LATINAMERICA PRESS
Women
For a life without violence
Special Edition
Vol. 38, No. 7, April 19, 2006
ISSN 0254-203X
Director: Raquel Gargatte Loarte
Managing Editor: Elsa Chanduví Jaña
Editors: Cecilia Remón Arnáiz, Leslie Josephs
Production & layout: Carlos Zúñiga Izquierdo
LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN
Women at risk
LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN
Interview with María Ysabel Cedano, coordinator of CLADEM-Peru
GUATEMALA/MEXICO
Feminicides on the rise
CENTRAL AMERICA
Maquila workers tolerate abuse
CUBA
A well-known secret
COLOMBIA/PERU
War crimes
ECUADOR
Nowhere to run
MEXICO
Girls in the shadow of Cancun’s dark side
LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN
Gender-based violence and AIDS
BRAZIL
Abused women lack government support
COSTA RICA
New law may put limits on aggressors’ impunity
CHILE
Domestic violence continues despite legal reforms
LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN
Latinamerica Press
Women at risk
Region’s deeply-rooted patriarchal values and passive governments impede the eradication of gender-based violence.
Violence against women is the cruelest manifestation of gender-based discrimination and inequality, and despite numerous international agreements to eradicate it, the trend has continued, ever more bloodily, fueled by a patriarchal society in which women are the undervalued sex.
“The continuation of violence against women in the 21st century is inconceivable and unacceptable,” says Célia Leão, a state deputy from São Paulo, Brazil, and a key member of the first Parliamentary Investigation Commission on violence against women in that state in the mid-1990s.
One of society’s greatest challenges is for violence against women to be considered a human rights violation.
“From birth to death, in times of peace as well as war, women face discrimination and violence at the hands of the state, the community and the family,” said Amnesty International in its report “Stop Violence against Women.” “Rape and sexual abuse by relatives, other men, security officials or armed combatants are inflicted on millions of girls and women every year,” the report continues.
The harsh reality
Violence against women in Latin America and the Caribbean takes on various forms: domestic violence, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, the trafficking of women and girls, forced prostitution, forced pregnancies, abortions and sterilizations; violence in armed conflicts and sexual slavery.
“I believe that in relation to other countries we share a situation where there still exists a lot of machismo and misogyny,” says María Ysabel Cedano, coordinator of the Peruvian branch of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights, or CLADEM. “But, I think that poverty, age, sexual orientation … social structure and cultural values” can also constitute different facets of the issue, Cedano adds.
One of the most brutal forms of violence against females is women killings, known as femicides.
“Violence against women is a common situation in our region that many times ends with violent deaths, including those that show signs of torture, mutilation, brutality or gender-based sexual violence,” said women’s and human rights organizations in March at the Organization of American States (OAS) Hearing on Feminicide in Latin America.
The emblematic case of feminicide, or a genocide committed against women, is that of Juarez, Mexico, where more than 300 women have been killed over the past 13 years. But a sharp increase in the number of women killed in Guatemala — close to 700 women in 2005 — is equally alarming.
Most governments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean do not have reliable data to adequately evaluate the scale of the problem, partly because femicides are low on these administrations’ priority lists.
But nongovernmenal bodies and organizations do claim to have reliable figures. In Peru, for example, according to a study by the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women’s Center and Amnesty International, eight women are killed each month, and, in Colombia, approximately every six days a woman is killed at the hand of her partner or ex-partner, women’s organizations have said at the March OAS hearing.
Silence and impunity
Women assaulted by their partners may feel that their lives are in danger, but most women, far from considering it a crime, still believe that it is a personal problem, a private matter, and remain silent. What’s worse is that they are not the only ones with this view.
Domestic violence “is not understood by those people who advise women to return to their aggressors,” says Ana Carcedo of Costa Rica’s Feminist Center of Investigation and Action. “Pressures in favor of reconciliation are frequent by [family, friends and priests] close to these women,” she continued.
What society as a whole is ignoring is the root of the problem: a patriarchal system in which women are not valued and are often despised. Growing up in such a society, many women still do not recognize their right to integrity, or to a decent life.
This global culture of discrimination against women allows for violence — with an important sexual component — to occur every day with impunity.
Governmental role
Governments play a large part in the persistence of these crimes in their failing to fulfill their obligation to protect the lives and human rights of women.
The Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women (Convention of Belem do Para), approved by the OAS in 1994, has been ratified by all nations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This agreement requires the governments to “apply due diligence to prevent, investigate and impose penalties for violence against women.”
