I have just spent three months living in Venezuela, an oil-rich Third World country with a population of 26 million, of whom 80% live on or below the poverty line. But there are exciting events taking place in this country.
In 1998, left-wing former paratrooper Hugo Chavez was unexpectedly elected president. Chavez has made a total commitment to change the social realities for the poor, the dispossessed and the marginalised through his Bolivarian Revolution. This has also meant big advances for most women in Venezuela.
When I was there, three floors of a large high-rise building in the capital, Caracas, has been given over to the National Institute for Women (Instituto Nacional de la Mujer, INAMUJER), to work towards achieving equality for women in all spheres. About 50-100 women were employed there, all paid for by the Chavez government.
Maria Leon, the director of INAMUJER, said they want to have women actively participating in all political forums and that 50% of the composition of any government committee should be made up of women. INAMUJER is also fighting for the recognition of the unpaid work women do in the home and on family farms.
A serious problem is domestic violence, both physical and psychological. Women in Venezuela have been conditioned for centuries to blame themselves and accept their subordination to men. Leon said it's a real struggle to convince women to fight for their legal rights.
Venezuela is one of the few Latin American countries that acknowledges domestic violence as a serious problem and is attempting to change the situation. INAMUJER has a free telephone line and about 75% of calls are related to the mistreatment of both women and children.
Another real problem used to be women's health and the death of many women in child-birth. Health care is privatised in Venezuela and the poor simply cannot afford to see a doctor. However, Chavez invited some 15,000 Cuban doctors to come to Venezuela. The government set up a program called Barrio Adentro where the Cuban doctors live in the poor areas, the barrios, in clinics built by the Venezuelan Armed Forces. For any serious medical problems, the patients are taken to the large army hospital in Caracas.
The doctors also pay special attention to sex education, contraceptive advice to women and treat all gynecological problems, according to Leon. In addition, the government pays for all prescriptions.
So far, in just a few years, some 27 million visits have been recorded with Barrio Adentro. Now the health centres are treating eye problems and carrying out necessary dental work on the population of the poor funded for free by the Chavez government.
Traditionally, a long-standing cultural problem more pronounced in Latin America is machismo — where men have several women partners, with a number of children to each one. Society judges a man's masculinity by the number of children he has fathered. Latino men have refused, in general, to take responsibility for their children and have abandoned them, with the women taking on the sole burden of raising their children. Seventy per cent of households in Venezuela are headed by women.
To deal with this problem, the Chavez government was discussing a law covering paternal responsibility. Under the proposed law, if the mother said a particular man was the father of her children and he refused to take a DNA test, then for all legal purposes he would be considered the father of her children.
Leon said the elimination of machismo would require a cultural shift such that it was no longer morally and socially acceptable that men joked about their serial relationships. She said this would require women to use moral persuasion and pressure from society to make men change their attitudes toward women.
The Chavez government is under extreme pressure from the US government to put a stop to these social programs, even to the extent of backing a military coup against the government in April 2002. The coup was defeated through a massive uprising by Venezuela's working-class poor, including rank-and-file soldiers.
A second attempt by Venezuela's wealthy business owners to oust the Chavez government — through a management-organised shut-down of the country's oil industry late last year — failed once again thanks to the mobilisation of oil production workers and the ranks of the army.
A third attempt by the bosses to remove the Chavez government — through a recall referendum on August 15 — looks like being defeated.
On August 8, hundreds of thousands of women and men marched through the streets of Caracas in support of Chavez. "Chavez has been in charge of liberating Venezuela for the past five years", said on woman marcher. "Chavez will not go!" she shouted.
Another woman marcher, a dentist, said: "I will be voting No [in the referendum] because I want a just and free country, a country where we can minimise social differences as much as possible, a country of opportunity for all of us, a country where the president is concerned for those most in need, a country with education, with health, and a country where those who want to study can study."
Robyn Marshall
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 18, 2004.
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