Beyond Polarization: Organized Venezuelan Women Promote Their Minimum Agenda

Although Venezuela is still politically polarized between chavistas and antichavistas,¹ collective violence is a lot more subdued than during the days following the April 2002 coup d’etat—especially the period of the December 2002–February 2003 oil and business strike, and the days before and after the presidential impeachment referendum on August 15, 2004.

Dozens of presidential precandidates were introduced after the opposition withdrew from the December 2005 parliamentary elections. Questioning the reliability of the National Election Council (CNE), the opposition was certain its withdrawal would deal a lethal blow to the legitimacy of President Hugo Chávez’s party (the Fifth Republic Movement, MVR) and gradually isolate the president himself in the international arena. After the deadline for final registration, the CNE list totaled 23 candidates: Chávez, who on December 3, 2006, became the first immediately reelected president in the republican history of Venezuela (with 62.89% of the votes); Manuel Rosales, the governor of the state of Zulia; comedian Benjamín Rausseo (also known by his stage name, El Conde del Guácharo); and 20 unknowns supported by ad hoc electoral groups, a record six of whom were women.²

At Each End of the Spectrum³

On the side of Venezuelan men and women who support the president, now elected three times, the Bolivarian Women’s Force—a mass movement of women from the popular classes, organized through the National Institute of Women, the state women’s agency—is said to consist of 30,000 to 40,000 puntos de encuentro, or base-level “meeting points,” consisting of about five women each. However, the great majority are not committed to what we Latin American and Caribbean feminists consider women’s “minimum agenda”—the demand for sexual and reproductive rights, including the voluntary interruption of pregnancy; respect for all sexual orientations; parity and alternation between men and women in political representation; opposition to any use and abuse of images of girls and women in advertising; and social security for all women, including those who work in the large informal sector of the economy. These Bolivarian women are in reality committed to the defense of Chávez, the most important leader of the process, and his administration. Above all, they support the programs implemented by the Chávez administration, programs that directly benefit women, although the programs are not exclusively aimed at them, but at the entire population.

These programs, called “missions,” are managed by different state ministries and currently include basic goods at low prices (Mercal); “food houses” in the poorest neighborhoods that provide three daily meals; health and dental care provided directly in the neighborhoods by Cuban physicians and dentists (Barrio Adentro 1, 2 and 3); literacy (Robinson 1 and 2); employment training (Vuelvan Caras); completion of high school (Ribas); completion of university studies (Sucre); financing, promotion, distribution and management of different arts in popular culture (Cultura); operation on cataracts and other eyesight problems in Cuba, a benefit also extended to other countries in the region (Milagro); and the newest mission that assigns a specific financial allowance to unemployed single mothers with three or more children (Madre de Barrio). At this time there are 21 missions administered by different executive ministries.

In all these missions, advocated and promoted by the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in his every speech, there are women in charge and women beneficiaries. However—and just as with women from the opposition, who returned from the streets to their apartments and offices after August 2004—it is unlikely that these women would agree with the urgency of decriminalizing the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, or the injustice of discriminating against nonheterosexual women seeking employment. Or that they know about the human papilloma virus rampant among younger women, or that AIDS is not only a homosexual issue and that their partners and comrades may have infected them with HPV or HIV without either of them knowing it.

Nor do the majority of women know that recently, on November 25, 2006, the Organic Law on the Right for Women to a Life Free From Violence was passed, which replaces the Law on Violence Against Women and the Family. The latter provided for temporary protective orders that allowed for distance to be put between the aggressor and his victims, orders that were suspended by the Attorney General of the republic three years ago, thereby disarming governmental entities and NGOs dedicated to providing services for abused women. The suspension of these temporary protective orders by the Attorney General and the following decision in his favor by the Supreme Court was the impulse that organized women needed to propose a new law against domestic violence.

While the streets seethed with masses of people for or against Chávez, women from both sides remained ignorant about the Social Security Organic Act, passed in December 2002. In Article 17, the act provides for homemakers’ social security, as established in Article 88 of the 1999 Constitution. Women know even less about the existence of a Social Services Act, passed in July 2005 and published in the Gaceta Oficial (comparable to the U.S. Federal Register) the following September, which in Article 41 ratifies a financial allowance valued at 60% to 80% of the current minimum urban wage to homemakers “in need” (US$173 a month at the official exchange rate).

Nor do women know about the Suffrage and Political Participation Organic Act, which in Article 144 establishes that 30% of parliamentary candidates should be women. Or that this article was suspended in 2000 by the male majorities of all parties, and that María León, the president of the National Women’s Institute (now part of the Ministry of Popular Participation and Social Development), has asked that this article be replaced by one increasing the quota to 50% and that positions be held alternately by men and women. Article 144, its suspension and the replacement request have certainly received more publicity than the other legislation, because the issue of quotas is of particular sensitivity to female leaders of both sides, since their own political aspirations have been at stake since 2000. With all this—and despite the fact that three of the five CNE directors issued a statement suggesting that parties and electoral groups should submit a 50-50 party list alternating between male and female candidates—women from both sides did not achieve even 30% on the 2005 party lists. In a joint meeting, female leaders who had reviewed how the lists were created declared that women themselves had either proposed male candidates for the leading positions and women as substitute candidates or proposed two men. Finally, it was a group of men in the leadership, and the top leader in the case of the chavista coalition, who decided which among several names would remain on the lists for each state.

