Supreme Court ordered the CNE to review the rules proposed by the president, due to legal action seeking to restrict the powers of the Constituent Assembly. But few noticed that the modifications included changes in the clause specifically referring to indigenous peoples.

Initially, 103 members of the Constituent Assembly were to be elected, three of which were to be indigenous people. But the CNE expanded that number to 131, without increasing the number of indigenous representatives.

The initial rules indicated that in view of Venezuela’s regime of exceptions and the international treaties signed by the country, indigenous groups would have three delegates, “chosen in accordance with their usage, customs and ancestral practices.”‘

But the new rules specified that the three indigenous delegates would be “elected in accordance with the provisions” issued by the CNE, “taking into account their customs and practices.”

“When the CNE modified the norm, it knew that we had already completed our selection process,” said Pocaterra from the city of Maracaibo, 800 kms west of Caracas.

The indigenous leaders pointed out that not only had the CNE been invited to the three-day congress, but a delegate of the electoral council of the region where the meeting was held had in fact participated.

They also explained that great organisational efforts and expenses had gone into the congress, and that it was not easy to bring the delegates to the southwestern ancestral indigenous lands of the Gran Sabana. While several were able to hitch rides in some airplane or another, others walked for days to reach the late March gathering.

“So much effort cannot just be wasted,” commented Yekuana delegate and Conive leader Jose Estaba. “It was a beautiful experience that marked a watershed in our history, and we will not accept that it be disregarded because of political intrigues.”

Pocaterra said it took long days and nights of discussions, in accordance with indigenous oral traditions, to decide how the three delegates were to be chosen, in order that they represent the three overlying regions of indigenous groups, and to guarantee that minorities and the plurality of cultures be taken into account.

Given the size of their community, some Wuayuu leaders argued that their ethnic group should have two delegates. But Pocaterra said she did not agree, because “that would do to the minorities what we are asking ‘criollo’ (white) society not to do to us.”

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, May 25 1999 (IPS)

The U.S. government’s search for a “new home” for military bases given Panama’s “no” to the continued use of the Howard airbase has run up against a new hurdle: Venezuela’s refusal to give permission for foreign military planes to overfly its national territory.

The Venezuelan government notified the United States and the Netherlands Monday of its “irreversible” decision not to allow military aircraft from other countries to fly through its airspace without express authorisation.

The decision’s effects on relations with Washington, an aspect of concern to business sectors, are not yet clear.

The daily ‘El Mundo’, meanwhile, applauded the measure in an article headlined “¡Buena esa, presidente!” (Way to Go, President!), describing it as a decision of “unquestionable courage.”

Minister of Foreign Relations Jose Vicente Rangel issued a declaration stating that Caracas was now studying “various alternatives” suggested by The Hague and Washington with respect to cooperation in anti-drug efforts.

The U.S. government said it hoped to maintain anti-drug cooperation with Venezuela. “We have always had a good working relationship with Venezuela in our common anti-narcotics efforts,” and we hope to continue that relationship, said a State Department spokesman.

The issue cropped up when the United States requested permission to use Venezuelan air space to connect possible U.S. military installations in Aruba and Curacao – two of the Netherlands Antilles located just 56 and 30 kilometres off Venezuela’s west coast – with a projected base in Ecuador.

President Hugo Chavez put an end to discussions of the U.S. request to overfly Venezuelan territory when he told the local daily ‘El Universal’ that “we cannot accept any foreign military plane overflying our territory without our authorisation, and we will not authorise it.”

He explained on TV later on Monday that Venezuelan law prohibited flights over national territory by warplanes from other countries carrying armed soldiers.

He added that there were other alternatives for cooperating in efforts designed to keep the Caribbean region from being used by drug traffickers, and said Venezuela would collaborate with the United States and other countries in that sense – while maintaining sovereignty over its airspace.

“I am sure this position is understood, and that it will not hurt relations with any country,” the president remarked.

Relations between Washington and Chavez – a 44-year-old retired lieutenant-colonel who headed a military uprising in 1992 – are complex. His government, backed by a leftist alliance, has reaffirmed the independence of its diplomacy in international matters of particular interest to the United States.

Chavez will travel to New York Jun 9 to meet with U.S. investors. He failed to arrange, however, a visit to Washington for a formal meeting with President Bill Clinton, as announced a few months ago. Chavez met Clinton in January as president-elect.

He explained that Venezuela had F-16 and Mirage airplanes equipped to overfly the entire Caribbean region, which could cooperate with the United States to intercept suspicious craft, as has already been done several times this year in cooperation with Colombia.

He also said he had offered the United States the use of military radio frequencies to pursue aircraft suspected of carrying drugs, thus allowing Venezuelan planes to take up pursuits which the United States initiated outside the South American country’s airspace.

Chavez stressed that the United States and Venezuela were “friends, allies and partners,” pointing out that his country headed the list of U.S. oil suppliers and was the seventh largest investor in the sector there as owner of a refinery and fuel distribution network.

In the wake of Chavez’s statements, Rangel met with the ambassadors of the United States, John Maisto, and the Netherlands, Roeland van der Geer, who put forth alternative proposals that the minister began to discuss Monday with the president.

Washington, which will hand the Panama canal zone over to that Central American country by the Dec 31 deadline, has been seeking a new location for its troops in the region.

Colombia and Peru refused, but the Netherlands offered the use of Aruba and Curacao to house U.S. Forward Operating Locations (FOLs) to replace the bases operating in Panama.

Washington also secured permission from the government of Ecuador to use its Manta base as the main location for U.S. planes used in surveillance, pursuit and interception of aircraft suspected of transporting drugs over the Caribbean.

Colombian Ambassador in Caracas Luis Guillermo Giraldo said Saturday that his country had no problems with the U.S. request to use Colombian (and Venezuelan) airspace as an “air corridor” between Ecuador and Aruba and Curacao.

He explained that such permission would square with existing authorisation for overflights by the United States, as part of drug enforcement efforts. A U.S. anti-narcotics brigade already operates in Colombia.

Giraldo’s statement left Venezuela alone in its refusal to authorise overflights, after earlier remarks by Rangel that Caracas and Bogota were both concerned over the request and were studying a common response.

Rangel reiterated Monday that the Chavez administration – which took office in February – had a “staunch and irreversible” commitment to the fight against drug trafficking, and guaranteed “cooperation at all levels.”

But in the case of traffic through Venezuelan airspace, “we are considering the interests of sovereignty and national defence, which could be compromised, and which are clearly top priority.”

The foreign minister, a long-time leftist politician and reknowned opinion-shaper in the local print media and TV, said that in Caracas’ view, multilateral collaboration in efforts against drug trafficking did not necessarily entail the use of airspace.

“There are technological resources that guarantee control of drug trafficking and effective efforts against it, without us having to agree to incursions by foreign planes over our territory,” said Rangel.

“There are sufficient satellite resources, radar installations on Venezuelan soil and at various points in the Caribbean, as well as the Tolemaida military base in Colombia, where the Antinarcotics Brigade for the region operates, which guarantee total coverage,” he maintained.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 26 1999 (IPS)

An overwhelming 92 percent of those who voted in Sunday’s referendum in Venezuela approved the creation of a Constituent Assembly to politically “refound” the country. Some analysts argued, however, that the record low voter turnout of 40 percent weakened the process.

Opposition and governing alliance interpretations of the results of the first referendum in Venezuelan history and their significance for President Hugo Chavez are contradictory, however.

Chavez promoted the idea of a Constituent Assembly as a route toward the peaceful – and lawful – transformation of the foundations of Venezuelan democracy, and called for a referendum on the issue when he took office Feb 2.

The president declared that he felt “happy regarding the results, and a winner along with the people.” He added that the overwhelming support for an Assembly “ratified the backing I received in December,” when he was elected president with 56 percent of the vote.

Chavez denied that the low turnout reduced the legitimacy of the route chosen for the emergence of “a new democracy, hand in hand with the people and in peace,” because “a referendum is not measured by abstention,” and the backing was achieved without any campaign for the “yes” ballot.

Voters backed the late June election of the 131 members of the Constituent Assembly, to be installed Jul 5. The Assembly is to function for six months. Another referendum will be held in January to approve the text of the year 2000 constitution, which is to replace the 1961 constitution.

