This interview was translated by Nancy Piñeiro and has been edited for clarity and length.
This is the sixth installment in a collection of interviews with Indigenous and feminist media makers and community organizers in Bolivia. They explore building community media, Indigenous liberation, and feminist social change through grassroots journalism and people's movements. Read the other interviews here.
A bright pink building covered with feminist graffiti and artwork decorates its sides. It stands proud in the bustling downtown of La Paz, Bolivia. It is home to the Virgen de los Deseos, the cultural and radical organizing space of the feminist movement Mujeres Creando. This well-known space hosts self-defense classes for women, reproductive health clinics, a popular radio station, a busy café, and much more. It is a well-known hub for feminist organizing in the city.
Julieta Ojeda has been a central member of Mujeres Creando for years. We discussed her work while sitting in the Virgen de los Deseos in a typically busy weekday evening. In this interview, she talks about her organizing work in reproductive health and abortion, violence against women, and empowering the feminist movement from below in Bolivia.
Benjamin Dangl: Could you explain what you’re doing now in Mujeres Creando?
Julieta Ojeda: The movement has been around for thirty years already, and I think, at this point, we can say that we enjoy a political currency even stronger than a decade or two ago. I’m sure that moments and political spaces have come together too.
I think that popular sectors have begun supporting [our] work because state institutions are not doing their job in our country, and we need a different type of work. Everyone must pressure the state to have real justice in our country at all levels, not only for women but also for people who don’t have resources, for children who can’t defend themselves, for people who don’t have economic resources, and women and men who not only suffer from rape or femicide but who are also searching for other things.
Mujeres en Búsqueda de Justicia (Women Seeking Justice) is also very empowered and very strong, which is the discourse of feminist justice. For us, it shouldn’t be punitive; it doesn’t have a punitive character but a creative and organizational nature. Women must organize, pressure, and adopt the issue of violence against women academically but also in political practice as something structural that affects a collective that is made up of us, the women, to assume a collective identity among women.
It’s very hard to adopt this collective identity as women. We know our experiences. The proletarians have a collective identity, “we are workers,” they assume it as a collective identity, but women don’t. We are trying to generate this consciousness that “my problem is not only my own, that it’s related to the system of oppression, which is patriarchal,” and within a class-based, racist economic system. We’re working mostly on these aspects.
I’m still doing counseling on abortion, which is my work. I think it needs a change... It seems that it doesn’t change and won’t change in decades to come here in Bolivia. I think we need to work on this and try to create a favorable context to achieve more advantages in the issue of abortion.
We’re also involved in the school of self-defense for women with the office of Women Seeking Justice. We’re involved in all this self-management of Mujeres Creando. We have a new office working on labor rights with domestic workers, especially providing labor counseling to guarantee or at least prevent labor exploitation. Also, we want to start some urban productive projects like gardens. We really want to keep publishing books; we have many projects for many books.
BD: Could you please explain a bit more about your work on abortion here in Bolivia?
JO: We are seeking the decriminalization of abortion. Many people say it’s not possible to discuss decriminalization and that you can only discuss legalization because they don’t conceive of the possibility of abortion being beyond the state’s decision. The only possibility they can think of is that the state should regulate it. We discuss decriminalization because we think we shouldn’t renounce our utopic horizon, and while the state must guarantee certain conditions for women who seek an abortion, it shouldn’t regulate the decision of a woman who wants to have an abortion.
Basically, what we do here with Mujeres Creando is to give advice and accompaniment to women who want to have an abortion. Obviously, it’s not within legality. In the case of Women Seeking Justice, we do seek the legal interruption of pregnancy in two cases: in the case of rape or when the life or health of the woman is at risk. In those two cases, we provide support. Despite its legality, the state is not fulfilling its role.
This was passed in 2014 by the Evo Morales administration after an amendment to the Criminal Code that eliminated the judicial consent requirement in cases of rape and when the health or life of the woman is at risk. Before 2014, women had to open a legal case if they wanted to have an abortion, imagine all the bureaucracy... In 2014, they eliminated the judicial consent requirement.
