CHILE Women in struggle against the dictatorship ONE OF THE RICHEST experiences of feminist organizations participating in mass struggles has been in Chile during the fight against the Pinochet dictatorship. The first public demonstration after the terror that followed the
1973 coup was appropriately a rally for Women's Day.
The following article outlines the history of the feminist movement in Chile, particularly in recent years. It is from
Cuadernos de Sociologia, a magazine published by the
Central American University in Nicaragua.
workers, peasants and miners. Miners' wives participated politically to a high degree in the class struggle. Working-class women who lived near the saltpeter factories formed the Belen de Zarraga Centers, and were later recognized as the precursors of the left feminists.
In the mid-1930s, the Women's Emancipation Movement of Chile came into being. It was formed by women coming from the middle layers and from the working class. It can be characterized as a left feminist movement. This movement was to lose a good deal of its importance for a long time, but it revived in 1983. One of its main features is that it united the class struggle and the fight for women's emancipation, while remaining independent of the political parties.
In 1945, after the second world war, the Feminist Party was formed. It focused on the struggle of the suffragettes. In 1949, after many divisions caused by a scandal, the Feminist Party disappeared. The other political parties took advantage of this and tried to eradicate the women's movement completely. For some years, they succeeded, and women turned to being active in the political parties, mainly those of the center and the left. This activity reached its height during the Popular Unity government (1970-73), when the class struggle was very sharp. Under the Salvador Allende government, women fought almost exclusively within their respective classes.
A lot has been written on the fight of the right-wing women who helped the other right-wing groups bring down the Allende government, but their role has often been exaggerated. The bloody coup of September 1973 that put an end to the Allende government also resulted in the destruction
MARTHA FUENTES of all the left women's groups.
In recent years, the women's movement in Chile has taken on a new life. In Chile, as in the other Latin-American countries, feminist women are fighting to find their own identity, whether as socialist feminists or simply as third-world women.
### Radical and socialist feminist influences
There are two major currents that have influenced Chilean feminists until now. The first is radical feminism; the other is socialist feminism. Having arisen in the United States in the 1960s, radical feminism does not perceive certain basic features of Chile. While there is no doubt, for example, that Chile is a patriarchal society, it is also a marked class society, like all the countries of the third world, where class divisions are stronger than in the imperialist countries.
Upper-class women dominate lowerclass men, and they can only emancipate themselves through exploiting other women, notably through the labor of domestics. The imperialist struggle, especially American imperialism, subjects third-world women to intense exploitation.
Thus, like upper- or middle-class women who get their "emancipation" at the expense of proletarians through domestic labor, many American and European women also owe a part of their emancipation to the imperialism and the neo-colonialism that have contributed to the development of Europe and the United States. Many European and American women have no need to struggle for their daily bread, for water or for a roof over their heads. 15
At present, Chilean women's organizaFebruary 22, 1988 • International Viewpoint
CHILE tions can be divided into two broad groups. The women who support the military junta, who are for the family and against abortion. For example, the National Secretariat women [a government-sponsored organization] are active members of the anti-abortion campaign. These women were at the head of the struggle against the Allende government.
In recent years, many women's organizations have come into being. Middle-class Chilean feminists have been influenced to a large extent by the radical feminists, but they have never gone to the extreme positions, they have never forgotten the dependence and class society that mark the country. In recent years, some working-class women have turned toward feminism, including it among their demands. Many Chilean feminists have also brought with them their experience of activism in left parties or groups.
Combining these experiences with a strong opposition to the violent repression and male chauvinism of the Pinochet regime, Chilean feminism is acquiring its own identity.
From the start, the junta repressed all those who had supported the Unidad Popular (UP) government. The brutality employed against the left is well known. Thousands of people were murdered (more than 30,000 in the first months after the coup). Some were executed. Many more were murdered. And others were declared "missing" (more than 3,000), after having been held in prisons or concentration camps. In the first months of the dictatorship, almost 30 per cent of the political prisoners were women. The tortures inflicted on them were in a way worse than those the men had to suffer. The women had to endure sexual torture, and a lot of them were raped in the prisons.
