In Latin America the gender gap kills
Part Seven: A woman's lot
If feminism in North America and Western Europe is identified with the
intellectual elite and a movement by women who want to participate fully in
all aspects of their cultures, it means something quite different in many
areas of Latin America. There it is often identified with the deepest
poverty and with women's struggles for safety for themselves and their
children. At the most fundamental level, feminism in Latin America can
simply mean struggling to stay alive, a battle often joined by church
agencies and women of faith.
By BARBARA FRASER and PAUL JEFFREY
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
They are officially nameless and faceless, but they had a few things in
common: They were young, attractive, poor and female, and they were bound,
raped, tortured and murdered.
At least 300 young women have been killed brutally over the past decade
in this sprawling border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.
Several thousand others may have disappeared. Statistics are hazy because of
poor record keeping, a symptom of the official lack of interest.
“Women here are afraid, although few admit it,” said Esther Chávez, one
of the first people to take up the cause of the murdered women. “They’re
afraid that when they go to work or school, they won’t come home again. They
have to put on a brave face, though, because they can’t live in constant
fear.”
As international attention has focused on the case, the women of Ciudad
Juárez have become a symbol of the problems faced by women throughout Latin
America. More girls are finishing school in the region than ever before, and
there are more women in public office. But women are paid far less than men
for equal work, and violence against women -- in the home and in places like
Juárez -- has reached levels that alarm women’s rights activists throughout
the region.
“Ciudad Juárez is a paradigm of things that are happening in other
countries,” Susana Chiarotti, regional coordinator of the Latin American and
Caribbean Committee for Women’s Rights, told NCR.
Indeed, the story has played out in different ways from Juárez to São
Paulo, from San Salvador to Lima. Mired in poverty, often in the
countryside, where farmers barely earn what they need to survive, women are
drawn to the promise of jobs and a future in factories that assemble
clothing and appliances that they will never be able to afford.
Over the past four decades, Ciudad Juárez’s population has nearly
quadrupled, from 400,000 to about 1.5 million. The explosion began when
Mexico allowed maquilas, huge plants that assemble everything from clothing
to refrigerators, along the border. The factories were a magnet, and
busloads of people left rural areas of southern Mexican states for the
border. At one point, Chávez said, 600 people were arriving every day.
The migrants moved out into the desert and built shacks out of anything
they could find. For some, Juárez was a stop on the journey to the United
States. For others, especially women, it was an end in itself. As in cities
around the region, however, the dream was far from reality. With no urban
planning, the shantytowns stretched out over the sand without running water,
electricity or sewers.
“The plants were supposed to resolve the problem of poverty. But poverty
is still here. And in many families today there are three or four people
working in the maquilas. They work hard, and yet the family just survives,”
said Carlos Vázquez, director of a church-sponsored community center in the
Independencia neighborhood.
Working long hours under tremendous pressure was exhausting. Pregnancy,
complaining or union organizing would get a woman fired, and there were
plenty more to take her place.
Sociologist Graciela de la Rosa has worked for years in grass-roots
education in Ciudad Juárez, but the maquila managers usually refuse to let
her talk with their workers about health issues. She compares the situation
to that of women in Afghanistan.
“We have a lot of people here who are like the Taliban,” she said. “They
don’t make us wear burqas, but they kill us. It’s part of the despotism of
the border region. They also don’t want to let us into factories to educate
women. They say we might organize unions, and they’re deathly afraid of
authentic unions.”
For factory owners and politicians, the women were expendable. So when
they began to disappear, or turned up dead, no official eyebrows were
raised.
“The authorities always had an easy answer,” Chávez said. “They said this
happens everywhere or that the women were asking for it because they wore
short skirts and went out at night.”
A few arrests were made, but activists say the detainees were scapegoats.
While they were in prison, the killings went on.
Machismo is at the root of the problem, according to Graciela Alvarez,
Methodist bishop of Mexico City.
