Mariela Jarela (Peru )

It Is Impossible to Continue Living in Poverty, with Inequality and Violence:

The World March of Women’s Ethical, Political and Feminist Proposal

Equality, solidarity, justice, peace and freedom: every nation should base its political system on these five values. In the 21^st century, however, what we see is the opposite, with governments leading humankind away from its right to live without poverty and exploitation.

These five universal values make up an ethical, political and feminist proposal launched by the World March of Women and which, for Peru, has special relevance given the many instances of discrimination affecting most of its population, especially its women. Today, as part of the actions throughout the planet advocating a world without poverty or violence, Peruvian women are mobilizing in the capital and various regions in the country.

Here is an overview of why we need these values to materialize in concrete policies and measures.

Every day, Aurora works more than 12 hours in an agro-export company. This is an economic activity that generates millions for the country and that¾so it is promised¾will continue to prosper when the free trade agreement being negotiated by Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, on the one hand, and the United States on the other, is signed.

Aurora is one of 5000 women on the Peruvian coast employed in this sector, characterized by an atypical work schedule allowing for an overload of work hours with no access to fringe benefits.  Like many of her co-workers, Aurora longs to improve her situation so as to provide a better life for her five-year-old daughter. However, because she lacks skills and training, she won’t have an opportunity to get a more qualified job with better pay.

Like all other women who can’t choose the type of job they need, Aurora’s right to equality is hindered.

Poverty affects over one half of the country’s population, but it’s the women who bear the brunt of it, especially in rural areas, where the highest rates of illiteracy, malnutrition, school dropouts and maternal mortality are found.

The cycle of poverty imposed by the system is inhumanly perverse. In a context of lack of job security, decreased opportunity, widening social and gender gaps, the feminization of work occurs in conditions where women’s economic, social and cultural rights are seriously undermined.

Without a higher education, and therefore no specialized qualifications, women are the main source of cheap labour and are easily replaced. “I don’t want my little daughter to go through what I do. She’s going to finish school and study to have a career,” Aurora says. However, her legitimate dream clashes with the barriers thrown up by the neoliberal economic model, which impedes human development, especially women’s development.

The current system shows no solidarity with the great majority of Peruvian women

Those who see the country as a dead end will join the 2.5 million Peruvians living outside our borders. Over half of them are women, since they have an easier time selling the qualifications “inherent to their gender”: they will be look after other families abroad, caring for the elderly, sick people, children; they will be housekeepers while their own mothers stay behind to care for their children.

The female labour force driven out of Peru will pay their huge dues of sacrifice to develop not only their family but their country as well. In many countries, the amount of money migrants send home surpasses the official assistance they receive from credit agencies. In 2004 alone, Latin America received $45,000 million of the total $126,000 million sent home by migrants.

This heightened migration, which has also become feminized since th 1990s, entails serious risks for women’s safety and their lives, since they are potential victims of sexual trafficking. It hasn’t been possible to discover how much of the money sent back to Peru was earned through the use and abuse of women’s bodies abroad.

But the violence isn’t only found outside. It is present in women’s own homes. Out of every ten Peruvian women, seven experience some form of mistreatment by their partner, and the government has done nothing to improve prevention, attention and sanctions regarding this serious problem of human rights abuse.

A peaceful life at home, in public places and in the country is a right that many women in Peru have not yet attained.

Quite the contrary, the steps backward taken by the Ministry for Women and Social Development, the leading body in charge of promoting gender equity, are putting women in a more precarious situation. The Ministry’s recent administrative changes have weakened the program designed to confront family and sexual violence¾an extremely serious development given the growing number of murdered women in the country. In the last three years, over 260 women have been murdered in acts of extreme cruelty by husbands, partners or former partners.

Most cases have not come to trial and victims’ families have no recourse. The legal system has an enormous debt with gender-based justice since impunity is a commonplace when it comes to the many facets of violence against women, sexual assault being just the tip of the iceberg.

Justice is far removed from women’s lives

The right to a life free of violence is denied to most Peruvian women. Among them we must mention lesbians, who are invisible to society, to governments and to the State. Forced to live a double life, with harmful effects on their mental health, they are deprived of manifesting their identity and talking publicly of their problems and demands. If they did so, social condemnation would rain down on them and take the form of expulsion from school or work, attacks by the family, and moral condemnation fuelled from the pulpit in a clear fostering of lesbophobic violence.

A deep-seated fear of women’s freedom exists. The main battleground is women’s bodies and their right to exercise their sexuality. They have to fit in the moulds shaped by a Catholic society that doesn’t recognize sexual or reproductive rights. This repressive stand, coupled with weak public policy, gives rise to unwanted pregnancies, many of which are terminated by underground abortionists since abortion is a criminal offence. Women don’t have the right to decide over their bodies, and it is the poorest women who are the most seriously affected.

Women’s right to freedom, an essential value for humankind, is not recognized.