Patriarchal ideology of the military
In October 1973, the government established a new National Secretariat for Women, whose principal objective was to disseminate the patriarchal ideology of the military. What is more, a whole series of advances for women have been done away with. One of the main ones was the mothers' centers established under the UP. They were totally democratic, with members electing their representatives, and so on.
Under the military junta, the centers are administered by a hierarchy headed by Lucia Hiriart, who is married to General Pinochet. The administrative director is a lieutenant colonel, and then come the vicepresidents, who are in general the wives of provincial governors. The controller is a man, a military officer of course. And then come the volunteers, middle-class women, the great majority of whom are wives of members of the armed forces. There are 6564 de tem the wear uniforms an swear to serve the fatherland and the mill International Viewpoint • February 22, 1988 tary government.
There is a strong similarity between this body of volunteers and the fasci femminili of Mussolini's Italy. The volunteers run the Mothers' Centers (CEMAs), and the members of these centers are under their direction. One of the main occupations of the Cemas is to sell craft items. There are 232,000 women in the centers, most of them are women who have no other way to survive. They earn very little, but the poverty reigning in the country is such that they are obliged to work in the centers. The CEMAs are not only a commercial concern but also serve as an ideological transmission belt for the junta. Junta's economic policies hit women hardest
The junta's economic policy is the opposite of that under the two previous governments. Producing for the domestic market does not interest them. For example, they have started a policy of export substitution, non-traditional exports, especially agricultural products, such as fruit.
It is thanks to big capital and the policy of opening up to the international market that the dictatorship has managed to maintain itself all these years. The American private banks and the World Bank have opened lines of credit to the junta. Chile's foreign debt, which was $5,000 million in 1973, reached $25,000 million in 1984.
On the the other hand, the situation of the masses has deteriorated at a dizzying rate. In 1973, workers' wages were readjusted by 600%, while inflation was 1,200%. The junta established an economic policy based on monetarist principles.
In 1975, a new plan for cutting the budget deficit, called"shock treatment", reduced spending by a third. The national health service was the hardest hit, and with it women, both as health service workers and patients.
With its free enterprise policy, the junta opened up the doors for international traders to compete with Chilean industry. The traditional industries were hardest hit, especially textiles, food, electronics. All these industries were drastically reduced or even wiped oat. This happened precisely in those industries where the majority of workers were women. They made up 60% of workers in textiles, 70% in food, 90% in electronics.
This economic policy not only hit working women, but more broadly all working-class women. Many of them who had stayed in the home were obliged to seek work. They began to do so when the job supply was shrinking sharply. Unemployment rose from 3.8% of the economically active population under Allende to 20% under the dictatorship - 30% if you include the under-employed. So, in order to find a job, women were often obliged to accept anything, at any wage, and this is leaving aside the fact that the junta threw out a lot of social laws.
The military know that women have been come worst off under their policies. Unemployment and poverty were such that early on the junta decided to create a Minimum Employment Scheme (PEM). It involves working for the government, either national or local, but with no social protection. It is really slave labor, with people being fired for the slightest protest. It is interesting to note that the junta has boasted that there is no sexual division of labor in the PEM, and that women have access to all the kinds of training offered.
However, what the military fail to say is that since the PEM offer barely a subsistence minimum, a lot of men do not want this slave labor. Many poor women are heads of families and are obliged to work in the PEM. In 1977, two years after the setting of the PEM, women made up 22.2% of all the workers.
On October 11, 1978, turning its back on the policy followed by the previous governments, the junta opened up a period of introducing capitalism on a grand scale into the agricultural economy. What interests the government economically is to produce for the international market. Agribusiness arrived in Chile with a great fanfare. The country was divided up into three export production zones — fruit, lumber and livestock.