“It starts with this aggression against women, and then there’s the
laziness and lack of responsibility of the authorities, which is part of the
culture of impunity,” she said. “Because the victims are women, there is no
prompt or correct investigation -- simply because they are women.”
Some women who have managed to escape from assailants tell similar
stories of being forced into a car, sometimes at gunpoint, blindfolded,
robbed and sexually assaulted. In some cases, descriptions of the assailants
coincide, leading some investigators to believe that there are several
criminal gangs operating in the city. One theory is that members of one gang
might abduct and rape the victims, then sell them to members of another gang
who kill them.
“It’s like a sport,” said Chávez, who was working as an accountant when
the brutal rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl spurred her and several
friends to take up the cause. She is now director of Casa Amiga, which
provides legal, medical and psychological aid to women who have been victims
of violence.
Because of the lack of official action on the cases, Chávez suspects
police involvement or at least collusion in the murders. Last year, both the
Mexican Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International issued reports on
the cases. U.S. legislators, media and investigators are also looking into
the murders.
President Vicente Fox recently named a special prosecutor to handle the
case, but Chávez said the official lacks the authority needed for a full
investigation. Meanwhile, the killings have spread to Chihuahua, the state
capital.
Even if the killers are caught, that will not solve the problems that
have given rise to the violence, which Chávez attributes to “social
breakdown” caused by poverty, migration, a lack of opportunities and
subhuman living conditions that she says are “a breeding ground for
frustration, anger and desperation.”
And the same hopelessness that drove poor Mexicans from rural areas to
the border over the last few decades now traps their children. Ciudad Juárez
has some 500 street gangs and a growing drug problem among children as young
as 10. With the assembly plants closing and jobs becoming even scarcer,
young people are easy prey for drug traffickers who recruit them to smuggle
drugs across the border into Texas.
Bodies for sale
Chávez suspects that drug-trafficking gangs are also involved in the
murders of the city’s women. And drug trafficking melds into another big
business on the U.S. border and elsewhere in the region -- the trafficking
of women for prostitution, mainly in the United States and Europe.
Trafficking in people ranks third among illicit businesses throughout the
region, behind drugs and illegal weapons.
“It’s such a big business that women who dare try to combat it or
investigate it are threatened and attacked,” Chiarotti of the regional
Committee for Women’s Rights said. She criticized the region’s governments
for their laxness, saying that corruption makes trafficking profitable for
law enforcement, customs and immigration personnel and other officials.
The same is true, at the local level, of prostitution. A study in Buenos
Aires found that 90 percent of the extra income generated by the federal
police came from prostitution.
“The police chiefs collected the money and distributed it through the
ranks,” Chiarotti said. “That happens in a lot of countries. It’s a way of
supporting the police without having to raise salaries.”
Throughout Latin America, by word of mouth and through newspaper ads,
women are lured with promises of jobs abroad, usually as maids or nannies.
The Dominican Republic is a hub for these deals.
While some of the victims may be naive enough to believe the promises,
women’s rights activists say, others know that they will end up working in
nightclubs or clandestine brothels. In a form of indentured servitude, the
traffickers keep the women’s identity papers and most or all of their pay.
Complicating the picture, Chiarotti said, is the argument by some
feminists that some forms of trafficking and prostitution are voluntary, and
that women have a right to make that choice.
“That attitude weakens us, because it ignores the structural poverty and
the brutal violence to which so many women and children are subjected,” she
said.
London-based Anti-Slavery International has drawn a link between
migration and trafficking. A study done in 2002 found that the countries
that are most successful in prosecuting traffickers are those that have the
best protection programs for the victims, sometimes offering them the
possibility of legal residency even though they are officially undocumented
migrants.
Not all exploitation happens far from home, however.
Elizabeth Valdiglesias was 13 when her godmother offered to take her from
her rural village in the Peruvian highlands to Lima so she could go to high
school. She moved to the capital with her younger sister, who was 10.
“Since we were together, we figured nothing would happen to us,” she
said.
But instead of being taken into her new family as one more daughter,
Valdiglesias was put to work as a domestic servant. She received no wages
and was not allowed to go to school.
