Women in the fight for national liberation children.
The scenes seemed strikingly familiar. The children's drawings, games and morning assemblies are alike the world over. And there were the signs reminding parents: "Children must come between 8:30 and 9:00 in the morning!" "Please mark your child's clothing We cannot
Around Christmas time, a representative of the El Salvador women's organization AMES, which is a component part of the national-liberation struggle going on in the country, toured Sweden. During her visit, she an interview to Haakan Blomovist, editor of Internationalen, weekly paper of the Swedish section of the Fourth International. It was followed in the January 31 issue of Internationalen. Our translation
"I would like to encourage Swedish women to support our struggle, and to protest against the violation of human rights in my country, El Salvador."
Azucena Quinteros is thirty-five years old and the mother of four children.
Actually, she is a seamstress, but some years ago her entire life changed.
She joined the revolutionary movement in El Salvador.
Today, she is in the leadership of
AMES, the Salvadoran women's association, a mass organization of women who support the liberation struggle.
visited
Just before Christmas, she
Sweden to help to organize Swedish support work for women in El Salvador. The women's movement AMES has started a lot of projects for organizing women in zones controlled by the liberation the movement.
"We
Azucena Quinteros said:
are starting sewing enterprises, bakeries, dayand handicraft care centers, groups people's shops.
"For example, the women are making
This is hats, baskets and handbags.
partly to meet the needs in the controlled zones and partly for sale in the markets
The in the zones the regime controls.
money they get goes to buy things that are not available in the zones controlled by the liberation movement - clothing, shoes, medicine and various foodstuffs.
"And so they smuggle these goods to us. This is a risky job.
The women who ase raught at it are jailed. But it is neeand smiled a lot, laughed
Azucena even when she talked about the risks.
They are only part of everyday life. But she became serious when she talked about how the various AMES projects are doing. She explained the practical problems and left the ideological formulas out.
"The people's shops are managed by the women's movement AMES and only
AMES people work there.
They sell staples such as maize-coffee, beans, cigarettes, matches and flour."
She explained that the local organs of people's power, the PPL, elected coun cils in the guerrilla-controlled zones, have their own projects. They coordinate their activity with the AMES stores.
There are also a lot of private businesses in the liberated areas, but Azucena explained, they are "quite uninteresting."
"The enterprises run by the organs of people's power are the people's way of controlling prices. Prices in these stores set the standard for all, including private businesses." 'We don't tell women to come to us - we go out to them..'
Another area of work for AMEs is childcare. The women have started daycare centers themselves in the liberated
"The primary task of the day-care centers is to allow the mothers to take part in the revolutionary struggle and work, while the children are kept safe, looked after and fed," Azucena said. She added with a laugh:
"Our day-care centers are not so elegant. But they do not charge the women Women defend the revolution (DR)
take responsibility for unmarked clothing."
"At this AMES day-care center in Nicaragua, there are fifty children and 15 staff members. In El Salvador, we generally have one adult for every eight to ten children."
Alongside its various projects designed to draw women into common work, the AMES also runs courses and seminars for women on various subjects, ranging from methods of childbirth and contraception to cultural questions, economics, politics and the military situation.
"We address ourselves to women who are not yet politically conscious or involved in the revolutionary struggle," Azucena said.
"Our task is to point up the role that women have in this society and the one that they will have in the society we want to achieve.
"We don't tell women to come to us, we go out to them and explain that we want to work with them.
"In common discussions of what many women consider personal problems, many come to realize that women are doubly oppressed. And the final conclusion is to join together and fight."
Azucena explained that joining the women's movement and the revolutionary struggle brings a big change in the women themselves.
"The women often have prejudices themselves about what women's tasks in life are. That changes.
"Then they have to explain to their husbands what the problem is. There is a big difference in the attitude of the men to women in liberated areas, where the men are revolutionists. But even there, women themselves have to fight for the ideological changes," Azucena stressed.
"The first reaction from the men has always been to reject the change on the part of the women. Before it was only men who took part in the revolutionary struggle in El Salvador.
"Of course, there was also a women's struggle before, for example, twenty years ago. But they were only concerned with problems of food supply and such questions. Women never talked about national liberation and the new society in a longer-term perspective."
Azucena Quinteros herself is an illustration of her concluding remark:
"But everything has begun to change now."
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