Women demand a fairer share of political power in Guatemala

11 January 2008 in Government, South America

Women cry out for more power in country’s male-dominated political scene.

Juana de Jesús Ramírez Méndez, a 32-year-old mother of four, describes the hurdles she has had to overcome to become president of the Community Development Council for the village of Los Vados, Jocotan, in the southern department of Chiquimula.

Like many other young girls in rural communities, she was encouraged to marry at an early age as her family could not afford to support her. Juana did not get past her third year in primary school and when she decided to return and finish her education, she was met with fierce opposition from her husband.

“I had to tell my husband: ‘Look, I’m going to school, whether you like it or not,’” she recalled. Juana managed to finish primary school and is now attending high school.

As a community leader, she had to overcome deeply embedded sexist stereotypes. When the village realized that Juana de Jesús was confident, eloquent and good at sourcing government-funded or international aid-sponsored development projects she was elected president of the village council, but it did not go down well with her predecessor and his supporters.

Strong accusations

Juana was accused of usurping the post without having been elected by the community and she even received threats. Undaunted, she contacted the human rights ombudsman’s office, which offered support and counselling.

Today, however, she is a respected community leader and a role model for other women in the village. Her case is by no means unique, as the prevalence of sexist stereotypes has made Guatemalan politics an exclusively male domain, and women, especially in rural areas, need to fight tooth and nail to be respected as equals.

Compared to other Central American countries, women are hugely under-represented in government positions on a local and a national level in Guatemala, mostly due to the prevalence of sexist attitudes and high illiteracy rates, which continue to bar many women from politics. Indigenous women are the most excluded, as they suffer gender, class and racial discrimination.

However, this year’s election was unique, with two women running for top government posts: Rigoberta Menchú, presidential candidate for center-left party Encuentro por Guatemala, and feminist intellectual Walda Barrios running as vice-presidential candidate for the former-guerrillas-turned-political party, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, or URNG.

Struggle Against Patriarchy, a vocal feminist group within the URNG party, led by Barrios, forced party leaders to establish a minimum 30 percent-quota to increase the participation of women, indigenous people and young candidates. Twenty-nine percent of the URNG’s congressional candidates and 18 percent of municipal candidates were women.

The URNG came up with a system known as trenzas, or “plaits,” in which each candidate’s list must include a man, a woman, an indigenous candidate and a youth leader, in order to make candidates more representative in terms of gender, age and ethnicity.

According to “More Women, Better Politics,” a study published this year by the United Nations Population Fund, in Costa Rica and Honduras, where laws were approved setting minimum quotas for female representation in government posts in 1996 and 2000, respectively, female participation has improved, especially in Congress. Since the laws were approved, the percentage of women in top government jobs has increased from just over 17 percent to over 38 percent in Costa Rica and from 5.5 percent to more than 23 percent in Honduras.

Some measures ineffective

However, not all female candidates advocate compulsory quotas. Ana Luisa de Córdoba, a former Congressional candidate to the conservative Values and Visions party, said: “I don’t think quotas are the answer. Parties just use women as space-fillers and nothing really changes.”

Despite the fact that some parties are making greater efforts to include female candidates, this year’s elections yielded disappointing results for women running for office. Menchú’s party came in seventh with just over 3 percent of the vote. Only 14 women were elected to Congress this year, which means there have been no changes since the 2003 elections. The number of women in Congress has varied little since 1985, ranging from 5 to 10 percent.

Women did not fare any better on a local level. Only 8 of 332 mayorships were won by female candidates. Miriam López Ochoa, new mayor of El Tumbador, in the northern department of San Marcos says that she had a tough time running against 12 male candidates who used sexist stereotypes to discredit her during the campaign.

But now she is determined to prove them wrong: “I want to deliver my promises to the people of El Tumbador and show all those sexist men who criticized me that a woman can do things right,” she said.

Since the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, Guatemala has been one of the main recipients of international development aid in the region and most of the projects sponsored have a gender or indigenous rights focus. However, many critics point out that 10 years later, these efforts have yielded poor results.

Dolores Marroquín, of the Civil Society’s Women’s Collective argues that cooperation aid has been largely ineffective in terms of combating gender-based discrimination because the projects funded often fail to address the root cause of the problem.

“Cooperation aid has disarticulated many social struggles, including feminism,” she said. “They say that a project has a gender focus purely because it includes women without analyzing the structural causes of a patriarchal society.”

Guatemala Friday January 4 2008
http://www.latinamericapress.org/article.asp?lanCode=1&artCode=5446