The growth of a new kind of scale (and it is not clear as we go to press what the developments mass women's movement have been), then they will be in the forefront of the confrontation with the private sector and with the government itself.
Because of the struggle of the miners' wives the need for women to organise is de casa' committees have become a model now movement recognised by the as a whole and the trade-union 'amas 6 by Soledad Moreno and Patricia Mercado, two leaders of the Mexican The following interview was given to Gerry Foley in Geneva on February for all women to follow. Women have ers Party, Mexican section of the Fourth International). Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT - Revolutionary Workalso been organised in the past around issues such as forced sterilisation introduced through the US aid programmes; and within the textile industry where many women work. Few women go out to work in Bolivia, but most women are forced to take on extra paid work in the house, such as washing, or are often seen selling in the street.
Women are starting to organise in the workplaces as well, however, and in particular women workers in the government sector have recently set up a national union. Article 104 of the constitution banned trade unions for all government employees and it was largely the women who defied the ban and got the union organised. They now lead and run the union and have been in the forefront of COB actions in the last year.
The heroic struggle of Bolivian women and of the miners' wives in particular have propelled women to the forefront of the labour movement where they are best placed to bring forward their own demands. The self-organisation of women on a national and local level has been and still is a vital component of this process. International Viewpoint 11 March 1985
Question. How has the women's movement developed in Mexico in recent years?
Soledad Moreno. A very interesting process has been developing at the rank-and-file level in the mass organizations, which shows that women are beginning little by little to organize around their interests as they see them. This means that women who years ago would not have met to discuss problems as women are beginning to do this.
This process has been exemplified by various assemblies that have been held on the national and regional levels of women who live in the shantytowns, peasant women, women of the left political organizations and the women in the committees to defend the political prisoners and the political "missing persons."
The discussions at these assemblies have taken up both the immediate daily concerns of the majority of Mexican women - problems created by the capitalist austerity drive, how to fight to get public services, how to fight to defend their jobs, how to fight for the land - and a series of problems directly and clearly related to the specific oppression
This marks a big change from past years when the problems of women's oppression were the property, so speak, of small nuclei of women intellectuals or students. They did important theoretical political but they remained isolated from the great majority of Mexican women.
Today, we are seeing a combination of the concerns held by the majority of women, that is, the general problems of their class, with the sort of problems that their entry into struggle poses for them as women, that is, confronting their oppression as women. For example, they may find that as they get involved in •fighting for sidewalks, for schools for their children, against high prices, for jobs and for the land that they run up against their husbands opposing their participation in political activities.
Q. Could you gwe some examples of these regional or national assemblies of women?
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Patricia Mercado. For about a year and a half, following an initiative by the PRT, most of the left organizations have been discussing the possibility of establishing women's organization, based on the women of the poor urban masses, working-class women and peasant women. Last March a National Women's Forum was called, which brought together companeras from the shantytowns, delegates from the Coordinadora-El Movimiento Urbano Popular [an organization of activists in poor neighborhoods], as well as peasant companeras belonging to peasant organizations grouped in the Coordinadora which groups the entire peasant movement. There were also trade-union women there, both representatives of unions and working women. course, there were women from the political parties and women's groups.
This forum discussed a wide range of concrete problems. For example, one very important discussion was on the problems of the women who work in the maquiladoras [factories that do only a limited task in a process divided up within multinational corporations in order to weaken the bargaining power of the workers]. women from the maquiladoras who were there discussed a lot about the working conditions of a workforce of 200,000 on the [US-Mexican] border, who are mainly women. At the time there was a fight going on, and it is continuing, to win the right to unionize and to democratize the unions.
In November 1984, there was a national gathering of women from the shantytowns to discuss the problems of women in these concentrations around the cities. The main themes were the need to fight to get water piped in, to get electricity, and so on. One fundamental theme that touched them as women in the shantytowns and as housewives, as working women, was the fight against high prices, which involves forming consumer cooperatives, demanding that the state establish people's stores in the shantytowns and a whole series of such measures.
At the same time, the gathering discussed the need to promote within the shantytown-dwellers associations the participation and political education of women, as well as their involvement in the leaderships of these associations.
In December 1984, the first meeting of women workers in the maquiladoras along the frontier was held. About fifty women attended. They discussed how to begin to coordinate all the struggles that have been being waged in the maquiladoras. No trade-union group in the maquiladoras has been able to achieve what these women did, that is, set up coordination covering the whole frontier.
Besides this coordination of women in the maquiladoras, there is a coordination of working women in the services. In this sector, women have mobilized against a government decision not to set up day-care centers for the children of 18
A woman textile worker (DR)
who work in the government secretariats but just to give [about 15 US dollars] a month to pay
Another problem in the service sector is that the government is trying to get women to leave their jobs and go back to
So, the president's wife has organized a group of women, wives of of government secretariats, which has set up a whole series of lectures in the service sector, lectures whose fundamental objective is to tell women to go back to their homes, that they have left their children uncared for, neglected their families.
The same problem has arisen in the banking sector [the banks are nationalized in Mexico], where 14,000 layoffs are coming up. The first in the list to be laid off will be women, women whose husbands work in the banks.
Moreover, last year workers in the public service sector were given an emergency wage increase, but it was not given to women with children in day care. They generally arrive at work a half hour late because they have to take their children to the day-care center. So, they were not given the raise on the grounds that they worked a half hour less. The women responded to this by mobilizing actions, work stoppages and so forth.
Today, this coordinating committee that I talked about has developed an initial form of coordination of women who are in the executive committees of unions in this sector in order to try to organize a more general response, to organize all the women in the service sector together and to not be isolated from each other.
One of the first things they have done is set up a monthly journal to familiarize all the women in this sector with the problems of women in other jobs. The objective is to show these women that similar things are happening to all of them. Starting off from this journal and this coordination of trade unionists, they want to move toward a national assembly of women in all the services and to try to launch a more general coun teroffensive. The first issue of the journal has just appeared. It is called Nosotras ["Us," in the feminine].
Q. What about peasant women?
PM. At the end of November 1984, the congress of the Coordinacion Nacional-Plan de Ayala was held. framework of the congress, a meeting of peasant women was held to discuss the possibility of holding a national assembly of peasant women. It was decided to undertake this project, and a national congress of peasant women is being prepared for the middle of this year.
Also, around the middle of this year, the second national assembly of shantytown women. One of the major tasks of this assembly will be to draw a balance sheet of all the work that has been done
Moreover, all these meetings are being held in the context of a discussion among all the trade-union women belong ing to these mass coordinating bodies and to the political parties of forming a national organization of women that could offer a general response to the whole offensive that the bourgeois government is launching against women in Mexico -working women, women in the shantytowns, women in the villages.
What is necessary to prepare for forming such a national coordination of women is to have nuclei of women in most of the regions of the country and in most sectors, the shantytowns, working masses, etc., who are prepared to build such an organization. That is necessary to assure that it will be real, have a real base. On the basis of this, the specific time for launching the organization could be decided.
International Viewpoint 11 March 1985
Q. What role is the PRT playing in El Salvador, to build a women's barrier are trying to promote coordination of all these struggles on the na-
In fact, a lot of struggles have been waged but often because of being isolated they have failed to reinforce
We think that it is necessary to build a movement, not just to wage isolated struggles.
On the other hand, we are coming into the campaign for the national legislative elections in July of this year. the readers of IV may remember, there were national elections in 1982, in which our candidate, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, the first women presidential candidate in the history of Mexico. This year the elections are just for the Chamber of
We are running 300 candidates throughout the country.
We intend to use this election, as the previous ones, to promote mass struggles, including, of course, the struggle and organization of women. To this end, we are preparing to form women's committees around the election campaign. But these committees will not be just electoral, but will organize struggles for the women's immediate demands, as well as support for the candidates.