Virtually trapped in her godmother’s house, Valdiglesias lost touch with
her family. Like many girls in similar situations throughout the region, she
moved from house to house in search of a better situation. Finally, at age
16, she was able to resume her studies through a night-school program
offered by Franciscan sisters at Santa María Reyna Parish.
“At first, I was afraid to go,” she said. “I figured I wouldn’t know
anything. I had nightmares about it.”
She ended up first in her class, however. She now has a family of her
own, but she is acutely aware that many other girls are following in her
footsteps. Valdiglesias spends every Sunday at the Casa de Panchita, a
modest house in a working-class neighborhood in Lima that offers domestic
employees tutoring, recreation, counseling, computer classes, lunch and a
telephone so they can call their families.
More than 670 young women took advantage of the Casa de Panchita’s
services last year, according to Blanca Figueroa, who runs the house.
Nevertheless, they represented only a fraction of the more than 300,000
women working as domestic employees in the capital.
About half of all workingwomen in Latin America are in the informal
sector of the economy, and 15 percent of them are domestic employees. In
most countries, women in domestic labor account for about 11 or 12 percent
of the female labor force, but the figure rises to 21 percent in Paraguay
and Brazil. Paraguay is also one of the countries with the largest number of
children, some as young as 6 or 7, in domestic labor.
“It’s extremely hard to help them,” Figueroa said of the young women who
seek her aid. “Even when they have been mistreated by employers, they don’t
want to return to their rural homes. What they want is better employment,
but they usually have no job skills,” she said.
A public hearing held last year while a law on domestic labor was being
drafted shows how far domestic workers still have to go to gain recognition.
At the hearing, five legislators, one of them a woman, presented their
proposals for the law. Each took great pains to explain why their drafts did
not include minimum wage for domestic workers. Their argued that if
employers were required to pay minimum wage, which amounts to about $120 a
month, social upheaval would follow because of mass layoffs of domestic
workers.
The audience, mainly made up of young women from rural areas who cleaned
other women’s homes for a living, was not convinced by the image of
upper-class Lima women -- pitucas in local parlance -- firing their
maids and doing their own cooking, cleaning and child care.
When the legislators finished speaking, Adalinda Díaz -- a former
domestic worker who now runs a center where female domestic workers can find
support, training and legal assistance -- had her say.
Nearly dwarfed by the speakers stand, the diminutive Díaz, who migrated
to Lima at age 14 to work as a maid, told the lawmakers, “It isn’t paying
people minimum wage that causes social chaos, but violating their rights.”
The law that was passed does not include minimum wage, but it does
require that employers provide vacation, holiday and severance pay and sign
a contract with the employee.
“The law has its good points,” Figueroa said, “but what’s really needed
is enforcement.”
Díaz is a veteran of early efforts to organize domestic workers in Lima.
Similar efforts have been made elsewhere in the region, including Mexico
City. It is difficult to organize domestic workers into traditional unions,
however. Some of the barriers are physical -- domestic workers tend to be
spread out around a city and hidden behind the walls of private homes.
Others are psychological. The women’s low self-esteem makes organizing
difficult, according to Irene Ortiz, a Mexico City social worker.
“I’ve often heard them say that they don’t deserve better treatment or
pay. A major task we face is convincing the women that they are individuals
of worth,” she said.
Ortiz was one of a group of feminists who formed the Atabal Collective
with the goal of helping domestic workers organize a union. When that didn’t
work, they began a job clearinghouse to match employers with women looking
for work. The Casa de Panchita in Lima operates a similar service.
Despite laws providing nominal protection, domestic workers remain at the
bottom of a well-established power chain in Latin American life. Many tell
stories of abuse in which only the names change -- of being falsely accused
of theft by an employer who wanted to fire them without giving them
severance pay, or of being raped by male members of the employer’s
household.
Women who are sexually abused generally do not complain, because they do
not want to lose their jobs.
“If they get pregnant, they’re usually fired,” Valdiglesias said, “but
sometimes the family throws them out and keeps the baby.”