The latifundia had been eliminated by the expropriations carried out by the governments of presidents Frei and Allende. In 1973, some big landholdings reappeared. The land was given back to its former owners. The junta also gave land individually to 37,000 small farmers, but half of these parcels were sold between 1978 and 1982 because the occupants lacked the economic resources to get them to produce.
The turnabout in agricultural policy hit peasant women hard. They were never considered producers in their own right; they did not even consider emselves as such. Their work was regarded as a part of the work of reproduction. The new agrarian policy led to a growing pauperization of the small peasantry. Peasant women had to work for wages, since the family could not subsist on what the work of the men brought in.
Women move to agricultural sector
A large part of the women became agricultural workers, especially in the fruitgrowing areas. In some areas, a third of the income of families came from the labor of the women. Furthermore, it has to be remembered that all the work of reproduction falls on peasant women.
This new tendency toward employment of women in agriculture affected the migration of young women to the cities. What is more, agribusiness has gone hand in hand with the appearance of a new type of settlement, called the campalla, which differs
from the pattern of the 1970s. Now the shantytowns are around the villages and no longer around the big cities. They are inhabited by people who work off and on in the countryside every year. They no longer migrate to , the cities for three reasons: the repression is worse there, it is more difficult to find work and they do not have enough money for such a move.
Shortage of domestic workers
Women find jobs in the new agricultural enterprises more easily than men. The bosses say that they prefer female labor because women are more dextrous and docile. The availability of such jobs for young women means that they no longer migrate to the cities.
What is more, despite the high level of unemployment in the country, it would seem that wages of domestic servants have held up. Domestics' wages are very much linked to the vicissitudes of supply and demand. In Santiago, for example, in 1984, the minimum wage for a household worker, over and above food and lodging, was 9,000 pesos, compared with 4,000 for a PEM worker.
It seems, therefore, the decline in the exodus from the land of young women has resulted in a relative shortage of domestic workers in the big cities. This situation, compounded by the economic crisis, which is also hitting the middle classes, is reflected in the fact that many middle-class women can no longer afford servants. An indirect reflection of this is a new rise of feminism, since many of these women have to do two jobs, doing their housework on top of an outside job, like women in the industrialized countries.
As already mentioned, the junta started privatizing state services, including the National Health Service, which had existed since 1920. The only institutions that did not fall into private hands were the Family Planning Clinics. Some 40% of the total health budget was allotted to these clinics. It seems that at first the junta wanted to reduce poverty by lowering the birth rate.
For example, in the early years of the dictatorship, from 1973 to 1976, many poor women were sterilized without their consent. Some think that nearly 19.5% of women of child-bearing age were sterilized in this way, most of them without knowing it. In those years, the government campaigned on the theme that the only people who should have children were those able raise them properly.
The underground press of that period is full of cases of young women who were sterilized during minor operations. In addition to sterilizations, some women had coils implanted or were given injections of depo-provera, which had long been withdrawn from use in Europe and the United States because of its secondary effects. In 1976, this policy of discouraging population growth was stopped, and the junta adopted a totally opposite one.
At the beginning of 1976, the small international upturn reached Chile, and the country started exporting non-traditional products, including agricultural ones, on a large scale. This economic revival brought down unemployment and, to a certain extent, reduced poverty. So, Pinochet no longer needed to get rid of the poor by drastic measures, and in 1976 he declared that "the law protects the life of the unborn child." This draconian ban on abortion improved his relations with the Catholic
CHILE Church, which had badly deteriorated because of his anti-population growth policies.
Not only was abortion banned, but the budget of the Family Planning Clinic was cut. Today, contraceptives are sold at market prices, and a lot of poor women cannot buy them. As a result, more and more of them are being forced to resort to backstreet abortions, with all the consequences of this for the health or even the lives of these women.