On December 4, 2005, the day of the parliamentary elections, abstention rates reached 75.5%, a little over the traditional abstention rate in Venezuela for any nonpresidential election. In Venezuela, the vast majority cares only about the man in charge of public affairs, the president, although the higher abstention rates may have been due to the confusion created by most opposition groups that withdrew from the elections 48 hours before the campaign was officially closed. Thus, the 25% that voted elected congresswomen for the same reason they elected congressmen: because they were on the slate due to their unquestioned loyalty to Chávez and the process he fosters, and not because women candidates supported the minimum agenda of the Women’s Assembly, a network of civil society and state-based women’s rights advocates and organizations. This does not mean, however, that some of those congresswomen—as well as some congressmen—could not be made sensitive to the program’s goals.

The fact that women themselves did not oppose the old practice of supporting male leadership in creating the list that finally won on December 4 (in the case of government supporters) or the one that did not make it (in the case of the opposition)—and the fact that it was actually women who favored male rather than female candidates with equivalent merit (both in the creation of the final lists and in the process of voting for them)—shows that the subconscious will not be modified by a law, much less by a “suggestion” from the CNE or any other official or unofficial agency. It also proves that the old conviction that women are unsuitable for handling public affairs is not one held exclusively by men. The same happened in the presidential campaign: Any specific women’s claim was postponed for the sake of (Chávez’s) reelection or the leader’s replacement (by Rosales). This long-standing behavior of women has prompted quite a few feminists to advocate a return to Second Wave feminism’s consciousness-raising groups, so popular in the 1960s, given that the sabotage by men who benefit from maintaining women far from “men’s business” counts on the support of women themselves. This explains the triumph of machismo vis-à-vis the lucidity of feminist discourse and slogans on radio and TV. It is one thing to state that you are in favor of a 50-50 slate in front of a TV camera, and a very different thing to impose this claim at electoral campaign headquarters, where the least that the majority is going to think or say is that it is a typical hysterical or vested claim.

The Elastic Core

Certainly there are women in Venezuela who form what Cathy Rakowski and I have called a “core group.”⁴ This is a small group of activists that at crucial times is part of larger mobilizations, and in between those times is “in abeyance,” waiting for political opportunities to act. This core group of activists who have been participating on and off in Venezuelan political life since 1936 is not made of stone. Rather, its flexibility accounts for its ability to incorporate women of successive generations as the need arises. Sometimes, new members remain as part of the core group and resurface in the next period of activism, although generally young women continue their professional careers or family lives—or both—once the critical situation is over, which is perfectly understandable. Until only a little while ago, the core group included activists who went all the way back to 1936, such as Eumelia Hernández, or 1958, such as Argelia Laya, Esperanza Vera, Adicea Castillo and Nora Castañeda. In the late 1970s, during the struggle to reform the Civil Code led by the Venezuelan Federation of Women Attorneys (FEVA), it incorporated the women who rallied to the Plaza el Venezolano on March 8, 1978.

In 1985, while reviewing the status of women during the UN Decade on Women in preparation for the UN conference in Nairobi, Kenya, the same core group also incorporated women from other old and new organizations in what we called the Coordinadora de ONG de Mujeres (Coordinating Committee of Women’s NGOs, CONG).

This elastic core of activists, whose most outstanding feature is that they can put aside political differences to advocate a specific women’s program, made a comeback during the writing of the 1999 Constitution. At that time, it managed to introduce in the final text most of the demands that had accumulated since the UN’s International Women’s Year in 1975. Except for the two years of extreme political confrontation between 2002 and 2004, the core group has succeeded in working together, supporting and sustaining five specific actions:

• The writing of the regulations that would allow for the application of the recent Law on the Right of Women to a Life Free From Violence.
• Creating a new penal code that would replace the current one dating back to the 19th century. The new code should include two provisions: one on decriminalizing abortion (which would be a crime only if performed without a woman’s consent or without safe medical and hospital conditions) and one on sexual crimes (which would ratify the International Criminal Court’s definition of such crimes as crimes against humanity, as set forth in the Rome Statute).
• Replacing Article 144 of the Suffrage and Political Participation Organic Act with one that ratifies equality and equity between the sexes, and establishes 50-50 quotas for women and men, alternating positions in electoral lists at all levels.
• Complying with the laws that prohibit the use and abuse of stereotyped images of women in all kinds of advertising.
• Creating a new Social Services Act that would enable the payment of monetary allowance to homemakers (based on the minimum wage). Following a proposal the Women’s Assembly submitted to the National Assembly’s Family, Women, and Youth Committee, “homemakers” would be defined as women who have spent more than 25 years as heads of their household, who are not included in any of the country’s 400 public and private social security systems, either as the main beneficiary or as the dependent of the beneficiary, and who are duly registered at the Institute for Social Services, at the new Ministry for Citizen Participation and Social Development.