“The image is that of a victory which was not completed,” maintained Carlos Blanco, former president of the now-defunct Commission for the Reform of the State in the early years of the decade. Although an adversary of Chavez, Blanco backed the creation of an Assembly.

“The message is clear: change is unstoppable,” the vice- president of Congress, opposition legislator Henrique Capriles, told IPS. “But the president must understand that the agenda does not end here, and that there is an economic emergency that must be addressed.

“Within the low turnout there is a silent criticism of Chavez, his lack of action in tackling the profound economic crisis, and his style of confrontation with the other branches of power,” said Capriles, an independent from the ranks of the christian democrats who at age 26 made his political debut as president of the Chamber of Deputies.

Of the two questions voted in the referendum, the one referring to whether a Constituent Assembly should be held garnered 92 percent of the votes. The second question, referring to the election of the 131 members of the Assembly and the limits of their functions, took 87 percent.

Those projections were based on the tallying of 81 percent of all ballots cast, although the National Electoral Board said the proportions would faithfully reflect the final outcome.

Thus, a majority of voters defined the result, making unnecessary the participation of more than half of all registered voters.

Analyst Fausto Maso joined those who interpreted a defeat for Chavez in Sunday’s results, but one which could be “very beneficial for the president if he knows how to read it.”

Maso pointed out that now the Assembly could become more than “just a ‘Chavista’ project;” that the “matrix of the opposition that the president is calling for and which does not exist” could emerge from the Assembly; and that “defeats teach us more than victories, something that the politician and military man in Chavez knows.”

Chavez, a 44-year-old retired lieutenant-colonel, attempted to seize power with arms in 1992, and personified the popular rage against traditional politicians and their poor leadership with a discourse containing a profound social content.

The highest level of abstention recorded in Venezuela up to now was 54 percent, during the 1995 regional and municipal elections.

While stressing that Chavez maintained the level of support expressed in the December elections, Blanco said “he suffered a clear erosion by failing to draw new followers.”

“Chavez was defeated with this weak participation,” said Alberto Franceschi, leader of ‘Proyecto Venezuela’, the emerging centre-right force whose candidate, Henrique Salas, tailed Chavez in the December elections.

But different analyses emerged from within the ranks of the ‘Polo Patriotico’, the alliance of leftists and former coup- leaders that backs Chavez.

Although pointing out that the low turnout “must be read by all of us, the government as well as the opposition, which never presented an alternative and opposed Chavez without facing up,” prosecutor Javier Elechiguerra said “the most conclusive aspect is the triumph of the ‘yes’ to a radical change through an Assembly.

“Measuring abstention in comparison with a different kind of election is a subtle maneuvre by those who do not want to perceive reality,” he argued.

“Chavez was the big winner,” said Aristobulo Isturiz, former mayor of Caracas and considered the Polo’s most brilliant parliamentarian. “Alone against everyone he obtained overwhelming support, without any campaign.”

The governor of the oil-rich western state of Zulia, Francisco Arias, one of the commanders who accompanied Chavez in his uprising, said “this is the first occasion in the history of the country that people were not hauled to the polls.

“Those who voted were motivated to do so,” he added, recalling how up to now, the two main traditional parties and other political groupings have carried out major operatives to bring their supporters to the polls.

The exponents of the two-party system which dominated the political scene until Chavez shouldered them out – the social democratic Democratic Action (AD) party and the christian democratic Copei – stayed out of the campaign. The AD issued no recommendations, while Copei staked its bets on the “yes” ballot.

The Copei leadership agreed that the low turnout had only a relative significance in a referendum. But the secretary-general of the party, Donald Ramirez, added that Chavez should interpret “that the people want to move toward change amidst coordination and agreement rather than tension.”

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 19 1999 (IPS)

Cent by cent, oil spot prices have been rising this month – to two dollars above last year’s average – and last week’s prices on the futures market were the highest seen in a year, partly due to the conflict between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Yugoslavia.

In spot trading of benchmark oils, prices rose between 0.14 and 0.41 cents per barrel (159 litres) last week, to two dollars higher than the 1998 average.

On the futures market, the New York market rate for delivery in May rose to 17.46 dollars a barrel last Friday, the highest price seen in over a year.

In Venezuela – the world’s third largest oil exporter and the only member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the Americas – the Energy Ministry said the market had been influenced by “the high volume of purchases caused by concern over the conflict between Yugoslavia and NATO.”

Such purchases, which have swum against the current of the gradual entry into the season of low demand, have so far neutralised the impact of the American Petroleum Institute (API) announcement that U.S. stockpiles were larger than estimated.

API reported that the United States, the world’s top consumer of oil, had stocks of 218.5 million barrels of gasoline, 3.06 million more than projected, while stocks of crude stood at 343.2 million barrels, 1.03 million above projections.

Uncertainty with respect to the duration and outcome of the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia has brought uncertainty regarding the rise in demand and transport difficulties, as the conflict does not involve production zones.

Benchmark North Sea Brent crude averaged 14.54 dollars a barrel last week, nearly three dollars above the year’s average so far of 11.71 dollars. Last week’s price was also nearly two dollars higher than the 1998 average of 12.76 dollars.

In 1998, the price of North Sea Brent crude plunged 49 percent below the 1997 average, in the context of the overall price debacle, due to the wild excess offer, which was not curbed by the – only partially fulfilled – production cutbacks agreed by exporters.

The excess offer was the result of a sharp slowdown in the rise in demand caused by the crisis in Asia – the region where consumption was growing the fastest – which found large private and state exporters caught up in a race toward expanding supply, which threw the market sharply off balance.

The Venezuelan Energy Ministry said the strengthening of prices was also a consequence of the perception that supply was in fact steadily shrinking, in compliance with the latest cutbacks agreed among producers.

Last month, OPEC members and independent producers agreed to withdraw 2.1 million barrels a day (bpd) from the market as of Apr 1.

Traders believe there are grounds for confidence that producers will largely live up to the agreed cutbacks, according to analysts in London and New York, who say that is driving prices mad.

Iran – OPEC’s second largest exporter, which was expected to slowly comply with its cutback – confirmed last Thursday a 10 percent drop in production this month, which boosted confidence in the organisation’s discipline.

The pledge by OPEC – which controls around half of all exports – to withdraw more than 700,000 bpd from the market began to be taken seriously since the clients of the organisation’s leading members received notifications of cutbacks.

Non-OPEC exporters Mexico, Norway, Russia and Oman have also committed to cutbacks, with the aim of bringing supply back into line with global demand, calculated by the World Energy Council at 75.7 million bpd this year.

Preliminary independent estimates indicate that the current excess offer on the market is no higher than 300,000 bpd – compared to two million bpd in February, which sank prices to a 30- year low.

A third element that drove prices up last week was the expiration of contracts on the London market, according to the Venezuelan Energy Ministry.

But local oil expert Alberto Quiros said the arrival of the northern hemisphere summer and the consequent drop in consumption, as well as the still large stockpiles, would be felt by the market once it absorbed the psychological impact of the agreed cutbacks.

Venezuela’s energy authorities pointed out that U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) averaged 16.61 dollars a barrel last week, 21 cents up from the previous week. The average price for the year stands at 13.51 dollars, compared to 14.40 dollars in 1998 and 20.56 dollars in 1997.

The OPEC basket sold at 14.47 dollars, a rise of 35 cents, which brought this year’s average to 11.51 dollars. The price averaged 12.33 dollars in 1998 and 18.68 in 1997.

Venezuela’s export cocktail, meanwhile, rose to 13.09 dollars last week, a 14-cent rise, which brought the year’s average to 10.11 dollars, compared to 1998’s 10.57 and 1997’s 16.32 dollars.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 10 1999 (IPS)

A legal battle between local and transnational drug companies over the anti-impotency pill “Viagra” has moved into Venezuela’s Supreme Court of Justice.

Venezuelan companies are ready to reproduce the drug that, in the past year, has revolutionised the global pharmaceutical market. The cite a 1995 law which declares that, as a rule, products in the sexual dysfunction area of the health sector cannot be patented.

However the Autonomous Service of Intellectual Property (SAPI), the highest authority on the issue, has granted patent rights to Viagra to the transnational concern “Pfizer”, the manufacturers of the drug.

The fight over Viagra was highlighted by the newspaper “El Nacional” as part of a wider struggle between national and foreign companies, which also affects the Andean Community, the trade bloc to which this country belongs.

The First Court of Administrative Disputes accepted a lawsuit from a local laboratory last month for nullification of the patent granted by SAPI to Pfizer, whose stock went up 60 percent in 1998 when it introduced Viagra on the US market.

Local laboratories have used a traditional two-pronged strategy of promoting market protection from foreign competition while seeking to keep the sector free of patents.

Six Venezuelan-owned laboratories brought legal actions for the right to manufacture male anti-impotency products with the same active ingredient as Viagra, called pirazolopirimidon.

They also requested permission from health authorities to sell their “copies” on the domestic market, under brand names like “Sildenafil” and “Viasek” — much less evocative than the combination of the words “vigor” and “Niagara” (Falls), with which Pfizer baptised its pill.

The local “copies” will cost 50 to 70 percent less than Viagra which sells at around 10 dollars a pill.

Pfizer, which has not confronted obstacles to obtaining a patent in other countries, warned that it will exhaust every legal remedy to prevent Venezuela from becoming the starting point for the “cloning” of Viagra, which would erode its control.

The director of the Chamber of Venezuelan Laboratories, Milagro Ladera, elaborated that in fact, the laboratories did not face any impediments in manufacturing the drug, other than obtaining the permission of local health authorities, a very slow process due to red tape.

Ladera argued that Venezuelan law is very clear in exempting medicines from the patent regime, based on the public interest and as a way of containing the rising costs of medicine — in practice, a total failure.

But in reality, drug patents are being granted in the Register of Industrial Property of SAPI, pointed out Francisco Allende, director of the chamber of transnational laboratory affiliates.

“The Register accepted at least 230 pharmaceutical patents and there are many others being applied for,” since 1994, when the Andean Community established a common regimen for industrial property, he indicated.

The director of SAPI, Francisco Astudillo, based his decision in favor of Pfizer on that regimen, which has compulsory application in member countries, according to the Andean Tribunal. The other Andean members are Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

The official argued that in accord with regional Andean legislation, it has the right to patent any pharmaceutical product that originates from new research and whose uses were not previously known, as is the case of Viagra.

“We are not innovating (the law), just once more applying the general principles of patents and Andean standards,” he affirmed.

Astudillo warned that if any laboratory other than Pfizer obtained permission from the health authorities and commercialised the anti-impotence product, with the same pharmaceutical chemical ingredient as Viagra, the Irish company will sue.

He also raised the possibility that if the Supreme Court sided with national laboratories on the Viagra issue, “it would be disowning every industrial property right applied for the last eight years,” as well as the enforcement within the country of Andean rules.

The episode with Viagra is not unprecedented. At the beginning of 1998, a system entered into force in the Andean Community to facilitate the commercialisation of medicine within the bloc, which operates as a free trade zone and a customs union.

This system, known as decision 418, limits the bloc countries to a 30-day period to grant or deny permission for the sale of drugs of Andean origin, and assumes silence to be a positive response.

The rule was appealed in February 1988 before the Supreme Court by the same national laboratories, who consider it unconstitutional and argue that any international standard must be approved by the local Congress according to the constitution.

But the Andean Tribunal insists that any rule of the bloc is enforceable once it is published in the Andean Gazette, and the Venezuelan Supreme Court has always given precedent to Andean legislation over other sources, although it has not yet ruled on that issue.

The attorney Allan Brewer, an advocate of the laboratories’ claims, insisted that Viagra is not entitled to a patent under national law and the constitution. He added that the fact that the authorities have repeatedly violated these laws before is not an argument in favor of them continuing to do so.

Astudillo stressed that pharmaceuticals is the only sector that opposes Andean standards and that the situation will only be resolved when the Supreme Court confirms that the treaty which gave life to the Andean Community, and was ratified by the local Congress in 1983, is Venezuelan law.

The plaintiff laboratories did not rely only on the supremacy of local laws in their arguments against the patenting of Viagra, but also on points relating to the natural science of medicine.

They argue that it should not be treated as an invention, but rather the discovery of a new application of a principle that was already patented for other uses and was public knowledge.

They are presenting documents that pirazolopirimidon was already used as an active ingredient in a drug previously patented as a capillary dilator for the treatment of hypertension, but which did not prove very effective.

Pfizer discovered the “secondary use” of the compound Sildernafil, which increases blood flow to the penis, when patients participating in clinical trials of the product refused to give back their remaining pills, explain the plaintiffs.

But beyond the coincidence and good luck of the discovery, the patent has been registered in the United States and Europe, on the basis of which, even if it happened as they say, there was a new investigation and an unknown use. (FIN-IPS-eg-if-he-ks-99)

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 6 1999 (IPS)

There are 65 indigenous languages spoken in Venezuela and the care of their phonetic and grammatical structure is pretty much in the hands of one man – 70-years-old Pedro Juan Krisologo.

Krisologo holds the chair marked with the letter “D” of the Venzuelan Academy of Language, a 23-member branch of the Spanish Royal Academy, in an acknowledgement of his contribution to aboriginal languages.

The Warao linguist, anthropologist and philosopher is the first Venezuelan indigenous person to be member of the language academy, thanks to a bibliography which features dictionaries and language manuals of indigenous peoples.

If Krosologo is satisfied about something, it’s that chance or destiny that have helped him be the successor to Fray Cesareo de Armellada, a Spanish missionary adopted by the Indians and who became known as “Father Indian”, and who also devoted himself to the recovery of indigenous languages.

Krisologo explains that many of Venezuela’s 65 languages have different dialects and are used by only 28 aboriginal groups – a total of about 400,000 people.

“There is an unknown and undervalued wealth” in indigenous languages, says Krosologo, who complains that bilingual education is legally mandatory in indigenous communities, but actually is only taught in a few places.

According to the last indigenous census, 20 percent of the Venezuelan Indians do not speak a native language, only Spanish only. One the other side of the coin 24 percent of indigenous people speak only their native tongue.

The situation is even worse for the rest of indigenous culture: myths, crafts, legends and knowledge. This is in part due to the fact that knowledge among indigenous peoples depends largely on the oral tradition, as writing is recent in many of the languages.

“Every time an indigenous elder dies, it’s as if an entire library disappears,” says Krisologo.

In his writings, he remembers his great-grandmother, who was believed to be 120 years of age when she died. She taught him all the science and myths that are hidden behind the stars.

The Warao, the second largest indigenous group in Venezuela in number of inhabitants, live in the northeastern state of Delta Amacuro, which contains a large part of the Orinoco river delta. Their tradition has a great amount of knowledge about the zodiac and astrology, which governs their activities and destiny.

In fact, his acceptance speech for the Academy was titled “The New Nomenclature of the Sky World, Constellations and the Zodiac in Indigenous Venezuela”, in which he interwove the stories from his grandmother and “Fr. Indian” the tutor of some of his linguistic manuals.

Warao is one of the most musical languages spoken by indigenous people in Venezuela, with phonetics that are very characteristic, though its grammatical structure is similar to other languages, Krosologo says.

“Warao” means “people of the curiara” (the holy vessel made from the trunk of a tree), according to some, and “people of the water” according to others, as they live their peaceful lives among the reeds and canals of the delta’s fragile eco-system.

Krisologo says that the aim of his work is not only to maintain and appreciate indigenous languages, but rather to consolidate the spirit of nationality of the native peoples of Venezuela, in order to recover the knowledge and values of the those ethnic groups for the benefit of the whole country’s 23 million inhabitants.

“Mestizaje” (or racial mixing), he argues, “has marvelous elements for Venezuelan culture”, and should be taken advantage of, such as the ways in which the Indians have managed to survive in the face of domination by another civilization, thanks to “our integration with the land, the roots, and the native and genuine” values, as well as their cosmology.

