Confrontation at Latin American feminist meeting
Jean Dupont
Over 600 women from 20 countries gathered in Cartagena, a beachside town 200 km from the Chilean capital, Santiago from November
23 to 28th, for the 7th Latin American and
Caribbean Feminist Encounter.
This Encounter was dominated by tension and accusations between the organisers, who described themselves as working "from autonomous positions", and several hundred participants who are active in non-governmental and government-funded programmes
Cartagena was the forum for polemics in which "the feminist policies that are being created in the name of feminism" must be evaluated, Margarita Pisano, a member of the organizing commission told the Mexican left newspaper La Jornada.
"Considered one of the feminist thinkers who is more outstanding on the continental level," writes Rosa Rojas, *Pisano spoke of the founders of the organization of the Encounter. 'we are not saying that we are the only ones, says Pisano, 'but we are trying to show that there are two different global strategies. This does not have to be a problem, providing that these visions be exp lained and discussed, since one part of feminism - the institutionalised part, which emphasises emphasis pressure group politics and lobbying, with a strategy very much oriented towards the United Nations, participation in large summits, and dialogue with governments, speak as if in the name of all the feminist movement.
'With this strategy,' Pisano continues, *they have abandoned the policy of orienting towards the social movements, rather... they speak and negotiate in its name. It seems to me that one of the large current challenges of the feminist movement is to make a great cultural process, of imagination and installation of another culture, more than a reductionism to be requesting equalities from a civilising system that I find terrible.
*A feminist that says to me that her interest is to seek justice, equality with men, is someone with whom I do not have much to do because she is proposing that the prevailing culture is valid, that the only thing that we have to do is accede to that culture, which we are a little outside of.""
Sara Lovera was one of the many dissatisfied participants. "By making the 'need' to expose the differences between the various feminist currents one of the main themes of the Encounter, [the organisers] suppressed the festive, happy atmosphere which has characterised similar meetings in which feminists in various countries have come together to experiment with ways of improving the lives of millions of women in this continent. The autónomas organised a set-piece trial of those women who had participated in the Beijing UN conference on women. And all this in the best "boys' own" style, with shouting out, loud applause, and whistling. They disqualified all activity organised through NGOs. Many of the participants were bothered by this. Most of us come from NGOs, political parties and social organisations. Some other women were here for the first time, and they didn't understand what the debate was about. There was no discussion, only speech-making."
The meeting was also marred by bitter accusations about the financial resources of the women's movement. Pisano and the other autónomistas accused "certain Chilean women" of mounting a whispering campaign not only to block the Encounter, but to discourage institutional donors from financing its deliberations. Other participants claimed that it was the organisers' own sectarianism which led to this meeting receiving only about $30,000 in outside funding, considerably less than the 1993 meeting in El Salvador.
Pisano replied that "the institutions did not have either a political or an organisational interference in the encounter. We accepted
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[them] as support or sponsors if that is what they wanted, but the encounter and its organization were to be independent of the institutionalised system of the feminist movement, of the phenomenon of institutionalisation. The organizing commission, fulfilling those agreements, is formed by feminist women, autonomous in this sense...
"We conceived of the encounter as a place in which is proposed a discussion of feminist policies and where we would be able to evaluate what is being done in the name of feminism. Our intention is that this
Encounter serve to evaluate what has been the construction of the movement and its politics in the last years, to project strategies of future action. For this it seemed relevant to us to come to know through a comparison of what has been the discussion of the Chilean feminist movement in the three national forums as in the national encounters held to date, generated and organized by the autonomous feminist movement in a great joint effort for reflection and philosophical political discussion.
"We are convinced of the need for the complete autonomy of the feminist movement with respect to United Nations policy, states, governments, political parties, NGO's and networks of NGO's and the politics of international cooperation. We must also recognise the existence of two politicalphilosophical currents in the movement. These translate into different, sometimes opposed strategies. We recognise that we have political differences. * Based on reports circulated by Nuevo Amanecer Press (NAP), <amanecer@cyberspace.com>. Registered as a non profit corporation in the USA. As a press service, NAP seeks to serve human rights organizations with translations and distribution of human right alerts, news and reports. NAP also seek to inform and educate the public on issues of human rights. The NAP team works on a volunteer basis. All expenses are covered by donations. [Additional information from International Viewpoint staff and from Comunicacion e Informacion de la Mujer A.C., <cimac@laneta.apc.org>
January 1997 #284 15