It is evident that the Pinochet government does not give a damn about the lives of unborn children. The lives of tens of thousands of women, men, children and old people matter so little to it. Why should it be suddenly worried about the lives of foetuses? On the other hand, the drastic ban on abortion and the change in the policy on population growth is linked to the junta tightening its control over women. It is a response mainly to the active participation of a large number of women in the political protests against the junta. It is easier to have women burdened down with children than to have them fighting the government.
Women first to organize after the coup
Although most of the present mass movements are defensive it is important to note that it is women who have taken the initiative in organizing. In the first months after the coup, female relatives of political prisoners were the first to organize. They did so in defence of human rights, forming the Defence Federation of Relatives of the "Disappeared."
This organization came into being in the lines that the women formed in front of the
17
CHILE police stations, stadiums, prisons and even the morgues, trying to find out where their relatives were. They were mothers, wives, sisters of people who had been jailed and of whom they had no news. This organization was able to find some of the missing persons, to expose the dictatorship and to teach women that if they united they could stand up to the dictatorship. Many of them were persecuted, some of them were jailed. Other organizations of the same type existed, such as Wives of Executed Persons, Relatives of Political Prisoners and so on.
The economic policy led to profound poverty for most of the population. In 1974, another organization arose, the Common Soup Kitchens. Aid was channelled to it through religious institutions, notably the Catholic Church. The soup kitchens became a very important community organization. There is no poor neighborhood or shantytown in Chile where there is not at least one canteen of this sort. In recent years, the organizers of these kitchens have not only devoted themselves to finding and preparing food communally, but have also served as relays for organizing protestas against the junta. 18/ International Viewpoint• February 22, 1988
Various committees exist inside this organization. In discussing the problems of feeding people, clothing, housing and others that the poor people of Chile have to face, some of the soup kitchen committees have been transformed into organizations raising more advanced political demands, including feminist ones.
For example, a former shantytown dweller, a political refugee in France, said at a meeting of Chilean women in exile: "In the shantytowns, women very often question the role of the family as the basic unit of society. The inhabitants of these neighborhoods have learned that the solution to their problems lies in communal life. They cannot cook and look after their children individually; many of them are alone, without steady companions, both because of the repression and the economic situation. They have to leave their homes in order to find work; so the children are left in the care of other women, who also prepare the meals. In other words, the household work is done communally."
Extended families in the shantytowns
The shantytown women know that the nuclear family barely exists in the environment in which they live. At present, in the big cities, there is a new sort of extended family made up of people who live permanently in the house, plus the "extras." The latter are relatives or friends who cannot find a place to live. This problem is so vast that now nearly 40% of the present population of Santiago are living as "extras." Between 1973 and 1975, women's organizations devoted themselves particularly to the problem of human rights and direct aid to families in need. In 1976, other kinds of organizations began to appear, made up both of working women and feminists.
About two years after the military coup d'etat, the National Trade-Union Committee (CNS) began to reorganize. The initiative came from members of the old left parties and the trade unions, which were now banned. The unemployed were among the first to form committees in which both men and women participated. The CNS has a Women's Department (DF), as do all the parties. This department began to function in its own right in 1976. Its principal task was to organize working women and the wives of working people.
In 1978, the CNS Women's Department organized the first public rally under the dictatorship for March 8, International Women's Day. Nearly 7,000 women took part in this demonstration. But the number of participants did not begin to reflect the enormous impact that this event had on the people. You have to remember that propaganda was illegal, and that the rally was called by word of mouth.
At that time Chile was experiencing a slight economic upturn, unemployment was falling and wages rising. This economic upturn was accompanied by a very limited political opening. That can be seen from the large number of papers and books that were authorized for publication at that time. The government started to gain self-confidence and talked about an economic miracle." But this miracle and the democratic freedoms were only skin-deep. Moreover, they were accompanied by an increase in repression against women. It was at this time that abortion became strictly illegal.