On summer afternoons in Lima’s parks, young, dark-skinned, dark-haired
women in crisp blue or white uniforms push fairer-skinned babies in
strollers. But domestic service is not just a luxury for the upper crust.
Middle-class women in small towns also have maids, and are sometimes more
abusive than the wealthy.
And a feminist consciousness is not always enough to break through
entrenched customs. According to Amparo Arbores, a staff member at the
Atabal Collective, feminist support for the organization dropped off over
time.
“The feminists all have domestic workers in their homes, but they don’t
want them involved with the collective,” she said. “They’re afraid their
workers will change and will speak up and demand that their rights be
respected.”
Squaring off over reproductive health
That’s not to say that the feminist movement has not made its mark on the
region. Many of the battles over the past two decades have focused on such
issues as birth control and abortion. Because the region is overwhelmingly
Catholic and there is little separation of church and state, many of these
issues have pitted women’s rights advocates against church leaders.
The Vatican’s declaration of March 25 -- nine months before Christmas --
as the “Day of the Unborn” was picked up by governments around the region,
including Argentina, Nicaragua, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala,
Peru and Costa Rica. Peru’s new health minister, Pilar Mazzetti, the first
woman to hold the post, sidestepped the issue this year, focusing on health
care for pregnant women instead of whether the fetus has constitutional
rights.
Mazzetti is in the eye of another church-state storm, however. In late
March, several Peruvian bishops spoke out against the “morning after pill”
as government officials debated whether to distribute it through public
health facilities. It is already available in pharmacies. Debate raged in
the press over whether the pill is abortive, with health officials saying no
and church leaders saying yes. The pill prevents the egg from being
implanted in the wall of the uterus.
In a report issued in December, a high-level commission recommended that
the ministry make the pill available, but several members of the committee
dissented. One dissenting voice is reported to have come from the Ministry
of Justice, which argued that life begins at the moment that the egg is
fertilized.
Mazzetti, the fourth health minister since President Alejandro Toledo
took office in July 2001, has said reproductive health should not be a
political issue and that it is the ministry’s role to make family planning
methods available to couples. Despite strong opposition from Catholic
bishops and a small group of legislators, some of whom called for Mazetti to
be fired, the ministry finally began making the pill available through
public health clinics.
This is not the first time that reproductive health issues have made
waves in Peru. In the late 1990s, feminist groups and the Catholic church
found themselves unlikely allies in denouncing excessive use of surgical
sterilization by doctors at state-run health centers. The government’s Human
Rights Ombudsman’s Office registered about 150 deaths from the surgery.
Critics said many women were sterilized without their consent or not given
the information they needed to make a decision.
Government officials denied that there was a policy of promoting surgical
sterilizations, but some Health Ministry personnel reported being pressured
by their superiors to perform a certain number every month.
The pendulum swung to the other extreme in 2001, after Toledo was
elected. His first two health ministers, Luis Solari and Fernando Carbone,
were conservative Catholics whose religious views influenced their policy
decisions. During those years, women’s rights advocates complained that
health centers were not adequately stocked with contraceptives and that
signs pointing to family planning offices were removed from public clinics.
The policies also affected AIDS prevention.
“Their approach had a religious slant, with the production of prevention
materials that discredited condom use and emphasized abstinence, chastity,
marriage and the like,” said Dr. Robinson Cabello, executive director of Vía
Libre, an organization that provides assistance to people living with
HIV/AIDS in Lima.
The availability of contraceptives and sex education is linked to another
pervasive problem that generally goes unmentioned -- clandestine abortions.
In most Latin American countries, abortion is illegal or permitted only if
the mother’s life is in danger. Reliable statistics are scarce, but based on
partial studies done in the 1990s, women’s rights advocates say clandestine
abortions could number 4.4 million a year. Many are done under unsanitary
conditions. If something goes wrong and the woman ends up in the hospital,
both she and the doctor who performed the abortion could face prosecution.
Women’s rights advocates say that a Bush administration policy
prohibiting the mention of abortion by any organization that receives U.S.
funds makes it even more difficult to address the problem of unsafe
abortions.
“I can’t talk about anything related to abortion,” said Susana Galdós, of
the Manuela Ramos Movement in Lima, which runs a nationwide reproductive
health education program that receives U.S. funding. “I can’t talk about the
statistics, the deaths, the illnesses, the suffering, the drama, even though
the Ministry of Health recognizes it as a public health problem.”
Galdós and others say that both access to contraceptives and better sex
education can help combat illegal abortions, but sex education is also a
battleground where the line between church and state blurs. When former
Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who first riled the Catholic hierarchy
by courting the evangelical vote, made sex education part of the national
curriculum, there was strong criticism from Catholic bishops.
In Nicaragua, President Enrique Bolaños bowed to pressure to withdraw a
sex education manual, saying that such material should “reflect our values,
our customs, our philosophy of life and the Christian nature of our ethical
and moral principles.”
To feed their families
For decades, women have been in the forefront of social movements in
Latin America, especially in the shantytowns that have grown up around urban
centers as more and more families have migrated from the countryside. Women
have organized soup kitchens to feed their families, set up communal
child-care centers and marched in the streets to demand electricity, water
and other basic services in their neighborhoods. Many of the women involved
in such efforts have also been part of base Christian communities.
Colombia’s Popular Women’s Organization grew out of base communities in
Barrancabermeja, one of the areas most affected by the country’s political
violence. Although not officially connected with the church or the base
Christian community movement now, the organization has become one of the
country’s most respected peace-building groups, according to Colombian
historian Ana María Bidegain.
“Amid a violent war, they raise the banner of pacifism, of saying no to
war,” she said. “It is now the strongest pacifist organization in Colombia.”
Women have also been at the forefront in other human rights battles.
Every Thursday for a quarter of a century, mothers have marched silently in
Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, pleading for information about children who had
disappeared during the country’s “dirty war.”
Now the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have become the Grandmothers, taking
on the even more delicate task of helping their grandchildren discover their
real identities. In one of the dirty war’s most nefarious twists, police and
military officers took children from political prisoners, sometimes waiting
for women in detention to deliver their babies before executing the mothers.
Some of the children who were raised by military families are now
searching for their roots. The Grandmothers help them by offering DNA
screening. And the children have formed their own organization, taking up
the cause of the parents they never knew.
With their white headscarves embroidered with their children’s names, the
Mothers and Grandmothers became a symbol of the plight of women throughout
the region who lost loved ones under military dictatorships and during civil
wars.
Women’s grass-roots activity spilled over into the church during the
1970s and ’80s, Bidegain said. This made a lasting impression on women’s
religious congregations, which began to move out of the schools and
hospitals where they had traditionally worked and into the barriadas.
“Concern for the poor was always an element of religious life, but for
women religious, the poor were the object of charity,” Bidegain said. “When
they moved out into poor neighborhoods, they began to focus on social,
political and cultural factors to enable people to assume their full
citizenship and assume their rights.”
Those efforts led to a reading of the Bible from the perspective of the
poor. That trend has evolved, Bidegain said, and grass-roots groups are
learning to read scripture from the viewpoints of women, indigenous people
and Afro-Latin Americans.
Now, however, the cycle seems to be starting over. Women religious
originally served in schools and hospitals because government budgets were
insufficient. Several decades later, lack of government social spending is
once again creating gaps in public services that women religious are
beginning to fill again. Some female congregations are moving out of the
barriadas and back into schools and hospitals, but Bidegain wonders if
they are reflecting on what that shift could mean.
“This is giving the church more power in the social sphere, but women
religious aren’t aware of this. They don’t see that they’re being used,”
Bidegain said.
More women in office
The raising of consciousness among women at the grass roots has
translated into increased political power throughout the region, putting
more women in government posts than ever before.
