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VENEZUELA: Grassroots
Empowerment for Women
By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS (IPS) - In Venezuela "women have
passionately embraced community activism, taking on
a more committed and active role, and this is
reflected in the increasing female participation in
neighbourhood assemblies," Alba Rojas, spokeswoman
for a community council in Tacagua, a township that
spreads along the Caracas-La Guaira highway, told
IPS.
"Sixty percent of all community councils are chaired
by women," María León, head of the recently created
Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Gender Equality,
explained to IPS. "Gone are the days in which we
were confined to household chores. We’ve earned the
right to participate and speak in a forum, like in
the French Revolution," she said.
Over 10,000 community councils, formed by up to 200
families each, have been established in Venezuela,
according to figures from various government
agencies. Many communities also set up "technical
committees" to deal with specific issues, such as
water, health, energy or communications, depending
on the needs of each neighbourhood.
Women’s authority is enhanced because "nothing is
done here without the vote of the people gathered in
an assembly. It’s part of the change we’re
promoting, encouraging people to assume control of
their own projects, to take ownership of the
processes that affect them," Rojas said.
The council operates from a small headquarters that
serves both as office, library, meeting hall, and
computer room, and is located in one of the many
makeshift houses built in Tacagua, an area formed by
a series of shantytowns crisscrossed by steep,
narrow paths and lanes, which have sprouted over 20
kilometres of rough hills extending from Caracas
down to the Caribbean.
Some 6,000 people live in the area, which is
delimited by the Tacagua river, formed primarily by
sewage that flows down through a ravine from other
shantytowns on the west side of Caracas.
It is dominated by a hill on which spaces have been
carved out to accommodate terraces and storage rooms
for the metropolitan area’s first production
cooperative, the Comuna Gual y España - named after
two historical figures who led an early attempt at
independence from Spain.
Rojas heads a "technical committee on
telecommunications" that is working with the
government telephone company to obtain basic
telephone services for all of Tacagua. The councils
also run small food stores and schools. In all, the
government of Hugo Chávez reports that it has
provided some three billion dollars in funding for
community projects in the last three years.
The five councils that make up the pioneer Gual y
España cooperative are planning several production
activities including "a chicken and rabbit farm,
complete with slaughtering facilities, a tomato and
pepper garden, and a pottery production unit," Rojas
said, "because our aim is for the communities to be
self-sufficient and not have to depend on any
institution."
"We’re moving forward, but there’s a lot of trial
and error, and we have our occasional run-ins with
bureaucracy, because the community acts more quickly
than the public administration, which is bogged down
by red tape," she said.
In this South American country of 28 million, it is
women who have traditionally taken on the task of
improving living conditions in the shantytowns on
the outskirts of Caracas and other cities,
implementing different forms of organisation. Now
their efforts are being channelled through the new
community councils.
More positions, more women
With the 1999 constitution - which replaced the
country’s longest-standing constitution, in force
since 1961 - Venezuela increased the number of
institutions in public administration, and extended
the three traditional branches of government to
include two more - the electoral branch, and the
moral or citizen branch, in turn subdivided into
three offices: attorney general, comptroller
general, and ombudsman.
Five of these seven institutions are headed by
women: the single-chamber parliament (where Chávez
supporters hold nearly all of the seats since the
opposition boycotted the 2005 legislative
elections), the Supreme Court, the National
Electoral Board, the Ombudsman’s office, and the
Attorney General’s Office.
Seventeen percent of legislators are women (29 out
of a total of 157), although some assemblywomen are
serving as alternates in seats to which men were
originally elected but declined in order to occupy
other posts.
As of 2005, the electoral branch established
mandatory gender parity in all candidacies for
deliberative bodies, but men are usually placed at
the top of candidate lists and thus have a greater
chance of being elected.
According to data from the Ministry of Women’s
Affairs, one-third of all seats in the 24 provincial
parliaments are held by women, 60 of the country’s
335 mayors are women, as are five of the 22 cabinet
ministers, and three of the 24 state governors. With
the exception of the mayors, these figures are not
much different than those prior to 1999.
"Over the last 10 years huge strides have been made
towards closing the gap that has historically
separated the constructive action of women from
their participation in political, social and
economic decision-making processes, not only in high
public office, but in power structures at the
community level as well," Minister León said.
Interviewed by IPS, Flor Ríos, of the congressional
Family, Women and Youth Committee, said that "while
we find women occupying many positions and heading
government bodies, we’re still far from achieving
true gender balance and having women in key national
spending and executive posts."
"Significant headway may have been made in
organisations at the local level, like community
councils, which benefit from the involvement and
capacity of women in problem-solving efforts," María
Guzmán, of the non-governmental Foundation for the
Rights of Women in Latin America, told IPS.
Contradictory words
"I declare myself a feminist. Long live women! As
Simón Bolívar said: women are not equal to men, they
are superior to them," President Chávez is fond of
repeating.
This month he called on "all our nation’s men to
declare themselves feminists," because "our people
will never be free as long as women are not free."
Just hours later, Chávez criticised Cecilia García
Arocha, the first woman to be elected president of
Universidad Central, the country’s leading
university, for speaking out against the Higher
Education Ministry at a university demonstration
organised to protest budget cuts. "I don’t know how
such an irresponsible and dishonest lady could have
been put in charge of running a university," said
the president.
The opposition and the private media – which the
opposition largely controls – say that when the
president stands before a microphone - and he’s
spent more than 3,000 hours in front of a mike over
his decade in power – his tone with regard to women
sometimes stands in stark contrast to his other
expressions in favour of women’s causes and gender
equality.
For example, when he was married to his second wife,
Marisabel Rodríguez, he announced to her publicly:
"tonight you’re going to get what you’re asking
for." On another occasion, as he argued his
differences with Washington, he said that what
former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice
needed was for "someone to do her a favour," and he
offered one of his mayors for the job.
Another time, he said he would beat his opponents in
an election and would then "play red" with them,
making a crude pun that evokes sodomy practices and
is typical male bar room talk.
"The speech of any political leader, whether of the
opposition or the ruling party, must set an example.
Form is very important, more so in a society with
such high levels of domestic abuse and violence, and
significant gender discrimination," Liliana Ortega
of Foro por la Vida, a coalition of human rights
groups, told IPS.
While five years ago women accounted for one percent
of homicide victims, that number had climbed to six
percent by 2008, according to Ortega. "The public TV
stations often make fun of people’s sexual
orientation, and their political talk shows
sometimes discredit female opposition leaders by
claiming they are so-and-so’s mistresses," Ortega
said.
"This strengthens stereotypes that have no place in
a modern society," she said.
Ortega also noted that the women who are currently
occupying senior government positions are women "who
have not voiced conflicting opinions and who are not
independent, but are rather strict followers of the
executive branch’s decisions."
Guzmán went on to say that "women are affected by
the political differences that have split the
country in two, and by the government’s discourse,
which has aggravated the machismo and paternalistic
attitudes that we were slowly moving away from, by
adding a component of militarism and using a
confrontational imagery of war, battles, enemies,
squadrons and cannons."
But according to León "above and beyond any of these
aspects, the revolution led by President Chávez has
been the most hopeful yet in the history of
Venezuela. We’ve achieved institutional changes,
like the Women’s Bank, and, for the first time ever,
public policies for women are generating great
involvement from below." |
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