Of course, the core group’s organizing is very hard work, and today it brings together young women from new organizations that are somehow closer to President Chávez’s administration, and from groups that also belong to the oppositional Frente Nacional de Mujeres (Women’s National Front, including Mujeres Democráticas Unidas and Mujeres por la Libertad, among others). Not all of them share the five demands on which the general work is based in the midst of this political hurricane—there is no consensus on abortion, for instance.

However, up to now the core group is still committed to act as one each time the country seems poised to believe that women have resigned themselves to forsake equality with men. And we understand this commitment, which is renewed periodically, to be a demonstration of what it has meant to live in a democracy that has suffered no interruptions since 1958. This is why the women of the parties that governed from 1958 to 1998 (always referred to by the president as the Fourth Republic) should be called upon, their proposals heard and they themselves positioned at the same level of those in the current Fifth Republic: because they have all, since 1958, openly condemned the male majorities in their own parties who have ignored women’s specific demands. Following the impeachment referendum in 2004, the core group met at the Women’s Studies Center at the Central University of Venezuela. Moreover, in preparation for a national meeting organized to promote the writing and passing of the new law to deal with violence against women, the core group and experts on violence met at the University of Zulia’s Law School Institute. Thus, academic feminists continue to call and facilitate meetings attended by women’s NGOs and women working in different agencies and government levels, such as the judiciary and the National Assembly, who are responsible for women’s policies. The goal is to carry out joint proposals and activities based on common agreement. This methodology contrasts with the core group’s organizational structure in 1985 (the Coordinating Committee of Women’s NGOs), which made the decisions and afterward or simultaneously talked with femocrats (feminists with positions in the public sector or state bureaucracy).

Now that Hugo Chávez Frías has won the presidential elections, two issues ought to immediately summon us women together: First, the approval of laws, but not the regulations that allow them to be applied, could function as a new alibi of national machismo, so we ought to insist that the authorities in charge of drafting the regulations (no longer the National Assembly) write them for the new domestic violence law, to see if the letter of the law can become social action. Second, Chávez announced on December 15 that he was about to create a single party of the revolution, to be named the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV), and that those who wanted to keep their own parties would lose their place in the government, a proposal that was taken up by the opposition. The question that the party women from both sides ought to ask themselves is: are there more possibilities of being heard in the majority-masculine directorate of a macro party than in the directorates of their current small parties? If, as it seems, there would be more difficulty in that case for women to make themselves heard by men from different political perspectives, then women who are outside the parties will encounter more obstacles when presenting their proposals than the women who are active in these macro parties. On the other hand, the creation of the PSUV may present an opportunity to build a powerful, unitary and autonomous national women’s organization that would orient itself directly to the macro parties and to any other institutions necessary to advance the minimum agenda.

Notes:

1. By chavistas I refer not only to those who have voted for Chávez and his supporters since 1998, but also to those who have actively supported what they call the Bolivarian and revolutionary process of the Fifth Republic, born when the 1999 National Constituent Assembly passed the new constitution of Venezuela. The latter was approved by popular referendum on December 15, 1999. Without a doubt, the great majority of these chavistas belong to the nation’s most impoverished sectors.
2. “Corte final para el 3D: 23 aspirantes,” El Nacional, Caracas, August 28, 2006, A2. The only year in which there were more candidates registered than in 2006 was 1988, with 24 candidates. The six unknown women candidates submitted either due to their personal initiatives or through equally anonymous electoral groups are Brígida García, Carolina Contreras, Lourdes Santander, Venezuela Da Silva, Yudith Salazar and Isbelia León. The young woman who could not register was Belkis Ortiz. Before the opposition rallied behind a unified candidate, two other women were proposed: Cecilia Sosa, former president of the Supreme Court, and Rhona Ottolina, the daughter of a famous TV host and producer.
3. Some of the pre-2006 analysis of women’s organizing in this piece is drawn from Gioconda Espina and Cathy Rakowski, “Institucionalización de la lucha feminista/femenina en Venezuela: solidaridad y fragmentación, oportunidades y desafíos,” in Natalie Lebon and Elizabeth Meier, De lo privado a lo público. 30 años de lucha ciudadana en América Latina (UNIFEM, Siglo XXI y Latin American Studies Association, 2006), 310–330.
4. Gioconda Espina and Cathy Rakowski, “¿Movimiento de mujeres o mujeres en movimiento? El caso Venezuela,” Cuadernos del Cendes 49 (January–April 2002): 31–48. See also Bertha Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance,” American Sociological Review, 54 (1989): 761–775.