“When researchers talk about the great Pre-Colombian civilizations, they refer to the Aztecs, the Maya and the Incas,” says Krsologo. But in his opinion, “there also is an enormous wealth of knowledge in the culture of the people from the Amazon, the Caribbean, the mountains and the flood plains of Venezuela.”

In this sense, Krisologo says, the efforts that are being made to recover the planetary knowledge of indigenous culture, such that of the Makiritare, the Pemone, the Yecuanas, and the Waraos themselves are very important.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano argues that this ignorance is part of a genocidal neglect towards the native cosmovision and civilization of the Americas.

“The Indians of the Americas are allowed to be objects of study, but not subjects of history. The Indians are said to have folklore, not culture; they practice superstitions, not religions; they speak dialects, not languages; they make crafts, never art”, says Galeano, in one of his writings.

Krisologo argues that is what leads to the consideration of indigenous knowledge as magic, while if it were the work of the dominant Western civilization, it would be considered science.

According to the Warao linguist and anthropologist, the current period is not a favorable one for the Indians, in Venezuela or in any other part, because they are a dominated and unappreciated minority.

He calls for more resources and respect for the maintenance of the culture and way of life of the Indians, beginning with the language.

He stresses that the issue is not to force indigenous peoples to incorporate into the dominant culture, but rather a racial mixing based on co-existence. “All kinds of cooperation, but not integration”, says the academic, whose travels throughout the world and its universities have not erased his Warao features and personality.

His enigmatic gaze, his very soft voice, and his very precise phrases, reveal his ethnic background, even when talking about details in his life, from the remote village of Yawaraco to his current seat in the Academy.

At his first school, he met Father Indian, who was one of the people who supported his move to Caracas, where he received a scholarship to study Philosophy and Letters in Madrid. He later received a doctorate at the Archive of the Indias, in the Spanish city of Sevilla.

He received his Masters in Social and Linguistic Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Mexico, and while on another sojourn in Spain, he also studied Journalism and Art Education.

In addition to his academic activities and time-consuming positions at the Ministries of Justice and Education – where indigenous affairs are dealt with in Venezuela – Krisologo considers his most satisfying work, together with his books, to be the foundation and presidency of the Museum of Anthropology and History in his state.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 5 1999 (IPS)

A legal battle between local and transnational drug companies over the anti-impotency pill “Viagra” has moved into Venezuala’s Supreme Court of Justice.

Venezuelan companies are ready to reproduce the drug that, in the past year, has revolutionised the global pharmaceutical market. The cite a 1995 law which declares that, as a rule, products in the sexual dysfunction area of the health sector cannot be patented.

However the Autonomous Service of Intellectual Property (SAPI), the highest authority on the issue, has granted patent rights to Viagra to the transnational concern “Pfizer”, the manufacturers of the drug.

The fight over Viagra was highlighted by the newspaper “El Nacional” as part of a wider struggle between national and foreign companies, which also affects the Andean Community, the trade bloc to which this country belongs.

The First Court of Administrative Disputes accepted a lawsuit from a local laboratory last month for nullification of the patent granted by SAPI to Pfizer, whose stock went up 60 percent in 1998 when it introduced Viagra on the US market.

Local laboratories have used a traditional two-pronged strategy of promoting market protection from foreign competition while seeking to keep the sector free of patents.

Six Venezuelan-owned laboratories brought legal actions for the right to manufacture male anti-impotency products with the same active ingredient as Viagra, called pirazolopirimidon.

They also requested permission from health authorities to sell their “copies” on the domestic market, under brand names like “Sildenafil” and “Viasek” — much less evocative than the combination of the words “vigor” and “Niagara” (Falls), with which Pfizer baptised its pill.

The local “copies” will cost 50 to 70 percent less than Viagra which sells at around 10 dollars a pill.

Pfizer, which has not confronted obstacles to obtaining a patent in other countries, warned that it will exhaust every legal remedy to prevent Venezuela from becoming the starting point for the “cloning” of Viagra, which would erode its control.

The director of the Chamber of Venezuelan Laboratories, Milagro Ladera, elaborated that in fact, the laboratories did not face any impediments in manufacturing the drug, other than obtaining the permission of local health authorities, a very slow process due to red tape.

Ladera argued that Venezuelan law is very clear in exempting medicines from the patent regime, based on the public interest and as a way of containing the rising costs of medicine — in practice, a total failure.

But in reality, drug patents are being granted in the Register of Industrial Property of SAPI, pointed out Francisco Allende, director of the chamber of transnational laboratory affiliates.

“The Register accepted at least 230 pharmaceutical patents and there are many others being applied for,” since 1994, when the Andean Community established a common regimen for industrial property, he indicated.

The director of SAPI, Francisco Astudillo, based his decision in favor of Pfizer on that regimen, which has compulsory application in member countries, according to the Andean Tribunal. The other Andean members are Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

The official argued that in accord with regional Andean legislation, it has the right to patent any pharmaceutical product that originates from new research and whose uses were not previously known, as is the case of Viagra.

“We are not innovating (the law), just once more applying the general principles of patents and Andean standards,” he affirmed.

Astudillo warned that if any laboratory other than Pfizer obtained permission from the health authorities and commercialised the anti-impotence product, with the same pharmaceutical chemical ingredient as Viagra, the Irish company will sue.

He also raised the possibility that if the Supreme Court sided with national laboratories on the Viagra issue, “it would be disowning every industrial property right applied for the last eight years,” as well as the enforcement within the country of Andean rules.

The episode with Viagra is not unprecedented. At the beginning of 1998, a system entered into force in the Andean Community to facilitate the commercialisation of medicine within the bloc, which operates as a free trade zone and a customs union.

This system, known as decision 418, limits the bloc countries to a 30-day period to grant or deny permission for the sale of drugs of Andean origin, and assumes silence to be a positive response.

The rule was appealed in February 1988 before the Supreme Court by the same national laboratories, who consider it unconstitutional and argue that any international standard must be approved by the local Congress according to the constitution.

But the Andean Tribunal insists that any rule of the bloc is enforceable once it is published in the Andean Gazette, and the Venezuelan Supreme Court has always given precedent to Andean legislation over other sources, although it has not yet ruled on that issue.

The attorney Allan Brewer, an advocate of the laboratories’ claims, insisted that Viagra is not entitled to a patent under national law and the constitution. He added that the fact that the authorities have repeatedly violated these laws before is not an argument in favor of them continuing to do so.

Astudillo stressed that pharmaceuticals is the only sector that opposes Andean standards and that the situation will only be resolved when the Supreme Court confirms that the treaty which gave life to the Andean Community, and was ratified by the local Congress in 1983, is Venezuelan law.

The plaintiff laboratories did not rely only on the supremacy of local laws in their arguments against the patenting of Viagra, but also on points relating to the natural science of medicine.

They argue that it should not be treated as an invention, but rather the discovery of a new application of a principle that was already patented for other uses and was public knowledge.

They are presenting documents that pirazolopirimidon was already used as an active ingredient in a drug previously patented as a capillary dilator for the treatment of hypertension, but which did not prove very effective.

Pfizer discovered the “secondary use” of the compound Sildernafil, which increases blood flow to the penis, when patients participating in clinical trials of the product refused to give back their remaining pills, explain the plaintiffs.

But beyond the coincidence and good luck of the discovery, the patent has been registered in the United States and Europe, on the basis of which, even if it happened as they say, there was a new investigation and an unknown use. (FIN-IPS-eg-if-he-ks-99)

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Mar 17 1999 (IPS)

Venezuela’s active role in the Colombian peace process is meant to prevent the conflict in that country “from becoming an excuse to internationalize the war,” according to minister without portfolio, Jose Vicente Rangel.

In an interview with IPS, Rangel said “there are those who are thinking of internationalizing the conflict in Colombia, and this would ignite violence throughout the region, with unpredictable consequences.”

The violence in Colombia and new measures that Caracas is taking as facilitator of the peace process, were discussed last week in the first formal get-together between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his Colombian counterpart, Andres Pastrana.

Rangel, a veteran leader of the left wing and one of the principals opinionmakers of Venezuela, has been a minister in the Chavez government since Feb. 2 , when it came to power after defeating traditional politicians and political parties.

Rangel explained that the Colombian conflict “worries us enormously…if it is not stopped, in no time it will become a highly explosive situation.”

