subscribe: Posts | Comments

Latin American women: powerful yet still very unequal

0 comments

Sarah Macshane
WVoN co-editor 

Countries with the highest levels of gender-based violence also tend to have the highest levels of female political representation.

Latin America is one of the most unequal continents in the world, with huge disparities between rich and poor, but has had more female presidents and prime ministers than the whole of Europe, starting with Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua.

Currently,  40% of the American subcontinent is governed by women: Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Cristina Fernandez in Argentina and Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica. Mexico may be on its way to electing a female president in the form of Josefina Vazquez Mota.

But Mexico also demonstrates the disconnect between day to day life for some women with the brutality facing others. Human rights groups say hundreds of women  have been brutally killed or gone missing in Mexico state alone in recent years.

And Guatemala isn’t any better – more than 7000 women have been killed there since 2000. “Around 49 [women] are killed every month,” according to Sylvia Gereda, an investigative journalist with the TV show Informe Especial “Special Report”.

Yet over half (53 per cent) of graduates in Latin America are women, some of whom such as Michelle Bachelet  (ex president of Chile and now head of UN Women) achieve the .

There are no easy answers, but one seems pretty clear – a fundamentally patriarchal system of power where a woman’s role is clearly identified with strong cultural expectations of what they should and shouldn’t do.

Latin America should be proud of the strong female leaders it has produced, but while women are subject to trafficking, sexual slavery, murder and violence on a scale that amounts to feminicide in some countries, it clearly has a long way to go.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *