Report
There are women in Venezuela who form what Cathy Rakowski and I have called a “core group.” 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.
After more than 30 years, with the arrival in January 2003 of the Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva administration, the fight for racial and gender equality that took to the streets and intervened in the national policy agenda beginning in the 1980s now faces limits imposed, in part, by institutionalized racism. This racism takes the form of a lack of understanding of the strategic meaning of confronting racism and sexism as a fundamental step in development.
Throughout the 1990s, the Bolivian women’s movement was ideologically polarized between a liberal, NGO-based “gender technocracy” and the anarcha-feminism embodied in the Mujeres Creando (Women Creating) movement. Between them stood the great majority of the country’s female population—a huge contingent of women of indigenous descent living in a colonized condition. Neither the technocratic nor the anarchist tendency considered them the subject of political representation.
The election of Chile’s first female president in January 2006 sparked unprecedented interest in the developments of gender relations and women’s political roles in the country. Many observers, including the mass media, emphasized the paradox that the election of Michelle Bachelet posed in what was perceived to be one of Latin America’s most conservative countries.
Leftist politics has always had a complex relationship with women’s struggles, one that many times translates into political exploitation and neutralization. More complex still is the condition of women “within” the left itself, where, because of the absence of organizational autonomy, the figure of the (obedient) “partner of the male political leader” and women’s role as the logistical and organizational—but silenced—mainstay of political movements abound.
The links between some “LGBTTTI” groups and left-wing parties (mostly communist and Trotskyist), as well as the more mainstream human rights movement, have been very strong since the gay and lesbian movement began in the late 1960s.