Panama’s last president, Mireya Moscoso, who finished her term Sept. 1,
was the region’s highest-profile female politician. Women hold 20 percent of
the country’s ministerial level posts. In Argentina, about one-third of the
legislators are female, although women hold only 7 percent of cabinet-level
posts, according to the United Nations Development Program.
According to both Bidegain and Chiarotti, most of the gains made by women
in politics are due to quota laws passed over the last decade. While some
countries’ laws require a certain percentage of female candidates on
electoral slates, Colombia’s requires that 30 percent of top government jobs
be held by women. At 47 percent, Colombia now has the region’s highest
percentage of women in cabinet-level posts.
In recent years, however, the number of women in public office has
dropped in countries that lack quota laws, according to Chiarotti.
And in countries that have such laws, the women who reach public office
do not necessarily attribute their success to the legislation. While this
could be positive, indicating that women are climbing the political ladder
on their own merits, it also has a down side.
“They don’t realize that they’ve achieved what they have because of the
long struggle by the grass-roots women’s movement and the feminist
movement,” Bidegain said.
Having more women in office does not necessarily translate into policy
aimed at correcting gender inequities. Women are often limited to
gender-based roles as heads of ministries of social affairs, according to
Chiarotti.
Policymakers also tend to make “women’s issues” a separate category, she
said, instead of looking at the impact of such issues as poverty, debt and
development on women.
Over the past decade, the number of women living on less than $2 a day in
Central and South America has increased, Chiarotti said. There is also a
persistent income gap that runs along both gender and racial lines.
According to a recent study in Brazil, for every 100 reales (the
local currency) earned by a white man, a white woman earns between 60 and
70, an Afro-Brazilian man earns slightly more, and an indigenous or
Afro-Brazilian woman earns 47.
And while more girls are in school and more women are graduating from
college, the income gap is even wider between professional men and women
than among unskilled workers.
“That means education is not helping women overcome inequality,”
Chiarotti said. “There hasn’t been enough investment in institutions that
need to stimulate gender equity, and there hasn’t been enough invested in
working to combat violence against women.”
In the new millennium, violence has become a recurring theme for women in
the region. And the women of Ciudad Juárez are not alone. The problem has
become so serious that a new word -- “femicide” -- has entered the regional
vocabulary. Women’s rights activists say it is a nearly invisible problem
that merits a serious response.
A year-long study of two national newspapers by DEMUS, a nongovernmental
women’s rights and legal aid organization based in Lima, Peru, found reports
of 79 murders of women in that Andean nation last year -- more than six a
month. The researchers resorted to culling cases from newspapers because
police data are not broken down by type of death.
“There’s no distinction between a murder and an automobile accident,”
said Cecilia Reynoso, a lawyer who worked on the study.
Nearly 80 percent of the murders were committed by a male partner, family
member or acquaintance of the victim, she said. The tone of the newspaper
reports tended to excuse the murders, dwelling on the woman’s supposed
infidelity or, in some cases, her desire for a divorce. Defendants who
confessed to having “lost control” in a jealous rage sometimes received
lighter sentences, the researchers found.
As in Ciudad Juárez, most of the victims in the cases studied by Reynoso
and her colleagues were young. Forty percent were between ages 16 and 25.
The researchers suspect that the newspaper reports represent only about 10
percent of the real number of murders.
“These are men who murder women, justifying their actions by claiming
that the woman was unfaithful or rejected their sexual advances,” Reynoso
said.
For Chiarotti, domestic labor, trafficking, violence against women and
the wage gap are all facets of the same issue -- one that governments tend
to pigeonhole as “the problem of women.”
“They think that just passing laws to eliminate the worst discrimination
will take care of everything, and they say, ‘What more do women want?’”
Chiarotti said. “But if steps aren’t taken to enforce real equality, we’ll
never get out of the vicious circle.”
Barbara Fraser worked in Peru
for 14 years as a Maryknoll lay missioner. She now lives in Peru as a
freelance writer. Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary who lived in
Central America for two decades. He now lives in Eugene, Ore.
National Catholic Reporter, October 8,
2004 |