We saw a very important example of what such women's committees can do in the elections in the state of Tamaulipas in the 1983 elections. Women's committees were organized on the basis of the various ejidos [the old Indian common lands] to fight for respect for the people's vote [electoral fraud has been open and crude in such areas] and for the women's
For example, one of the demands the women raised was for a grain mill. That was a very important demand. If you don't have a mill, that means that you have to go to another village to mill the corn, or you have to spend two or three hours a day milling it in order to be able the tortillas the Mexican The women had never raised such a demand before. But winning it made a very substantial change in their
Moreover, these women's committees were among the best defenders of respect for the people's vote, they were determined and radical. [In this area, the men are often away from the villages].
We see these committees as part of the process leading to a national organization of women. They will not close up shop once the elections are over.
Q. What sort of impact has the organization of women in Nicaragua and El Salvador had on the women's movement in Mexico?
PM. Not much so far. There was an assembly of Latin-American women that took place in Cuba at the end of November where it was decided to form women's coordinating committees in all Latin-American countries to build a Continental Front for Peace. One of the main objectives of this was to fight against US intervention in Nicaragua and International Viewpoint 11 March 1985
This organization has been formed in Mexico by women from women's groups, by intellectual women. But it has not had much of an impact on to take this question of the fight against intervention to the women we are working with in the mass sectors.
this March 8, for fort epict meen
PM. On the basis of what happened last year, we can expect some important
Last year, a national day of action was called around three fundamental axes — against high prices, against repression and for a women's right to choose. The fact that the International Population Congress was held in Mexico helped. There was a mobilization of women, fundamentally shantytown women, front of the Secretariat of Foreign Relations to press the demand that population policy not be based on the question of more or less people and that it should not disregard the opinions of women. This was an unprecedented mobilization on this sort of issue in Mexico.
It will certainly be proposed to carry forward that example this year by demonstration in defense of reproductive rights, for more effective contraception prices and repression continue to be axes of the actions because these are fundamental to a united front of women.
What impact did the onset of the economic crisis have on the women's movement in Mexico?
PM. Three or four years ago, the women's movement in Mexico had ceased to be a movement, there were just some isolated women's groups. Since the masses of women in our country did not respond demands of the autonomous women's groups, the movement reached a dead end. The women did not know
The onset of the crisis created another kind of women's movement, different kinds of mobilization, in other sectors. The shantytown women started to mobilize more than ever against high prices, they started mobilizing more than ever for public services for them most their husbands go out to work. And the first place the government wanted to cut its budget was in the area of public
In the countryside, the women began to demand that they actually be given the "women's portion" they could work it and have more money
And they started raising other demands in accordance with this, for seed to sow these plots, for water for the plots. They started forming cooperatives to dig wells and buy animals. They started to organize as women within the communities.
At the same time, in the unions, the women began finding themselves particularly hard hit by layoffs, and they started reacting against it.
So, we began getting a different sout of women's movement, a different sor of mobilization. And the autonomous women's groups that remain are trying to link themselves to this movement, so as to build a conscious movement, one not based merely on immediate demands, but
Q. What sort of links have developed between the women's organizations and
PM. None, really. oped are organizations of women. example, we have women in factories who are concentrated in certain areas of work and may die there. They have no right to training to improve their skills. There have been mobilizations for the right to promotion and training example, when the women are together in the factory cafeteria, they may decide to mobilize to stop the production line. In some cases, the union involved backed them up, in others it hasn't.
In the subway workers' union, for example, all the women have mobilized to win the right to be train drivers. have been a series of struggles at this level. But this has not brought about a link between the women's organizations and the trade-union organizations. There have been just isolated struggles in the
A movement of working women has begun to grow, exemplified by the assembly of women working in the maquiladoras and the coordination of women working in the service industries. But it isn't getting any help from the union leaderships.
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