In 1977, the first feminist group was formed under the dictatorship. It was called the "Study Circle on Women." At the outset, it was a small group of professional women, whose main occupation was study and discussion. Later, they started publishing a monthly bulletin. The group's objective was to fight for women's rights. The Study Circle on Women meant a renaissance of the Chilean feminist movement after being absent from the scene for 25 years.
This group arose under the dictatorship as a direct result of the role that the military imposed on women, that is, the reinforcement of the patriarchal system. For example, one of the group's most important actions was circulating a petition against the 1978 legislation that eliminated the maternity leave that had existed since the 1930s.
The activities of the circle between 1978 and 1983 can be divided into two major categories. One had to do with knowledge, that is research and studies on women. The other had the objective of raising the consciousness of the population as a whole on these questions. It involved education, theater, consciousness-raising groups and so on.
Feminism and the political parties
In 1980, the consequences of the economic recession that spread out from the imperialist countries between 1979 and 1982 began to make themselves felt strongly in Chile. Many production and financial enterprises were thrown into bankruptcy. There was a new increase in unemployment, with all its disastrous effects on women. A new development was that many middle-class women who had been spared by the crisis until then were hit and joined in the mass struggle, which gained a new momentum.
The left parties had learned their lesson, and integrated feminist demands into their respective programs, at the request of their female members. The woman question appeared in the underground press, such as the MIR's magazine Vamos Mujer, or the Socialist Party's Furia. These magazines reflected the presence of feminist ideas in the mass movement over recent years.
Other organizations arose. For example, there is the Committee to Defend Women's Rights (CODEM), a people's organization
CHILE that arose in Concepción in 1980, a big industrial city to the south of Santiago. In a short period of time, it spread to the entire country. Its units devoted themselves mainly to defending the workers, while also in-
'ernational jecting a feminist perspective into this work. In 1981, various women's groups started functioning. The biggest of them
JEWPOINT were the Women's Popular Movement
(MOMUPO) and Women of Chile (MU-
DECHI). Both are active in the opposition and in the fight for women's rights.
The year 1983 saw a period of intense struggle by the opposition in which women played a very important role. In this period of recession and despite the increase in unemployment, the population organized itself better, and began to confront the dictatorship in a more systematic way. In the popular neighborhoods, it was the women involved in the kitchens who first came out in the protestas of 1983-84. They were often the ones to take on the task of stockpiling stones and sticks to defend demonstrations against po-
Organizing against repression
When the armed forces invaded the shantytowns and arrested the men, once again it was they who organized defence for the prisoners. "In December, the police sur-
1987 rounded the Silvia Enriquez neighborhood with armored cars, and all males above the age of 13 were arrested. Two hours later, the women had prepared a complete list of the names of those arrested (several thousand) to give to foreign journalists."
(El
Pais, February 24, 1985.)
The population, and especially women, learned how to organize, and today the repression cannot wipe out what women have learned over all these years of brutal dictatorship. The women's movement really took form in Chile after 1983, the year when it became more active and grew
1987 COLLECTION massively.
Since the start of the century, women have acquired a certain experience in po-
For the first time, this year we are litical parties and/or in independent movements. The Chilean case shows that being producing bound volumes of the part of the workforce in the classical sense
1987 issues of IV. No respectable is not a precondition for participating in revolutionary bookshelf will be organizations of this type. Women have complete without this readily also organized in their neighborhoods in order to get food and housing for themaccessible edition, complete with selves and their families, when the situathe year's index!
tion of their husbands has made this
Supplies are limited, so rush your necessary.
Middle-class women have also joined order now to us at the address on the women's movement. Not being able to page two, with cheque or PO as for afford domestics, they were forced to take subscriptions for 160FF on the household work, and this personal experience made many of them conscious
(preferred)/E15/$25. (Add 20% if you of women's oppression. Women have also would like it sent airmail.)
risen up against the reinforcement of the patriarchal system, or the use by the mili-
19 tary of the ideology of European fascism or the US anti-abortion movement. *
February 22, 1988 • International Viewpoint