The state should socialize these types of laws, which are so important for half of the population of Bolivia, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t do this through the Health Ministry; it doesn’t socialize the protocols on how health providers and the police should treat women seeking an abortion or how the judicial system should treat women seeking abortion. It doesn’t. So, the progress is very slow. The initiatives emerge from civil society and social movements; they share information on how it should be done. The NGOs, in some cases, also do campaigns and disseminate information. Basically, those are the channels.
Many women who are raped are then stopped at the police station so they wouldn’t file a complaint or convince them not to have an abortion. Even in health centers, the administrative or medical staff make valuable judgments about the patients who want to have an abortion, convincing them not to. This is not regulated by the state. So, women who need a legal abortion also need support.
We do it through Women Seeking Justice, but also, if a woman wants to have an abortion but is not within legal grounds, we give them information that is public, and it’s in many books too, so they can make a free decision. Women here are having abortions despite the state, the laws, and the religions. Despite the social disapproval they might face, they are having abortions.
BD: As I understand, the cases of violence against women and femicides have increased. Could you explain what is going on in the country in this regard?
JO: I think what’s happening is that since the category of femicide was incorporated into Bolivian legislation, the problem became more visible. In the past, it wasn’t mentioned in this way. We knew it was machismo; we knew women were murdered just for being women, but when Law 348 was approved—which has many deficiencies, and we’re very critical of it—in 2013, after it was passed, this category was recognized, and reality was named.
This transformation, so to speak, is also thanks to social pressure and women’s organizing. I think with this process information is also being systematized, especially by the media, but not with the goal of investigating or contributing information, more with a sensationalist motive. After each femicide comes to light, they cover it, and every year, they say, ‘We have 13, 23 femicides.’ So, it’s also news now in a sensationalist way.
I think this situation became more visible, but there is also a hypothesis María Galindo [of Mujeres Creando] has, which is interesting: the concept of “depatriarchalization,” and she says this starts from below, by women from below who are part of society and not from the state.
For example, the fact that women are getting divorced and separating from violent men, especially in the cities, where it’s very common. I don’t know if this happens in the rural areas; I’ve worked mostly in urban contexts and in a city where many things flow such as politics and economics, so we probably have different experiences from other [rural] departments. But I think women are rebelling against this, they want to have a different relationship, to decide if they want to have children or not, if they want an abortion or not, if they want to break with a violent relationship; many decide to raise their children alone. There is a women’s rebellion, and in this sense, the men are not reflecting together with the women; they’re not experiencing their bodies and freedoms in a different way. Machismo is very strong, and social control among men is very strong; ‘you must be a macho, you have to hit women.’ I think it’s also related to a backlash of the patriarchy, of the local patriarchy and machismo we see in our societies, against the exercise of freedom by women, even sexual freedoms.
BD: My last question is, considering these issues, where do you see hope? In what projects, politics, and movements?
JO: I believe in what we do in Mujeres Creando, the work outside the state. I think that work is useful and gives power to societies. And I think that it is society that changes the state and not the state that changes society.
We need to keep working as social movements, rethinking political projects. For example, one priority for me is working on the issue of abortion from different perspectives, trying to expand the work we’ve done for years and give this topic a qualitative change. But I don’t think we have to start negotiating laws with the state; we must do other types of work. I believe in that.
I also think the state and power transform you and absorb you; power gobbles you up. The political system is so structured that believing that your presence can change society is very naïve. That’s why I think we need to work from society and generate the awareness that women can take on collective struggles.
We must take over the struggles collectively, regardless of whether they affect us or not, whether you’re a mother, a daughter, a professional, or a domestic worker. We must get involved and deal with this collectively. I think that’s where we must put our hopes. Politically speaking, that’s what I have decided for my life.
Dr. Benjamin Dangl is a Lecturer of Public Communication and Journalism at the University of Vermont. He has worked as a journalist across Latin America for over two decades covering social movements and politics. Dangl’s most recent books are The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia and A World Where Many Worlds Fit.