The report presented before the Hearing on Feminicide in the region explained that “to apply due diligence when facing violence against women requires paying attention the problem’s different dimensions, making men and women aware in order to change these traditional practices based on stereotypes, teaching about equality, modifying discriminatory laws and assuring a greater participation of women in these processes.”
But governments fail to comply with these, or other international norms that commit them to taking action to defend human rights and women’s rights in particular. Laws passed at the national level throughout Latin America and the Caribbean to prevent or address violence against women lack a true gender perspective.
“One does not attribute [this problem] to sex-gender system, but instead, people think that it’s an individual problem … the mentally ill, outside of the system,” CLADEM’s Cedano says.
There have been numerous studies on violence against women as well as campaigns to put an end to this horror. But it is not enough. Violence against women has already developed into a pandemic, as the United Nations has warned.
What is needed now is coordinated action by governments and civil society to implement campaigns to stop violence against women. One of the greatest challenges, however, is far less tangible: the eradication of the obsolete gender power structure that belittles — or ignores altogether— the value of women, which is entrenched not only in this region, but throughout the world.
LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN
Interview with María Ysabel Cedano, coordinator of CLADEM-Peru
“We women need to recover our sexuality”
María Ysabel Cedano is the director of the Counseling Center for the Defense of Women’s Rights, or DEMUS, a Peruvian nongovernmental organization. For 19 years DEMUS has worked toward ending discriminatory practices and violations of women’s human rights.
Cedano is also the coordinator of the Peruvian branch of CLADEM, the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights.
Both organizations conduct research and develop policy proposals to improve the situation facing women today. DEMUS, for its part, founded a counseling program for women who have fallen victim to domestic violence and aims to increase women’s access to legal services.
In the following interview, Cedano talks to the managing editor of Latinamerica Press,Elsa Chanduví Jaña about what she thinks are the causes of violence against women.
What is at the root of violence against women?
There are diverse factors. One is economic. I think that it’s not the most important in the sense that not only women without an income suffer from violence. Women from different social strata, different social classes suffer, too.
The problem when I say “economic” is that the organization of the world’s economy is still based on the traditional gender division of work where production is on one side and reproduction on the other.
I think another factor is that in our countries there are still patriarchal systems at the family level. The social organization of the familial system has this idea of power concentrated in one person with definite characteristics of authoritarianism.
It’s strange because the care that is demanded of us is more than anything else, survival. It’s giving [the family] something to eat, caring for them when they’re sick, taking [the children] to school. The link is not one of affection, but one that is based on relationships of power, abuse and the policy that someone submits, so it hasn’t been able to be broken.
This is accompanied by notions of sexuality, and machismo is not only the belief that one gender — in this case males — are stronger than women, or the idea that women are weak and that they need protection, but rather, the idea that women’s sexuality is the property of the men, of the community, of the family, of society in general. I believe that here, religion has played a harmful role in social and cultural terms.
Machismo and misogyny
Misogyny also has a strong presence. Unlike machismo, with misogyny there is a disdain for the feminine and for women. In the social hierarchy of our societies, what is female is considered insufficient. I’m not saying that only men see them that way — a woman herself [can].
It’s very difficult to have self-esteem; it’s very difficult to feel secure in a family that brings you up to be the opposite with mechanisms of control as harsh as violence.
I don’t think that it can be said that the problems are the economy, machismo, misogyny, the church. No. But I do believe that there are a set of institutions, beliefs, values, norms, in which violence against women exists as a vehicle, a mechanism, so the state of things is sustained.
This is linked to the belief that violence against women is a private, not a public, issue.
There were advances in the 1990s that began to remove violence against women from the private sphere, moving it to the public sphere. But …there has been a counter-current.
Faced with women’s efforts to make this a public problem and to…recover their sexuality, there has been a conservative wave put forth by the Vatican, fundamentalist countries and the very United States with [President George W.] Bush, turning these advances into mere formalities.
Increasingly, values that tolerate misogyny, that promote machismo, are reinforced through the media, the market, the education system, the family.
We definitely made advances in the 1990s, or we were on the path, so judges, prosecutors and police could understand that this is a human rights problem, a public problem. Now, we’ve taken such a big step back that the problem is still seen as a personal, individual problem, in which, no one can get involved.