“Already it is commonplace to say that, sooner or later, the war in Colombia is a war in Venezuela and that peace in Colombia is peace in Venezuela,” said the minister referring to the extensive and active border of 2,219 kms – an active front for Colombian guerrilla groups.

Rangel said that groups thinking of internationalizing the conflict “fall outside of the jurisdiction of the Colombian and Venezuelan governments, but force us both to think very seriously about the immediate future.”

Fear of an internationalization of the conflict has been nourished by a growing perception in diplomatic quarters in Latin America that the United States will intervene if Pastrana’s peace effort collapses.

Chavez repeatedly has said he would go wherever asked and do all he can do to achieve peace in Colombia. He attended a January meeting with Pastrana and Cuban President Fidel Castro in Havana and sent a delegation that same month to the opening of the dialogue with the Revolutionary Armed Force. (FARC)

Last month, Caracas hosted two meetings between the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN), another armed insurrectional group.

“We are acting in good faith as facilitators of this process but we aren’t a part of it…we don’t want to create any suspicions and we are recognized as the sole intermediary to the government and to the State of Colombia,” Rangel stressed.

“At the same time, we say that we cannot have an attitude of disrespect towards the guerrillas, because it is not possible to obtain peace in Colombia without reaching agreement with both sides of the conflict.”

Among signs that set off alarms in the region over internationalization, was Peru’s move in sending troops to the border with Colombia after Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori returned from a visit to the United States last month.

Fujimori’s claim of the need to avoid any penetration by “Colombian narcoterrorism,” into Peru was taken by some quarters as another indication of possible action by Washington, if there was no progress in the peace dialogue.

Rangel preferred not to speculate on such a possibility but admitted that “the possibility of establishing bases in neighboring countries to confront a possible complication in Colombia worries us tremendously.”

For this reason, news this week from Lima that Peru would not accept the establishment of a U.S. military base on its territory – to replace the one being given up in Panama this year – was encouraging.

“We too would not agree (to host a base),” Rangel stressed, leaving the question open as to whether Washington had made a formal request to Venezuela.

Rangel, who ran for president on two occasions but remained outside politics for 15 years, said that “I don’t dare to say that there is a strategy already outlined,” in the direction of an eventual internationalization of the conflict.

“But as an observer, I can say that there is a growing concern about U.S. actions – strengthened by the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Panama Canal Zone,” he declared.

He emphasized that “for some U.S. strategists this means a weakening of control in a region viewed as a “hot zone”, and this is a motive for concern.”

On the progress of the peace process with FARC rebels – that began Jan 7 but were postponed until April after 12 days – Rangel said that “my personal impression is that the guerrillas have not only the military initiative, but also the political one.”

“My sense is that, until now, the guerrillas practically have set the rules of the game of war and now they have taken the initiative in the peace process,” he said.

The reason for this is “because they move more easily in the political terrain, they are bringing up initiatives.”

For example, “when Chavez said that he is ready to meet with the guerrilla leaders and with Pastrana, immediately the guerrillas declared that Manuel Marulanda (commander of the FARC) was ready to meet with the president.”

“It’s a skillful political move, upon which the Colombian government will have to take the initiative,” he commented.

But the minister underscored that “what we must do is not judge but register what is taking place and write down the positive aspects of which ever initiatives are formulated.”

“While there is a chance for dialogue, we are going to continue to support that process,” and that is something that “President Pastrana knows and appreciates,” he said decisively. (FIN-IPS-eg-ip-la-mk-99)

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Mar 16 1999 (IPS)

Without production having been cut yet by a single barrel, oil prices have already risen around 20 percent due to the announcement of a new cutback, Venezuelan Energy Minister Ali Rodriguez remarked Tuesday.

The energy minister of Venezuela, the world’s second top exporter of oil, said prices would have fallen by up to four dollars below Tuesday’s spot prices if the situation on the market had remained unchanged.

At a news briefing, Rodriguez refused “to confirm or deny” any precise figure as to the voluntary supply cuts agreed last Friday in the Hague.

He stressed that a commitment had been made to release no details until the Mar 23 special conference of the 11 members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna.

Venezuela was one of the five oil-producing countries that participated in the ministerial meeting in the Hague, along with fellow OPEC members Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Iran, and independent producer Mexico.

Reports out of London indicated that as of next month, OPEC should reduce supply by 1,718 million barrels per day (bpd). Non- OPEC producers would account for the rest of the total cutback of 2,004 million bpd.

From March to July 1998, OPEC agreed on a total cutback of 2.6 million bpd, while independent producers agreed to cut another 600,000 bpd.

But the organisation only lived up to 75 percent of that commitment. In February, collective production stood above 28 million bpd, according to independent sources, while the upper limit as of July was set at 26.054 million bpd.

Deputy Minister of Energy Alvaro Silva said “two million barrels a day should be withdrawn from the market.” He added that an immediate rise was seen on the speculative market, while on the market of real transactions the effect would be felt more clearly as the enormous stockpiles that had built up were reduced.

Silva said that while a general understanding on the amount to be withdrawn had been reached, the details of each OPEC member’s quota would be finetuned in Vienna.

The deputy minister pointed out that the agreement reached in the Hague demonstrated to all actors in the oil business that producing countries were determined “to balance the market, and to do so through an understanding, and in no case by means of a price war.”

The spot price of Venezuela’s export cocktail stood above 10.60 dollars Tuesday, three dollars up from its February price.

“If the situation on the market had remained unchanged, particularly this quarter, oil prices would have plunged even below seven dollars,” commented Minister Rodriguez.

He pointed out that Venezuela refined 1.3 million bpd of the approximately 2.8 million bpd it currently produced.

“That would mean the real price of crude would have dropped below six dollars, a level that would have forced a large number of wells to close because they would no longer have covered costs – which would have put us in an even more critical situation than at present,” Rodriguez maintained.

He added that the situation of producers in the United States, where 45,000 workers had to be dismissed, was even more desperate.

Rodriguez admitted that in Venezuela, the social impact of the agreed reduction of 535,000 bpd had been extremely tough, but he ensured that without the new cut, the situation would get even worse.

Venezuela’s representatives went to the Hague determined not to cut one single 159-litre barrel more, due to the tens of thousands of dismissals directly or indirectly caused by the slump in oil activity since last July.

The situation has worsened since February, when the new government of Hugo Chavez decided to stop complying with Venezuela’s cutback quota, which it was still 125,000 bpd short of meeting.

“Without vigorous actions like those being taken, prices would have fallen sharply, and in the case of Venezuela, no less than one-third of the wells would have had to close, which is expensive,” said Rodriguez.

Private oil traders operating here described the agreement as “good business” Tuesday, saying Venezuela would obtain more benefits by shoring up prices than by defending volumes.

The reports out of London say Venezuela will reportedly be asked to cover only four percent of the new overall cutback, some 125,000 bpd, due to the social impact of the measure and the fact that last time, Venezuela undertook the largest relative cut – 15 percent of the total.

But sources close to the government said Venezuela’s cut would be even smaller, and that it had been asked to comply with a total cutback of 585,000 bpd with respect to a year ago, when it was extracting 2.37 million bpd.

President Chavez said Venezuela had “committed itself to expanding the cutback somewhat, but not much due to the internal situation.” The country is aware, however, that it is indispensable to shore up prices because “if the barrel plunges any further, we won’t know what to do.”

Oil covers 40 percent of the government’s budget and accounts for more than 70 percent of foreign exchange earnings in Venezuela, where revenues crashed seven billion dollars in 1998, plunging the country into recession and driving unemployment up even further.

It is calculated that for every dollar that Venezuela’s export barrel falls, the country loses one billion dollars. The new government took office in the midst of the worst financial outlook “of the century,” according to Central Bank director Domingo Maza.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Mar 13 1999 (IPS)

Venezuela will play a lead role in consolidating a world culture of respect for human rights through the international forums it belongs to, Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel said.

This objective is one of the fundamental elements of the new foreign policy of the Hugo Chavez government, which took power on February 2 with the promise of leading a “democratic and peaceful revolution.”

In interview with IPS, Rangel, a 69 year-old with 56 years experience as a political activist “in the depths of the opposition” – a left-wing figure supporting investigative journalism – outlined the new diplomatic plans of Venezuela.

A new model which defends human rights at home and abroad will mean “profound changes in the relationship with non governmental organisations and institutions, like Amnesty International and others.”

“We want the best possible relations with these entities and as co-workers in the effort to defend human rights in Venezuela and the world,” he stated, explaining that the era of outright rejection of unproved denunciations is now over.

“On the contrary, they will be accepted, examined and a response will be given,” explained the minister, also nominated by Chavez as the “political voice” of his government, along with Luis Miquilena, another veteran leader of the left and new interior minister.

“Another pivot point will be the environmental policy, because a fundamental issue for Venezuela is to protect our ecological wealth and surroundings, whereby we will actively join the great environmental movement in the world today,” he explained.

This would be the best way to resolve the equation of a country with a great diversity of ecosystems, some more fragile than others, and mining and oil resources, the latter of which form the basis of the nation’s economy.

“We will seek allies and technical assistance in order to promote a technological respose to our problems based on sustainable development (which includes the environmental variable),” he said.

These two new pillars of Venezuela’s foreign policy form part of Chavez’s plan seeking to “harmonise globalisation with national characteristics and elements.”

Rangel stated “globalisation and the national profile are elements which must not be exclusive. The linking of these bring the country the development we seek and the exercising of a sovereign and independent foreign policy.”

Chavez – a retired lieutenant colonel who assumed the presidency with a left-wing alliance and former coup officials following a failed attempt to take power by force in 1992 – has signed his government on the so-called “third way,” equally far from “savage neoliberalism” and the orthodox left.

Rangel – who in the last 15 years abandonned active politics to become a leading former of public opinion, producing articles and television programmes – stated the globalised world has a series of challenges to face.

“For a country like Venezuela, one of the major challenges is to sovereignly define its economic and social policies, without entering into conflict with the globalisation process,” he confirmed.

Within this definition, and given its situation, Venezuela’s foreign policy “must first deal with its condition as an oil- producing country.”

“The strong mark of the oil sector in our diplomacy signifies prioritising relations with other oil producers and at the same time the oil consumers,” he argued, stressing that “the foreign ministry will fully assume this oil-producing element.”

A second essential point “is the multilateral and bilateral, projected onto the economic and commercial,” for the experience of the positive explosion of trade with Colombia, to be projected onto the other three partners of the Andean Community (Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru) and other neighbours, like Brazil and Guyana.

“Integration must be the aim of foreign policy in a country like ours, not only via the blocs, but going beyond the blocs we belong to,” explained Rangel.

The foreign minister argued this was the reasoning behind him insisting on projecting himself beyond the Andean Community during this first month in power, stating that “the Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) are all in Venezuela’s sights.”

The minister stated this objective “is not aimed at weakening or disintegrating the Andean Community, seeking a more ambitious target,” hand in hand hand with the Andean group. “The further we can advance together, the better,” he stated.

“The Andean Community is not and end in itself, but a stage on the way to Latin American integration,” explained Rangel, pointing out that this strategy was well received by the other Andean partners, once he had explained it during a meeting in Bogota in late February.

As part of this intense diplomatic drive, pushed along by globalisation and national interests, Rangel also cited the quest for ever closer links with the English speaking Caribbean Community, the European Union, Canada and Mexico.

Not forgetting the United States, “now on excellent terms,” after initial “apprehension and suspicion.” As a former military insurgent, Chavez was refused a visa until January, when he travelled to Washington as president elect to meet US President Bill Clinton.

According to Rangel, Washington has understood “the Venezuelan case is far from typical and instead of making an enemy of it, as perhaps would have happened in the past, it will rather try to set rules of the game, and this is positive for both parties.”

Another objective of the new foreign policy will be the battle against drug trafficking, which up until now, in the foreign minister’s opinion, has been handled without the international stress it requires, keeping it an internal police matter.

“The war on drug trafficking must be assumed as a foreign policy priority because it has become a world issue which can only be resolved by equally global action,” he said.

“Furthermore, there are many problems with the image Venezuela is projecting abroad, as a consequence of becoming one of the important narcotrafficking channels,” admitted the foreign minister.

He said the war on drugs, in Venezuela’s opinion, should be a two-way street, tackling, on the one hand, production, processing and transport, and, on the other, consumption and money laundering.

Rangel said the government will promote multilateral treatment of the problem in the world forums, and has started to make contracts with the United States, Canada, Britain, France and Spain, for technical and other support to reinforce action against drug trafficking.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Mar 11 1999 (IPS)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that the Constituent Assembly which is to draft a new constitution will have sweeping powers.

However, he accepted many of the demands put forth by the opposition.

The Constituent Assembly was the most controversial point in the already polemical campaign platform of Chavez, a retired lieutenant-colonel who led an aborted coup attempt in 1992 and was elected president last December.

Rather than yielding to those who demanded a larger majority, the president decided that the Assembly would be convoked by a simple majority of voters in the Apr 25 referendum. The new constitution will also have to be approved by a simple majority of voters in a second referendum.

In a message to the nation Wednesday, Chavez pointed out that this is the first time in the history of Venezuela that one of its 25 constitutions would be drafted by an Assembly approved and elected by the people, as well as the text itself. “More democracy than that is impossible, it doesn’t exist,” he said.

The only limits on the Assembly, which is have the “Constitution of 2000” ready after six months of work, are to be the values and principles of the country’s history as an independent republic, and compliance with international treaties and commitments undertaken by the state.

The Assembly’s 103 members, three of whom are to be representatives of indigenous communities, must take into account the gradual character of fundamental human rights and democratic guarantees against a backdrop of “the most absolute respect for commitments assumed” by the state, Chavez added.

But once installed, the Assembly will act “as a power that represents popular sovereignty,” and for that reason it will not simply draft a new Magna Carta to replace the constitution of 1961.

No other constitution has lasted longer than the one presently in effect, which has governed the now exhausted political model basically since the restoration of democracy, in 1958.

Chavez’s announcement of the rules for the convocation of the Assembly eliminated the main gripes with the decree he issued the very day of his inauguration on Feb 2, in which he called a referendum for a Constituent Assembly – the key point in his campaign platform, which enjoys the support of 70 percent of the population.

In that decree, voters were asked whether they authorised the president to establish the electoral rules for the Assembly, once the views of all sectors of the country had been heard – a move seen by political opponents, legal experts and civil organisations as an authoritarian abuse of power.

Chavez said “the action of the Assembly cannot be previously imposed,” and added that “neither I nor the people fear its power.”

He said that those who feared the power of the Assembly were found mainly in Congress, because of the possibility that it could decide to dissolve parliament. “The worst thing that could happen is that they could be dissolved, what is there to fear in that?”

But he stressed that in no case would parliament be eliminated. On the contrary, he added, it should have much greater weight and power in the new constitution.

Chavez said the rules to govern the election of the members of the Assembly were the result of more than 200 hours of direct dialogue with all sectors, and in first place with Congress.

Law professor Allan Brewer, a specialist in constitutional affairs who has challenged the manner in which Chavez called the referendum, admitted that the 11 rules proposed “are good.”

He also praised the fact that participation in the Assembly by military personnel was ruled out, and that candidates can be nominated by political parties, besides organised civil society. They can also run on their own initiative.

And he applauded the decision to set up the Assembly within a framework of democracy and respect for local and international agreements and commitments.

But he took issue with the breadth of the Assembly’s powers, and the fact that no minimum quorum for the referendum would be set.

Brewer introduced one of the 13 lawsuits against the decree, which the Supreme Court dismissed en bloc last week, as well as one of the two pleas against the convocation of the referendum by electoral authorities, which the Supreme Court is currently studying.

Tulio Alvarez, one of the president’s advisers on the Constituent Assembly, said there were no plans to dissolve the legislature that convened on January 23, although its functions could be limited to the passage of ordinary legislation.

But he added that Congress would probably be dissolved and new members immediately elected once the new constitution went into effect, as has occurred in Colombia and other countries in the region.