Perverse logic
And when the problem passes to the public sphere, what do we have? The death penalty for rapists, life sentences. We trade impunity and indifference for repressive logic. We do not have the affirmation of rights; we do not have the recognition of an issue.
No one says, “The problem of sexual violence is one of the abuse of power and there are people who believe that sexuality of others belongs to them and that they can rape women, rape children, because he is the father, the uncle, because he is older, because he can, because they are things at my service.” It’s not between people but between a person and an object.
You don’t hear “we have to change this mentality, this form of relating ourselves. We have to diminish the possibilities for the abuse of power.” This logic doesn’t exist.
The problem is complex. Where should efforts to combat it be concentrated ?
The idea of violence against women understood from a feminist and gender-specific focus, as a problem of inequality and of discrimination, mostly, policies of inequality and equality, in affirmative, not only repressive terms, and policies that guarantee sexual and reproductive rights, combating sexual violence with sexual pleasure.
It is important to recover sexuality for women, recognize that men and women are sexual beings and that we have to protect sexuality so that it is not violated, attacked or stunted. The whole issue of reproduction is also key in terms of your formation as a person and how you defend your rights.
Instead of a machista argument of women’s sexuality, we propose a feminist argument on women’s sexuality. We women need to recover our desire for pleasure, our sexuality. A more elaborate discussion is still lacking, but I think that [this desire] is a door to freedom, to think of your self, to recover yourself as a person.
GUATEMALA/MEXICO
Miriam Ruiz in Mexico City
Feminicides on the rise
Governments of both countries demonstrate their incapacity and lack of interest in preventing female genocide.
The number of women who are brutally killed in Mexico, particularly along the borders, and throughout Guatemala has showed no signs of slowing.
Authorities can no longer look away from the problem, but their few efforts have done little to console the families of women who have been violently mudered, or the other women in these communities, who feel unsafe in the street, at work or in their homes.
The frequent murders of women are a phenomenon recognized by governments in Guatemala and Mexico, but both countries continue “their silence, omission, negligence and collusion of authorities in charge of preventing and stopping these crimes,” said Mexican Rep. Marcela Lagarde.
Lagarde introduced in Mexico the term feminicide, meaning genocide committed against women, based on the term femicide, or murdering a woman for gender-based motives, coined by US feminists Jill Radford and Diana Russell and in the 1990s.
“Feminicide is when the state offers women no guarantees and creates no conditions of security for their lives in the community, at home, not even in work or recreational areas. Even worse, authorities do not even do their job efficiently,” Lagarde said.
Juarez: the emblematic case
According to local government data, since 1993, some 380 women have been violently killed in the city of Juarez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which until 2000 was considered Mexico’s clothing factory capital.
Estimates by local and international civil organizations, including Amnesty International, however, say otherwise: more than 430 women have been killed and 4,000 disappeared, according to their counts (LP, Feb. 9, 2005).
The chilling murders of women in Juarez, a city of 1.5 million, have become the subject of numerous books, films and studies and the phenomenon has received worldwide attention.
But feminicide in Mexico is not specific to Juarez. In the state of Mexico, 300 women are killed each year, according to an ongoing investigation by a special congressional commission in 11 of Mexico’s 32 states.
After Juarez, Guatemala has received the most notoriety in recent years as the country’s femicides increased both in number and cruelty. In 2005, there were 640 cases of murdered women — 113 more than in 2004 — according to figures of the Presidential Women’s Secretariat. Most cases also included signs of violence and torture. Bodies were mutilated or dismembered, information from the National Civil Police has shown.
In the last five years, more than 2,230 women were violently killed, say official figures.
What do the victims have in common?
The common threads linking the Guatemalan and Mexican cases are the victims’ poverty and their failure to speak up.
In Ciudad Juarez, they were assembly plant workers, poor women, migrant women, who feared for their lives. In Guatemala, many were housewives.
The Center for Legal Action on Human Rights and other Guatemalan organizations say that 40 percent of the women killed to date were housewives.
Authorities credit these heinous attacks with organized crime — drug-traffickers in Mexico and youth gangs in Guatemala — but husbands, boyfriends, and male bosses are not discounted.
Guatemalan feminist organizations say that the Public Ministry has failed to launch a full-scale investigation, as it still lacks personnel and training, so it cannot determine whether these women had a direct relationship with gang members, alleges the Center for Informative Reports on Guatemala.
Investigations progress slowly
Victims’ relatives and human rights organizations accuse both governments of being uncapable and uninterested in solving these cases or preventing new ones.