Of the 100 non-indigenous members of the Assembly, 76 will be elected by the regions and 24 on a national circuit. The national candidates will require 20,000 signatures to run, and the regional nominees between 1,000 and 10,000, depending on the number of inhabitants in their provinces.

The Assembly is to be elected in late June and to begin functioning on July 5, Independence Day in Venezuela. The candidates must be at least 21 years of age, and will dedicate themselves full-time to the Assembly. Their salary will be decided by the Assembly itself, said Chavez.

The president, who proudly flaunts the indigenous part of his ancestry, said the three indigenous members would be elected by their communities, according to their own customs. He stressed that their participation reflected the multi-ethnic character of the country and their special situation recognised by international treaties.

However, unlike in Venezuela’s legislative elections, no quota was set to ensure the presence of women.

On the contrary, in a surprising setback in terms of bringing local laws into line with international standards, and running counter to the new doctrine of gender balance, “the fundamental rights of man” rather than of human beings or persons are mentioned with respect to the Assembly.

“Machismo has been present in the preliminary phase of this convocation, but we hope that does not occur with the results of the Assembly,” said Nora Castaneda, head of the Coordinator of Women’s Organisations.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Mar 8 1999 (IPS)

Venezuela will play a lead role in consolidating a world culture of respect for human rights through the international forums it belongs to, revealed Foreign Minister, Jose Vicente Rangel.

This objective is one of the fundamental elements of the new foreign policy of the Hugo Chavez government, which took power on February 2 with the promise of leading a “democratic and peaceful revolution.”

In interview with IPS, Rangel, a 69 year-old with 56 years experience as a political activist “in the depths of the opposition” – a left-wing figure supporting investigative journalism – outlined the new diplomatic plans of Venezuela.

A new model which defends human rights at home and abroad will mean “profound changes in the relationship with non governmental organisations and institutions, like Amnesty International and others.”

“We want the best possible relations with these entities and as co-workers in the effort to defend human rights in Venezuela and the world,” he stated, explaining that the era of outright rejection of unproved denunciations is now over.

“On the contrary, they will be accepted, examined and a response will be given,” explained the minister, also nominated by Chavez as the “political voice” of his government, along with Luis Miquilena, another veteran leader of the left and new interior minister.

“Another pivot point will be the environmental policy, because a fundamental issue for Venezuela is to protect our ecological wealth and surroundings, whereby we will actively join the great environmental movement in the world today,” he explained.

This would be the best way to resolve the equation of a country with a great diversity of ecosystems, some more fragile than others, and mining and oil resources, the latter of which form the basis of the nation’s economy.

“We will seek allies and technical assistance in order to promote a technological respose to our problems based on sustainable development (which includes the environmental variable),” he said.

These two new pillars of Venezuela’s foreign policy form part of Chavez’s plan seeking to “harmonise globalisation with national characteristics and elements.”

Rangel stated “globalisation and the national profile are elements which must not be exclusive. The linking of these bring the country the development we seek and the exercising of a sovereign and independent foreign policy.”

Chavez – a retired lieutenant colonel who assumed the presidency with a left-wing alliance and former coup officials following a failed attempt to take power by force in 1992 – has signed his government on the so-called “third way,” equally far from “savage neoliberalism” and the orthodox left.

Rangel – who in the last 15 years abandonned active politics to become a leading former of public opinion, producing articles and television programmes – stated the globalised world has a series of challenges to face.

“For a country like Venezuela, one of the major challenges is to sovereignly define its economic and social policies, without entering into conflict with the globalisation process,” he confirmed.

Within this definition, and given its situation, Venezuela’s foreign policy “must first deal with its condition as an oil- producing country.”

“The strong mark of the oil sector in our diplomacy signifies prioritising relations with other oil producers and at the same time the oil consumers,” he argued, stressing that “the foreign ministry will fully assume this oil-producing element.”

A second essential point “is the multilateral and bilateral, projected onto the economic and commercial,” for the experience of the positive explosion of trade with Colombia, to be projected onto the other three partners of the Andean Community (Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru) and other neighbours, like Brazil and Guyana.

“Integration must be the aim of foreign policy in a country like ours, not only via the blocs, but going beyond the blocs we belong to,” explained Rangel.

The foreign minister argued this was the reasoning behind him insisting on projecting himself beyond the Andean Community during this first month in power, stating that “the Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) are all in Venezuela’s sights.”

The minister stated this objective “is not aimed at weakening or disintegrating the Andean Community, seeking a more ambitious target,” hand in hand hand with the Andean group. “The further we can advance together, the better,” he stated.

“The Andean Community is not and end in itself, but a stage on the way to Latin American integration,” explained Rangel, pointing out that this strategy was well received by the other Andean partners, once he had explained it during a meeting in Bogota in late February.

As part of this intense diplomatic drive, pushed along by globalisation and national interests, Rangel also cited the quest for ever closer links with the English speaking Caribbean Community, the European Union, Canada and Mexico.

Not forgetting the United States, “now on excellent terms,” after initial “apprehension and suspicion.” As a former military insurgent, Chavez was refused a visa until January, when he travelled to Washington as president elect to meet US President Bill Clinton.

According to Rangel, Washington has understood “the Venezuelan case is far from typical and instead of making an enemy of it, as perhaps would have happened in the past, it will rather try to set rules of the game, and this is positive for both parties.”

Another objective of the new foreign policy will be the battle against drug trafficking, which up until now, in the foreign minister’s opinion, has been handled without the international stress it requires, keeping it an internal police matter.

“The war on drug trafficking must be assumed as a foreign policy priority because it has become a world issue which can only be resolved by equally global action,” he said.

“Furthermore, there are many problems with the image Venezuela is projecting abroad, as a consequence of becoming one of the important narcotrafficking channels,” admitted the foreign minister.

He said the war on drugs, in Venezuela’s opinion, should be a two-way street, tackling, on the one hand, production, processing and transport, and, on the other, consumption and money laundering.

Rangel said the government will promote multilateral treatment of the problem in the world forums, and has started to make contracts with the United States, Canada, Britain, France and Spain, for technical and other support to reinforce action against drug trafficking.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Mar 6 1999 (IPS)

Nearly 700 women asked to be sterilised in just one Venezuelan hospital during the first day of the civic- military social emergency plan, but only 22 of them fulfilled all the necessary requisites and actually had the operation.

The offer of sterilisation within the plan implemented on Feb 27 drew criticism from conservative groups and only conditional support from non governmental organisations (NGOs) dealing with women and children.

Carmen Gonzales, a 34 year-old mother of four, was one of the 22 women who had their tubes tied in the Concepcion Palacios Maternity Hospital, in Caracas.

Gonzales said she was satisfied with the outcome: “I am relieved because the current situation isn’t right for having more children and I waited nearly two years for this chance.”

“There is no sterilisation policy or programme in itself, it is not a specific nor mass objective,” said health minister, Gilberto Rodriguez, but “a great deal of scandal has been raised over the issue,” he said critically.

Gisela Diaz, executive director of the private Family Planning Organisation (Plafam), agreed with the minister saying there had been both scandal and manipulation.

But she also stressed her concern that the Maternity Hospital, the biggest health care centre in the country for pregnant and recently delivered mothers, had classed the sterilisations offered under the six month emergency plan as being “voluntary and for the indigent.”

“Poor women or women have the same rights as any other person, and their freedom of choice cannot be taken away,” Diaz told IPS.

The Plafam executive thus criticised declarations made by yjr director of the hospital, Carlos Cabrera, who had suggested a doctor or another authority could be granted the power to prescribe sterilisation in the case of beggars, alcoholics or the insane, should they be considered unfit, without permission from either the patient or their next of kin.

She also said sterilisation should form part of an integral health and social care policy. “It is not a matter of ‘sterilise them and leave them to their fate’,” she said, summing up the stance of the NGOs, most of whom offered to support the emergency plan.

The controversy surfaced when it became public that the social emergency plan, operated by 70,000 military personnel, 80,000 civil servants and tens of thousands of volunteers, would include sterilisation amongst the backlogged operations hospitals would try to clear in 120 days.

Catholic Church representative, Bishop Hernan Sanchez, classified the sterilisation workshops as “an assault on human dignity,” stating that the tying of the fallopian tubes “is contrary to moral law” when carried out voluntary.

Provive, the antiabortion organisation, stated efforts were being made to drag the country “into anti-birth campaigns which include plans for mass sterilisations,” taking advantage of the socio-economic crisis. Abortion is illegal in Venezuela.

This organisation which spreads across several countries, funded by a multimillionaire Venezuelan liquor-selling family, classed sterilisation as “mutilation of the poor” and “unacceptable social profilaxis.”

Meanwhile, Diaz, director of Plafam, the leading family planning NGO, said sterilisation is only one more method of birth control – something women have a right to – although as it is permanent, they must fulfil the prerequisites.

Diaz cited the fact that more than 20 percent of pregnancies in Venezuela occur in adolescents (aged 18 and younger) and that the State only offers help or guidance to around 14 percent of women of child-rearing age.

This means more than four million adolescent girls and grown women are given no information on sex, reproductive health or birth control, most of them falling in the class of the socially marginalised in cities and rural areas.

Of the 23 million Venezuelans, 80 percent live in poverty, 35 percent suffer from critical poverty, and 14 percent survive by begging. Around 60 percent of the poorest homes have no father, while in general, a quarter of all families are headed by a woman alone.

Cultural heritage, irresponsible fatherhood, a machist tradition where women are valued by “how much they produce” in terms of children and women’s attempts to keep their partner by having babies, all feed the problem along with the reluctance of the State to change values and promote family planning.

Venezuela’s birth rate is 3.3 children per woman, but this rises to seven in rural areas, while the infant mortality rate is amongst the highest in Latin America, with 27 deaths per 1,000 live births.

One sign of how machismo affects official levels is seen in the fact that the Maternity Hospital demands a husband’s consent in sterilising a woman, irrespective of the woman’s rights or the type of family predominant in the social strata dependent on public health care.

Diaz explained there is no specific legislation on family planning in the country, and the law on children and adolescents, approved in 1998, is the first to include the right to receive information on reproductive health.

Each institution sets its own rules for sterilisation. In the Maternity Hospital this means a minimum age of 26 years old, two births and approval of the partner throughout the emergency plan, when it expects to deal with 50 women per week.

Plafam, with its four centres in the metropolitan area of Caracas, and links with other NGOs dealing with women and children and giving day to day care to a hundred people, said current standards are for three children in women aged between 20 and 29, two for women up to 35 years old, and one from that age on.

An interdisciplinary Bioethics Committee is in charge of updating the rules and dealing with cases not fitting in with general guidelines. “The woman is always listened to and a decision made with her,” explained Diaz.

Plafam has carried out 14,800 voluntary sterilisations in its ten years of operation, and on the basis of this experience, Diaz said it would be a mistake to leave the decision up to only one player, or to make rules of any sort on absolutely exceptional cases, where free will would be difficult to achieve.

Diaz pointed out that Plafam’s experience is that the pill and sterilisation are the most commonly used contraceptives. Plafam also offers vasectomies, a male sterilisation cheaper and quicker than the female version, and not included in the emergency plan.

Excerpt:

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Mar 3 1999 (IPS)

Nearly 700 women asked to be sterilised in just one Venezuelan hospital during the first day of the civic- military social emergency plan, but only 22 of them fulfilled all the necessary requisites and actually had the operation.

The offer of sterilisation within the plan implemented on February 27 drew criticism from conservative groups and only conditional support from non governmental organisations (NGOs) dealing with women and children.

Carmen Gonzales, a 34 year-old mother of four, was one of the 22 women who had their tubes tied in the Concepcion Palacios Maternity Hospital, in Caracas.

Gonzales said she was satisfied with the outcome; “I am relieved because the current situation isn’t right for having more children and I waited nearly two years for this chance.”

“There is no sterilisation policy or programme in itself, it is not a specific nor mass objective,” said health minister, Gilberto Rodriguez, but “a great deal of scandal has been raised over the issue,” he said critically.

Gisela Diaz, executive director of the private Family Planning Organisation (Plafam), agreed with the minister saying there had been both scandal and manipulation.

But she also stressed her concern that the Maternity Hospital, the biggest health care centre in the country for pregnant and recently delivered mothers, had classed the sterilisations offered under the six month emergency plan as being “voluntary and for the indigent.”

“Poor women or women have the same rights as any other person, and their freedom of choice cannot be taken away,” Diaz told IPS.

The Plafam executive thus criticised declarations made by director of the hospital, Carlos Cabrera, who had suggested a doctor or other authority could be granted the power to prescribe sterilisation in the case of beggars, alcoholics or the insane, should they be considered unfit, without permission from either the patient or their next of kin.

She also said sterilisation should form part of an integral health and social care policy. “It is not a matter of ‘sterilise them and leave them to their fate’,” she said, summing up the stance of the NGOs, most of whom offered to support the emergency plan.

The controversy surfaced when it became public that the social emergency plan, operated by 70,000 military personnel, 80,000 civil servants and tens of thousands of volunteers, would include sterilisation amongst the backlogged operations hospitals would try to clear in 120 days.

Catholic Church representative, Bishop Hernan Sanchez, classified the sterilisation workshops as “an assault on human dignity,” stating that the tying of the fallopian tubes “is contrary to moral law” when carried out voluntary.

Provive, the antiabortion organisation, stated efforts were being made to drag the country “into anti birth campaigns which include plans for mass sterilisations,” taking advantage of the socio-economic crisis. Abortion is illegal in Venezuela.

This organisation which spreads across several countries, funded by a multimillionaire Venezuelan liquor selling family, classed sterilisation as “mutilation of the poor” and “unacceptable social profilaxis.”

Meanwhile, Diaz, director of Plafam, the leading family planning NGO, said sterilisation is only one more method of birth control – something women have a right to – although as it is permanent, they must fulfil the prerequisites.

Diaz cited the fact that more than 20 percent of pregnancies in Venezuela occur in adolescents (aged 18 and younger) and that the State only offers help or guidance to around 14 percent of women of child-rearing age.

This means more than four million adolescent girls and grown women are given no information on sex, reproductive health or birth control, most of them falling in the class of the socially marginalised in cities and rural areas.

Of the 23 million Venezuelans, 80 percent live in poverty, 35 percent suffer from critical poverty, and 14 percent survive by begging. Around 60 percent of the poorest homes have no father, while in general, a quarter of all families are headed by a woman alone.

Cultural heritage, irresponsible fatherhood, a machist tradition where women are valued by “how much they produce” in terms of children and women’s attempts to keep their partner by having babies, all feed the problem along with the reluctance of the State to change values and promote family planning.

Venezuela’s birth rate is 3.3 children per woman, but this rises to seven in rural areas, while the infant mortality rate is amongst the highest in Latin America, with 27 deaths per 1,000 live births.

One sign of how machismo affects official levels is seen in the fact that the Maternity Hospital demands a husband’s consent in sterilising a woman, irrespective of the woman’s rights or the type of family predominant in the social strata dependent on public health care.

Diaz explained there is no specific legislation on family planning in the country, and the law on children and adolescents, approved in 1998, is the first to include the right to receive information on reproductive health.

Each institution sets its own rules for sterilisation. In the Maternity Hospital this means a minimum age of 26 years old, two births and approval of the partner throughout the emergency plan, when it expects to deal with 50 women per week.

Plafam, with its four centres in the metropolitan area of Caracas, and links with other NGOs dealing with women and children and giving day to day care to a hundred people, said current standards are for three children in women aged between 20 and 29, two for women up to 35 years old, and one from that age on.

An interdisciplinary Bioethics Committee is in charge of updating the rules and dealing with cases not fitting in with general guidelines. “The woman is always listened to and a decision made with her,” explained Diaz.

Plafam has carried out 14,800 voluntary sterilisations in its ten years of operation, and on the basis of this experience, Diaz said it would be a mistake to leave the decision up to only one player, or to make rules of any sort on absolutely exceptional cases, where free will would be difficult to achieve.

Diaz pointed out that Plafam’s experience is that the pill and sterilisation are the most commonly used contraceptives. Plafam also offers vasectomies, a male sterilisation cheaper and quicker than the female version, and not included in the emergency plan.

Excerpt: