Célia em Movimento

2010-10-25T18:25:00.005-02:00

the closing event of the WMW's 3rd international action ends with 20,000 women marching in the streets of bukavu, RD Congo, on the 17th october 2010.

see CNN's video / article "congolese rape victims march against sexual violence" for more information (and a short interview with me!): http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/10/17/congo.rapes.march/?amp%3Bhpt=C1

2010-09-27T17:25:00.003-03:00

Over 1000 women registered for the Closing Event of the World March of Women's 3rd International Action: Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, 13th - 17th October 2010

More information: www.wmw2010.info

2010-09-27T17:21:00.002-03:00

22/10/09

The Hidden Crisis of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi

Making headlines today, even live up to the minute coverage on The Guardian online, is the crisis of the Commonwealth Games meant to be starting in less than two weeks in Delhi. Due to major problems with the infrastructure for the games, whether Delhi is ready is being seriously questioned.

But there is a hidden crisis not even mentioned in the reports, the crisis of the residents of Delhi. In the run up to the games to make Delhi “a world class city”, hundreds of thousands of people living have been displaced and evicted from their homes, the urban poor including beggars, rubbish pickers, rickshaw drivers have been rounded up and hidden from the eyes of the world and workers on the sites to be used in the games have faced massive exploitation. On top of this, huge amounts of public money meant to be spent on social services has been shifted to the games, All of this was revealed in a damning report by Miloon Kothari, the director of the Housing and Migrants Network, and former UN Special Rapporteur on Housing.

In the focus on the external, today’s news declares that the athletes’ accommodation is “unfit for human habitation”. Yet no mention is made of the fact that one in four people in Delhi live in ‘slums’ meaning that they are squeezed into shacks, made of makeshift materials without any water, toilets or electricity. Conditions that really are unfit for human habitation. As Kothari’s report highlights, in a country where one in three people live in poverty, it does seem paradoxical to spend so much money on a one off event. This paradox needs to be questioned.

But Delhi and the Commonwealth Games are not isolated instances. Similar crises of forced removals happened in the lead up to the Olympics in Beijing and the World Cup in South Africa. Similar questions were raised by the people on why vast amounts were being spent on one off events when a significant proportion of the population live in abject poverty. Similar crises were hidden whilst the games went on.

http://www.waronwant.org/news/blog/the-hidden-crisis-of-the-commonwealth-games-in-delhi.html

2010-08-20T10:23:00.005-03:00

Equal pay for women not likely till 2067, says research
Chartered Management Institute data shows that gender wage differential still wide - 40 years after equal pay laws

Katie Allen
Thursday August 19 2010

Working women who thought they might live to see Britain's pay gap finally close will have to hold out another 57 years, according to research published today.

Forty years after the Equal Pay Act was passed, the study shows that the gender pay gap remains stubborn and that male and female managers will not be paid the same until 2067.

Women have also been harder hit by the recession, with more female workers than men being made redundant in the past 12 months, the research by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) shows.

The findings will intensify calls from campaigners for the new government to do more to ensure equal pay in the UK, which has one of the biggest gender salary gaps in Europe.

"Girls born this year will face the probability of working for around 40 years in the shadow of unequal pay," said CMI's head of policy, Petra Wilton.

"The prospect of continued decades of pay inequality cannot be allowed to become reality. We want to see the government take greater steps to enforce pay equality by monitoring organisations more closely and naming and shaming those who fail to pay male and female staff fairly."

The group's survey shows that women's salaries increased by 2.8% over the past 12 months, compared with 2.3% for men. But with the average UK salary for a male manager currently £10,031 more than that of a female manager, women face a 57-year wait before their take-home pay is equal to that of their male colleagues, says the report, compiled with researchers XpertHR. Its findings, from more than 43,000 employees in 197 organisations, showed male pay still outstrips female pay by as much as 24% at senior level.

At junior level the gap also persists, with male junior executives receiving ?1,065 more than female executives.

Despite four decades of equal pay legislation, Britain has one of the worst gender gaps in Europe [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/05/europe-gender-pay-gap]. Women in the UK are paid 79% of male rates, while across the 27 countries of the European Union the figure is 82%, according to a report earlier this year from Eurobarometer.

Gender equality groups such as the Fawcett Society [http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/index.asp] blame the UK's poor record on a culture of secrecy around pay. They point to examples such as Sweden, where more transparency has resulted in falling pay gaps. They want the coalition government to set a deadline for closing the gap, make laws more transparent, and force companies to audit their workforces for unfair gaps more regularly.

For women unhappy to sit out the 57-year wait, the CMI report highlighted some of the better-performing sectors and regions of the UK, as well as the worst.

Women in the Midlands fare the worst, taking home £10,434 less than men, while those in the north-east fare the best, where the gap is smallest at £8,955.

Different sectors also varied greatly and women hoping for equal pay were advised to think twice about jobs in IT or the pharmaceutical industry, where the gaps were the largest, at £17,736 and £14,018 respectively.

The report suggests that stark differences in pay are seeing some women leave the workplace. It notes a dramatic increase in resignations, particularly at director level, where 7.7% of female directors voluntarily left their posts in the last year, compared with just 3.6% of men.

Women were also more likely to be made redundant. Over the year, 4.5% of the female workforce lost their jobs compared with 3% of men.

CMI has launched an "ambitious women toolkit" [http://www.managers.org.uk/glassceiling] with practical advice on asking for pay rises, how to challenge unequal pay, and tips on returning to work from maternity leave.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/19/equal-pay-women-2057

2010-08-05T15:36:00.005-03:00

organised and mobilised women around the world: updates, photos, statements and videos of the world march of women's 3rd international action
www.wmw2010.info

2010-08-02T15:01:00.002-03:00

a woman is killed, raped, beaten or verbally abused every second around the world... and the stories that find their way into the media (like that of bruno, the famous brazilian goal-keeper who probably planned the murder of his ex-lover, see below) are just the tip of the iceberg. in the patriarchal system, where men continue to be valued over women, violence or the threat of violence is the most effective way to keep women where they are considered to belong 'naturally': in the home, with the kids, in low paid jobs, caring for others, as sexual objects. and when women do suffer from violence, instead of punishing the men, it is the women who we blame: for wearing a skirt that is 'too short', for being a lesbian, for daring to leave the house, for being in the streets late at night, for the dinner not being prepared on time...

Brazilian footballer Bruno Fernandes accused of lover's murder
Goalkeeper Bruno Fernandes is held over claims he masterminded the kidnapping and execution of his former lover, Eliza Samudio

Friday 9 July 2010

One of Brazil’s best-known footballers was last night behind bars in a high-security Rio jail after allegations that he masterminded the abduction and execution of his former lover.
Police in Belo Horizonte, Brazil's third largest city, claimed that Bruno Fernandes, until recently captain and goalkeeper of Brazil's most popular club, Flamengo, plotted the killing of 25-year-old Eliza Samudio, who disappeared in June.

Edson Moreira, the homicide investigator in charge of the case, told reporters that while fans saw Fernandes as an "idol", the footballer was "a monster for what he did to this young lady". "Bruno was there and he saw how the woman was completely broken," he said. "According to witnesses he accompanied Eliza to her sacrifice and to her death."

Samudio, a former model and actor, reportedly met Fernandes last year at a party and became pregnant during their first encounter. Police believe the 25-year-old player was infuriated by her decision to keep the child, who is now four months old, and claim that Samudio was lured from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte, around six hours away by car, where she was killed by a former policeman named as Marcos Aparecido dos Santos.

Before her disappearance on 4 June Samudio had approached police to report receiving threats from the goalkeeper, who was recently linked with a multi-million dollar transfer to AC Milan. "You don't know me and you don't know what I am capable of – I'm from the favela," he allegedly told her, according to a statement given to authorities in Rio and reproduced in the Brazilian press.

While police have yet to find Samudio's body, investigators say they are certain she is dead, having been beaten, bound and then strangled in the former policeman's home. Police claim parts of her body were fed to a rottweiler.

According to Moreira, Fernandes was present when Santos strangled the former model. Santos's lawyer last night said his client denied taking part in the killing.

"Shortly before dying, she said: 'I can't take being beaten any more'," Moreira claimed, adding that her alleged killer had replied: "You're not going to be beaten any more, you are going to die."

As the scandal grew yesterday and TV news channels gave the case virtually uninterrupted coverage, candidates in the upcoming presidential election spoke out. "This is a barbaric crime," Dilma Rousseff, current president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's favoured successor, told the Record news channel. "The whole of Brazil is disgusted by such a barbaric and perverse crime."

Marina Silva, the rainforest defender who is also running for president in the October elections, told reporters the killing was part of a worrying trend of violence against women. "We have repeatedly seen this kind of episode against the lives of women," she said.
Recent months have seen increasing concern about the off-field actions of Brazil's high-earning footballers.

In May the Rio-born striker Adriano, who recently signed for Italian club AS Roma, was summoned for questioning after the Brazilian press uncovered photographs of him and a friend brandishing what appeared to be automatic rifles and making the sign for the Red Command drug faction with their hands.

Adriano denied the reports, claiming that one of the rifles was a Philippe Starck lampshade in the shape of a gold plated AK-47. But his exclusion from Brazil's World Cup squad was largely attributed to his troubled personal life and other reports about Adriano have claimed he has links to one of Rio's most notorious gangsters.

Earlier this year former CSKA Moscow striker Vagner Love found himself in hot water after police obtained a video showing the player at a dance party in Rio's largest slum, surrounded by men with assault rifles and a bazooka.

Speaking to the Guardian before the latest scandal involving Fernandes, the head of Rio's civil police, Allan Turnowski, said footballers who had grown up surrounded by drug traffickers needed to take greater care in their choice of friends.

"We know of their roots [in the favelas], the friendships they have there… But it is hard to explain to our kids – who see [these players] as idols – that [their idols] are hanging around with armed people, bad people, people who kill, rob and traffic drugs. [People] who do everything that we try and advise our children not to do," he said.

"The bad example they set for our children is what upsets us."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/09/brazil-footballer-bruno-fernandes-accused-murder

2010-07-10T17:12:00.002-03:00

Declaration of the European Feminist Gathering of the World March of Women
The European regional Action of the WMW took place in Istanbul, Turkey from June 29th to June 30th.

Today, on 30 June 2010, over 500 women from 22 countries and territories gathered in Istanbul, Turkey for the European convergence of the 3rd International action of the World March of Women. By coming to Istanbul we express our solidarity with Turkish and Kurdish women in their struggle for women’s rights and people’s self-determination. We articulated our idea of an open, democratic and secular Europe where all women can enjoy and benefit from their rights as full citizens.
Our gathering is a result of the previous work that has been done in different countries, among them the construction of a Balkan network as well as national meetings in different countries to prepare for this event.

We are meeting in a moment when governments and international institutions are using the economic and financial crisis to attack women's right and the achievements of social movements of the last 50 years.

We oppose and denounce these measures and we struggle against the worsening of working conditions and pension previsions. We struggle against privatisation of and budget cuts for public services and ask to reduce military budgets instead. We stand up against the rise of the far right, fundamentalisms and militarism as well as the criminalisation of social movements and the use of violence against women to suppress these movements. We oppose the sexual harassment against especially Kurdish women and children as state policy as well as all kind of state based violence against women activists. We all stand with the women from the oppressed nations that agreed to continue their struggle against nationalist, sexist and class exploitation.

Together as an international feminist movement of grass roots women we will continue this struggle by organising and taking part in upcoming mobilizations, such as:

- our international action for peace and demilitarisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo in October 2010;
- the observation of the trial against 151 Kurdish politicians, mayors, women's rights defenders and trade union members in Diyarbakir in October 2010;
- the Euro-marches against precarity and unemployment in Brussels in October 2010.
- the counter summit to the NATO summit in Portugal in November 2010;
- the demonstration of the European Trade Union Confederation in September 2010;
- the construction of a European forum on food sovereignty in Austria in 2011.

We call on social movements to connect to the many struggles of the people that are taking place locally and unite them at a continental level, as we are doing it in the World March of Women. Now is the moment to join these struggles in order to overcome capitalism, patriarchy and racism.

Change the world to change women’s lives. Change women’s lives to change the world.

30th June 2010, Istanbul
More information: www.wmw2010.info

2010-04-19T20:52:00.001-03:00

8th March: International Women's Day and the launch of the World March of Women's 3rd International Action... For news, lots of photos and updates from the 54 countries (Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Basque Country, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Canada, Catalonia, Central African Republic, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, England, Ecuador, France, Galicia, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Macedonia, Mali, Mexico, Mozambique, Nepal, New Caledonia, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Quebec, Republic of Korea, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Switzerland, Turkey) that organised marches, demonstrations and other activities, take a look at www.wmw2010.info

2010-04-19T20:18:00.000-03:00

MST Informa #180: In Struggle, We Commemorate the Centennial of March 8

One hundred years ago, Clara Zetkin, director of the German Social Democrat Party, successfully proposed the establishment of March 8th as International Womens Day. This historic reference alone would be enough to mark the date in its primary sense: struggle. It was on this path that women so often went out into the streets in every part of the world: for the right to vote, to equal wages, to denounce the daily violence that they experienced, from domestic humiliation to the most brutal physical violence.

In a country with one of the worst social inequalities in the world, with land, income, and power concentrated in the hands of an elite, profoundly marked by the latifúndio and by imperialist exploitation, the impacts fall most strongly on women. According to a study by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 80% of the people without access to income in Brazil are women. And they are the ones who must do two or three jobs, often considered “help” and without compensation.

In the countryside, this reality is even more striking. According to the UN organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO), only 1% of the rural properties in the world are in the name of women. And in Agrarian Reform as well, the index is low: fewer than 15% of land is registered in the names of women. Around 6.5 million women farmers are illiterate. The production model given highest priority by the Brazilian state as revealed in the details of the last Farm Census, shows that there are 15 million landless in the country. Of these, at least 50% are women. Behind the large number of landless, a data from the Census expresses the contradiction: only 1% of the landowners in Brazil hold 46% of the arable land.

Agribusiness, which receives most of the public investment for production, accumulates another shameful title for Brazil. After being the main consumer of agro-toxins, it’s now the second country in the world in the cultivated area in genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). While the developed countries follow the reverse path, concerned with the quality of food, our population needs to poison itself to ensure the profits for the transnational corporations. This is because they try to convince the world that the transnational corporations would end the need for pesticides. So how else to understand the immense quantity of poisons to maintain production of GMOs? The Census showed that almost 80% of the rural property owners use agro-toxins, much more than necessary. The huge volume of herbicides applied in Brazil contaminates the soils, water sources, and even the Guarani aquifer. The contamination gets to us through the water that we drink and through the farm products irrigated with contaminated water.

There is no lack of data proving the harm to human health caused by agro-toxins and transgenics, many more times to women, such as the contamination of breast milk and impacts on fertility. But none of this seems to be reason enough to move the perverse model of agribusiness off the path that it is on.
And for this reason the rural women are mobilizing, confronting oppression and exploitation. We will not be silent. Every year, we take on the historical responsibility left by the socialists.

This year, we organized the Day of Struggle Against Agribusiness and Against Violence: for Agrarian Reform and Food Sovereignty. We are going into the streets all over the country to let society know about our demands, our alternatives for health, for autonomy, for equality, for the end of exploitation. We join the women from the cities who have also for many decades carried out basic struggles for all of Brazilian society. We know that this is the only way possible to achieve our rights.

http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=node/640

2010-02-20T10:59:00.001-02:00

THE 3RD INTERNATIONAL ACTION OF THE WORLD MARCH OF WOMEN WILL BE LAUNCHED ON THE 8TH MARCH!!!

Around the world, women are collectively preparing their demonstrations and activities to commemorate the launching of our 3rd International Action... They will take many diverse and creative forms: marches, rallies, symbolic acts, conferences, debates, the launching of campaigns, the distribution of written materials, cultural presentations (music, dance, films, etc), press conferences and releases, workshops, forums, direct actions, vigils, the use of visual symbols (flags, bracelets, posters, marionettes, bandanas, etc), meetings with authorities, theatre, batucadas (drumming groups), frontier meetings, and the presentation of demands.

For more information take a look at the recently launched WMW International Action website: http://www.wmw2010.info/ Here you'll find details of the actions taking place at national and regional levels and about the events that close the International Action in the Democratic Republic of Congo in October. The website also explains how to participate in activities as well as mobilisation materials (stickers, leaflets, posters, books, etc), available in various languages.

2010-02-20T10:57:00.001-02:00

Call to Action: Women on the March until we are All Free!

In 2010, we – activists of the World March of Women from all five continents – will be on the march once more. We will march to demonstrate our perseverance and our strength as collectively organised women with diverse experiences, political cultures and ethnic backgrounds, but with a common identity and goal: the desire to overthrow the current, unjust world order that provokes violence and poverty, and to construct the world we want based on peace, justice, equality, freedom and solidarity.

We will march in solidarity with those women who do not have the freedom to do so as a result of war and conflict; the sexual division of work that maintains women prisoners in their own homes; the capitalist and patriarchal systems that determine that the public sphere – the streets, the workplace, spaces of learning, spaces of leisure activity – is the reserve of men; and the lack of time women have, as they juggle their responsibilities as primary care-givers.

We will march to demand our rights. We will march to resist those who would seek to take away the rights we have already gained in our struggle against the offensive of religious fundamentalisms and conservative sectors of society and the State. We will be on the march for the world we want, in which autonomy, self-determination and solidarity are the pillars of the organisation of our societies.

We will march in the struggle against the commodification of our lives, sexuality and bodies. We are not objects to be bought and sold! We refuse to be treated as pieces of meat for the pornography, trafficking and advertising industries! We will not accept violence in our homes and workplaces. We will be on the march until all women lead lives free of violence and threat of violence.

We will march to denounce the sexist, racist, homophobic capitalist system that exploits the daily reproductive and productive work of women while concentrating riches in the hands of the few. We demand equal pay for equal work, a fair minimum wage, the reorganisation and sharing of care-work and social security, all without discrimination of any kind. We will be on the march until all women achieve economic autonomy.

We will march for the immediate end to conflict and to the use of women’s bodies as spoils of war. We will march to demonstrate the economic interests behind conflict – the control of natural resources, the control of peoples, the profit of the arms industry. We will be on the march until women are recognised and valorised as protagonists of peace and reconstruction processes, and in the maintenance of active peace in their countries.

We will march in our fight against the privatisation of natural resources and public services. We will march for food and energy sovereignty, and against the destruction and control of our territories and false solutions to climate change. We will be on the march until our rights to healthcare, education, drinkable water, sanitation, land, housing, and autonomy over our traditional seeds have been fulfilled.

Join us in our Action!

The World March of Women (WMW) 3rd International Action will be organised around two prominent moments:

- The 8th – 18th March, with simultaneous national marches and mobilisations of different types, forms, colours, and rhythms that will also mark the 100-year anniversary of the Declaration of International Women’s Day by delegates of the 2nd International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1910;

- Simultaneous marches and actions during the 7th – 17th October period, with an international mobilisation in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as a way to strengthen women’s protagonism in the resolution of conflicts.

Mobilisations, actions and activities will also take place between these two key periods, in various different countries and also at regional level:

- Americas: 21st – 23rd August, Colombia

- Asia-Oceania: 12th – 14th May, Philippines

- Europe: 30th June, Turkey

The International Action is open to all groups of women and women who would like to join us in our struggle for the construction of the world we want, based on women’s alternatives. Come and march with us!

If you live in a country in which the WMW is organised as a National Coordinating Body (NCB), the first step is to get in touch with the sisters who participate to ask them what activities are being prepared during the year. Please search for their contact information on our website by clicking on the following link: http://www.marchemondiale.org/structure/cn-groupes/en/, or write to us at info@marchemondiale.org for more information. The second step is to get involved!

If you live in a country in which there is not yet a NCB, please feel free to organise your own mobilisations and activities! They could take many diverse and creative forms: marches, rallies, symbolic acts, conferences, debates, the launching of campaigns, the distribution of written materials, cultural presentations (music, dance, films, etc), press conferences and releases, workshops, forums, direct actions, vigils, the use of visual symbols (flags, bracelets, posters, marionettes, bandanas, etc), meetings with authorities, theatre, batucadas (drumming groups), frontier meetings, and the presentation of demands.

We also encourage you to regularly visit the Third International Action website to look at the texts, logos, and other materials that can be used to prepare for the action as well as news from the various participating countries: http://www.wmw2010.info.

And finally, don’t forget that here at the International Secretariat, we are always available to support you and your group in any way we can. Write to us to let us know what you’re planning, who is involved, and how we can help: info@marchemondiale.org.

2010-02-10T19:41:00.000-02:00

'killing me softely 3', the recording of a talk given by north american feminist jean kilbourne... really worth the 34 minutes... advertising, the commodification of women's bodies, pornography, violence against women... it's very well thought through and engaging and makes you think... a lot.

http://www.tv-links.eu/show_link.php?data=Mjg3NDQ0

2010-02-08T21:49:00.001-02:00

women constructing another world... collectively

2010-01-12T15:22:00.000-02:00

the WMW's feminist drumming group (batucada) in são paulo goes down a storm in front of a 2000+ audience at the 6th anniversary birthday concert of the 'teatro mágico' (brasilian band that mixes music and circus performances)... and it's all on video!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBCqR-8wvAs

2010-01-12T15:06:00.000-02:00

for news of international, regional and national preparations and mobilisations for the 3rd WMW international action, please read the latest WMW international newsletter: http://www.worldmarchofwomen.org/bulletin_liaison/2010/01/en/

and then... why not take part?!

"women on the march until we are all free!"

2009-11-24T22:30:00.001-02:00

Press release - La Via Campesina

Transnationals Contribute To HUNGER - Farmers provide SOLUTIONS

(Rome, 15^th of November 2009) La Via Campesina is appalled by the arrogance of the private sector and especially Nestlé in pretending to provide solutions for the food crisis whereas the transnational companies have continued to actively contribute to creating this crisis.

The comments of the Nestlé president at the FAO private sector Conference in Milan on the 12th of November were particularly shocking given Nestlés well known harmful campaigns to sell baby formula and discourage breastfeeding in developing countries.

Many transnational companies have increased their profits during the food crisis and have played a major role in increasing hunger in the world by taking control over the food system and the productive resources such as land and water, excluding family farmers from food production.

They have pushed changes in the agricultural production models, forcing high-input intensive production modes and pushing technologies and policies such as agrofuels, GMOs and trade liberalization solely in the interests of increasing their profits. The glaring failures of these transnational corporate strategies for the food system are evident from the statistics that show a growing number of hungry people.

On GMOs, Javier Sanchez, from the Spanish farmers' organisation COAG (member of Via Campesina), says “There is a broad global consensus among farmers and consumers that the GM technologies allow the companies to take control over seeds and deny farmers the possibility of saving their own seeds. Farmers lose the right to produce GM free food while consumers lose the right to eat GM free food. It is a clear example of how the privatization of natural resources goes against the common interest. European consumers who are wisely rejecting these technologies.”

Henry Saragih, international coordinator of La Via Campesina notes that in his home country of Indonesia, Nestle directly contributes to the impoverishment of farmers and malnutrition, particularly among babies, through their control of production and pricing in the dairy sector.

At the “Peoples Food Sovereignty Now" Forum parallel to the World Food Summit in Rome, Civil Society Organisations are proposing the real solutions of food sovereignty.

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La Via Campesina is an international movement which brings together millions of peasants, small producers, landless people, rural women and agricultural workers around the world. Our movement is made up of 148 member organisations active in 69 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

MST: 25 years of obstinancy

João Pedro Stedile

In January 1984, there was a process of re-ascension of mass movements in Brazil. The working class was reorganizing, accumulating organic forces. Underground parties, such as the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), the Communist Party of Brazil, etc., were in the streets. We had achieved a partial amnesty, but the majority of the exiles had returned.

The Worker's Party (PT), the Central Workers' Union (CUT) were taking shape, as well as the National Congress of the Working Class (CONCLAT) promoted by the communists, which later merged into the CUT. Broad sectors of the Christian churches broadened their beaver-like efforts, to keep building consciousness and nucleos de base (1) in defense of the poor, inspired by liberation theology. There was enthusiasm everywhere, because the dictatorship was being defeated and the Brazilian working class was on the offense; fighting and organizing.

The peasants in the countryside lived in that same climate, amidst the same offensive. Between 1979 and 1984 dozens of land occupations were carried out throughout the country. The posseiros (2), the landless, salaried country-dwellers, lost their fear. And they fought. They did not want to migrate to the cities like bullocks to the slaughterhouse (in the words of our dear Uruguayan poet Zitarroza).

As the fruit of all that, we met in Cascabel, in January 1984, encouraged by the pastoral work of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), leaders of the land struggle in 16 Brazilian states. And there, after 5 days of debates, discussions, collective reflections, we founded the MST: the Landless Workers Movement.

Our objectives were clear. To organize a mass movement at a national level, that could raise the consciousness of the peasants so that they would struggle for land, for agrarian reform (entailing broader changes in agriculture) and for a more just and equal society. We wanted, in short, to fight poverty and social inequality. And the principal cause of this situation in the countryside was the concentration of land ownership, known as latifundium.

We did not have the slightest idea if this was possible. Nor how much time would pass as we sought out our goals.

25 years have passed. Much time. They were years of many mobilizations, many struggles, and constant obstinacy, ongoing struggle and mobilization against the latifundia.

We paid dearly for that obstinacy. During the Collor administration we were firmly repressed, with the installation of a department specializing in the landless in the Federal Police bureau. After, with the victory of neoliberalism of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government, there was a green light for the latifundistas and their provincial police to attack the movement. And in a short time we had two massacres: Corumbiara and Carajás. Throughout those years, hundreds of rural workers paid with their own lives, for the dream of free land.

But we continue the struggle.

We have held back the neoliberalism selected by the Lula government. We had hope that the electoral victory could unleash a new re-ascent of the mass movement and that the agrarian reform would have a larger impetus behind its implementation. There was no agrarian reform during the Lula government. On the contrary, the forces of international and financial capital, through their multi-national corporations, have increased their control over Brazilian agriculture. Today, the greater part of our riches, the production and distribution of agricultural commodities are beneath the control of trans-national corporations. They have allied themselves with capitalist landowners and generated the agro-business economic model. Many of their spokesmen hurried to announce in the columns of the great bourgeois newspapers that the MST was finished. A mistaken deceit.

The hegemony of finance capital and of the multi-nationals over agriculture did not manage, happily, to put an end to the MST. For one sole reason: agri-business does not present any solution for the problems of millions of poor people who live in the countryside. And the MST is the expression of the desire for liberation of those poor people.

The struggle for agrarian reform, which earlier had been based solely on occupying the land of latifundia, is now more complex. We must struggle against capital. Against the domination of multi-national corporations. And the agrarian reform is no longer that classic tool: expropriating great latifundium and distributing them in parcels to the poor peasants. Now, changes in the countryside, to combat poverty, inequality, and the concentration of wealth, depend on changes not only in land ownership, but also the production model. Now, the enemies are also internationalized businesses, which dominate world markets. This also means that peasants will depend more and more on alliances with the workers in the cities in order to advance their battle.

Happily, the MST acquired experience in those 25 years. The knowledge necessary to develop new methods, new forms of mass struggle, that can resolve the problems of the people. (Translation by Max Ajl.)

- João Pedro Stedile is a member of the National Coordination of the MST and of the Vía Campesina Brasil. The article originally appeared in the Brazilian left-wing monthly Caros Amigos in January 2009.

- Max Ajl has written on Latin American politics and economics for the Guardian, NACLA, and the New Statesman, and blogs at Jewbonics.

Translator's Notes:

(1) Small groups organized in Brazilian cities or the countryside, often at the initiative of radical Christian priests.

(2) Peasants who have precarious land possessions, above all in Amazonia, who, nevertheless, do not have property titles..

http://www.alainet.org/active/28440&lang=en

2008-12-18T22:07:00.000-02:00

Dear All,

The year is coming to a close, the holidays are on their way, and I'm pleased to be able to announce that the December edition of my newsletter, Em Movimento, is ready. For those of you who have not yet received it by email, please let me know and I'll send it to you for a bit of light reading while you're recovering from the Christmas and New year festivities!

In it you'll find:
- A front page telling you a bit more about Christmas traditions in Brazil;
- News of mysecond six months of 2008 with the World March of Women;
- A selection of photos from the VII WMW International Meeting in October: 148 women from 48 countries spend an amazingly inspiring week together in Galicia, Spain;
- The WMW's 'Call to Action 2010', written by delegates at the International Meeting;
- Celia's Christmas Appeal: please consider supporting my work in 2009.

As ever, I look forward to hearing from you and receiving any comments, suggestions or questions you might have.

Wishing you fun end of year festivities...

Love,
Celia

2008-11-04T08:22:00.001-02:00

Waves of Resistence in Canada: Young Feminists Refuse to Stay Silent

From the 10 to the 13th of October was held the first pan-Canadian young feminist gathering, called “Waves of Resistance”. It was more than 500 young women who invaded the classrooms of UQAM for those 3 days to reaffirm the pertinence of feminism and to act collectively about issues like feminization of poverty, hypersexualization and racism, to name a few. The young feminists have even been invited to experiment radical cheerleading!

The energy emanating from those young feminists was worth the travel! The adoption of the pan-Canadian young feminists’ manifesto was the climax of the Gathering, this manifesto compiling and declaring their hopes, what they give and take of the actual system and what they propose to perpetuate the struggle to obtain equality between men and women. The manifesto is available on this website and will be used as a political tool for all the young feminists in their communities. For all those who think feminism is dead, the young feminists are far from silent!

To read the manitesto in English, go to: http://www.rebelles2008.org/en/manifesto

2008-10-31T15:13:00.000-02:00

CALL TO ACTION

Change the lives of women to change the world. Change the world to change the lives of women.

We, activists of the World March of Women, struggle together against the root causes of poverty and sexist violence. Ten years after our first International Meeting, we gathered together in Panxon, Galicia, from 14th - 21st October 2008. We were 136 women from 48 countries from all five continents, jointed together to construct proposals around our Action Areas: Peace and Demilitarisation, Common Good, Violence against Women, Women's Work.

During these seven days we also joined many Galician sisters and male supporters in a public forum for debates and a fair to defend Food Sovereignty and women's self-determination. We also took part in an amazingly joyful, positive demonstration - along with more than 5,000 people - in the streets of Vigo on Sunday morning, 19th October. Accompanied by the sound of 'batucada' drums, we created rhythms for women's rights, against machismo and for peace.

Our struggles continue in the global context of an increasing offensive of the conservative sectors of society, religious fundamentalism of every kind (such as communalism), the criminalisation of protest, the disrespect of people's rights over their territories, rising militarization, and violence perpetrated by governments in the name of an alleged 'war on terror'.

Patriarchy, capitalism and racism are three systems interlinked to control our bodies and our lives. The institutions of countries from the South and North - governments, large companies, and religions - want to prevent us from achieving our rights and take away rights we have gained. Following in the wake of the food, energy, environmental, and ethical crises, the financial crisis reveals once more the speculative, destructive, neo-colonial character of these systems. Yet again, the State is called on to bow to the interests of the financial system and transnational companies, abandoning the people and saving the market.

We struggle together permanently to resist the system imposed on us and to construct alternatives based on the values of peace, justice, equality, freedom and solidarity. In 2010, our collective voice will be even stronger from 8th March to 17th October:

- Marches of many kinds, colous and rhythms will open our mobilisation calendar and celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the declaration of International Women's Day.
- Marches and other simultaneous actions around the world on 17th October will strengthen our presence in Sud Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Between 8th March and 17th October, we will carry out many actions, including defending the rights of domestic and rural workers, and rejecting the promotion of the prostitution industry during the World Football Cup in South Africa.

With the aim of making explicit the diverse causes and interests at the heart of increasing militarization, we focus our actions on various issues. We condemn the exploitation of our resources by multinationals, which impoverish the most vulnerable peoples. We denounce the State's responsibility in the development of the arms industry that leads to extreme violence against women.

We refuse to accept that armed conflicts are waged for the control of the natural riches of a people. We refuse intervention or threats to people's sovereignty by imperialist powers. We refuse to accept that women's bodies be used as spoils of war!

Women on the March Until we are All Free!

Panxon, Galicia, 20th October 2008

2008-09-08T20:57:00.001-03:00

Only one Month to go Before the VII World March of Women International Meeting!

Definition of the Global Action 2010 is the principal objective of the WMW's upcoming International Meeting, which will take place in Galicia in October.

Under the slogan 'Women on the March until we are All Free!', we are organising our seventh International Meeting in Galicia, northwest Spain, from 14th to 21st October this year, on the 10th anniversary of the very first International Meeting of the movement - held in Montreal from 16th to 18th October 1998. Now, as 10 years ago, the principal objective of the meeting will be the definition and organisation of our next Global Action: in 1998 the first WMW Global Actions of 2000 were planned in the presence of 145 women from 65 countries, while in 2008 we are expecting 150 participants from around 45 countries to contribute to the preparation of our Global Action of 2010...

As well as defining our next Global Action, the VII International Meeting will be an occasion to formally approve our principal political directions, to determine regional action plans, to discuss and monitor our four Action Areas, to advance our political debates and deepen our political knowledge around a number of feminist themes (the commodification of women's lives, bodies and sexuality, the right-wing offensive against women's autonomy, etc), and to hold our General Assembly. We will also be launching our new WMW book entitled, "The World March of Women 1998 - 2000: A Decade of International Feminist Struggle" which examines the March's collective and international identity, retraces steps taken by the movment through its key historical documents, and looks to the future while considering current challenges.

As well as being responsible for the logistics of the meeting (infrastructure, translation equipment, transport, etc), the Galician National Coordination Body is working incredibly hard in the preparation of the food sovereignty weekend - an International Forum, a Food Sovereignty and Responsible Consumption Fair, a demonstration and the creation of a milladoiro - open to other activists and the general public in the territory / region. The objectives of these events are to advance our discourse, promote a debate and develop a feminist position in relation to the theme of food sovereignty, while also denouncing the control of the food prodution chain by transnational corporations and showing that local, agroecological agriculture has the capacity to feed us all. In Galicia we want to go further than solidarity and discourse, challenging ourselves to change our daily practices with a view to strengthening alternatives to the free market.

We look forward to seeing you in October, when we will unite under the WMW banner, share experiences, strengthen ourselves as activists, and remind the world of our struggles: "Change the lives of women to change the lives of women!"

2008-09-08T19:39:00.000-03:00

Hola from the third largest city in the world, a city of extremes (rich - poor, culture/leisure - long work hours, hot - cold)... Just to let you know that if you haven't yet received the June edition of my newsletter, 'Em Movimento' (In Movement), I'll happily send you a copy if you ask for one by email.

In it you'll find:
- A front page explaining the 'hidden' side of Sao Paulo - the shanty towns;
- A concise but very interesting article on Free-trade impacts and feminist integration alternatives from the February edition of the World March of Women's international newsletter;
- News and photos from the recent E-CHANGER annual Brazil get-together: development workers and local partner representatives spend 5 1/2 days together in the hills;
- News of the first 6 months of 2008 with the World March of Women; and
- And an update of life in the big, big city that is Sao Paulo.

Abracos fortes,
Celia

2008-07-07T17:56:00.000-03:00

Now, the backlash

The sex industry is booming, the rape conviction rate is plummeting, women's bodies are picked over in the media, abortion rights are under serious threat and top business leaders say they don't want to employ women. It all adds up to one thing... an all-out assault on feminism. But why? And what's to be done about it, asks Kira Cochrane.

Tuesday, 1st July 2008, the Guardian

Anyone who has ever called themselves a feminist - even with a laugh in their voice and a toss of their hair - knows that the word is a red rag to misogynists, and that in the face of this, you have to find ways to bolster yourself. Deep-held conviction helps, as does the camaraderie of brilliant, politicised women. There's the self-respect that comes with recognising that not having a penis is no actual impediment, and, finally, crucially, there's the element of results: the sense that the culture is chugging forward.

There has always been resistance to feminism - the backlash that Susan Faludi chronicled in her 1991 book of the same name. But there is also the satisfaction of arguments won, rights enshrined, respect ensured, the sense that the central feminist project - the fight for women to be treated as human beings, no more, no less - is inching along. In fact, reading a recent piece by US feminist writer, Katha Pollitt, headlined Backlash Spectacular and charting the ways in which North American culture is regressing on women's rights, I felt smug. Thank God that's not happening here, I thought, sinking into my seat and reaching for another chocolate.

Of course, if you're feeling smug, you've got it wrong. In the weeks after Pollitt's article, I found myself tripping over signs, left and right, that not only does the feminist movement still have far to go, but that arguments we thought were long-won have been re-opened, rights we thought were settled are suddenly under threat. These signs came in a whole variety of forms, some ridiculous, some devastating.

On the ridiculous side, for instance, came a survey by Marketing magazine of the nation's most-loved and least-loved celebrities. The respondents' top five most loved were men: Paul McCartney, Lewis Hamilton, Gary Lineker, Simon Cowell and David Beckham. Of the five most hated, the top four were women: Heather Mills, Amy Winehouse, Victoria Beckham and Kerry Katona, with Simon Cowell coming in at number five. On some level, reacting to this at all seemed stupid, and yet ...

Another small sign came in the response to a post on the British feminist website the F Word. The average number of comments on any post on the site is around 10, but after one of the site's bloggers asked whether readers had experienced street harassment, hundreds of responses poured in. "Of course," wrote one woman, "I can't go out without being honked at, and people have asked me to 'suck their cock' when I was just walking down the street." "Yup," wrote another, "got threatened with rape on my way home just under a fortnight ago - when I responded angrily the creeps followed me down the road."

Then there are all the signs about attitudes to women and work. Flicking through the newspapers one day, I came across an interview with Theo Paphitis, who appears on the TV show, Dragon's Den, as well as on the country's Rich List each year; he is easily one of the UK's most prominent business people. "All this feminist stuff," he said, "are we seriously saying that 50% of all jobs should go to women?" Paphitis went on to note that women "get themselves bloody pregnant and ... they always argue that they'll be working until the day before, have the baby, go down to the river, wash it off, give it to the nanny and be back at work the following day, but sure enough, their brains turn to mush, and then after the birth the maternal instincts kick in, they take three months off, get it out of their system and are back to normal". On the subject of paternity leave he suggested that he thinks "it's a bit soppy".

And, sadly, Paphitis isn't alone in his unreconstructed views. In interviews earlier this year, Alan Sugar, Amstrad founder, Apprentice star and government business adviser, repeatedly challenged a law instituted more than three decades ago. This law was one of the big wins of the 1970s feminist movement, making it illegal for women to be asked at interview whether they plan to have children, on the grounds that it is clearly discriminatory: a chance for employers to weed out any woman who wants to combine a family with work. "You're not allowed to ask, so it's easy," said Sugar, "just don't employ them."

A survey showed that 68% of employers agree with Sugar, and it was at this point, admits Katherine Rake, director of equality campaign, the Fawcett Society, that she seriously began to worry that a major backlash was underway - suddenly she found herself having to speak up for rights that are so long-established they had seemed entirely beyond debate. More cause for concern arrived in a particularly unlikely and depressing figure: former feminist icon, Rosie Boycott, one of the founders of the ground-breaking 70s magazine, Spare Rib. Writing in the Sunday Times, Boycott, who now runs a smallholding, said that "my pigs certainly aren't going to thrive on flexi-feeding schemes. And neither is my business. Little wonder, then, that plenty of angry voices were last week demanding that women should get back to the kitchen".

If women aren't wanted in the workplace - and the fact that we're still paid 17% less than men for full-time work, 36% less for part-time work, is a sign in itself - then at least our right to be safe from violence is recognised and protected, right? Far from it. Just as the attitudes of business leaders seem to be regressing at speed, the number of women being killed by a current or former partner has remained constant at two a week, and the rape conviction rate has been diminishing to the point of near-invisibility.

I was reminded of this last fact when the Washington Post, a newspaper that rarely picks up on British feminist issues (the US frankly having enough issues of its own) ran a long article about this disgrace in our justice system. The piece pointed out that the rape conviction rate in Britain has plummeted from 33% in the 70s to just 5.7% today, and that the 14,000 rapes reported each year are thought to be the tip of the iceberg - Solicitor General, Vera Baird, suggested that only 10%-20% of all cases are brought to the attention of the authorities. The article quoted a barrister called Kerim Fuad, who has represented many men accused of rape, and who admitted that he had been surprised by some "not guilty" verdicts - including those in which the plaintiff had sustained internal injuries. It alluded to an Amnesty International poll, conducted in 2005, which found that 26% of respondents thought that a woman was totally or partially responsible for being raped if she was wearing revealing clothing, and 30% thought she was totally or partially responsible if she was drunk.

How does the wider culture respond to this? Does it do everything it can to make sure that rapists are punished, that women are granted justice, that the balance is redressed? It does not. In the years in which the rape conviction rate has stood at a point so insultingly low that it represents a backlash in and of itself, the papers have often focused, not on the victims, not on the rapists, but instead on running multiple articles about women who have apparently lied about being raped. The number of women who take false complaints to the police is thought to stand at 3% of the total, as it does with other crimes, but the media focus has casually, simply, successfully, helped ingrain in the public imagination that, when it comes to rape, women lie - a notion that, naturally, has a rather serious effect when it comes to trial by jury.

If rapists aren't going to be punished, then there must at least be good support services in place for women who have been raped. Well, no. The women's movement of the 70s and early 80s fought for provision for rape victims, a network of Rape Crisis centres, and, by 1984, there were 68 of these essential services across England and Wales. Today, with rapes at an unprecedented high (the tally of recorded rapes rose by 247% between 1991 and 2004), the number of Rape Crisis centres has almost halved - there are now only 38. This massive shortfall in services is less surprising when you consider that three of the most important women's charities in the UK - Refuge, Women's Aid and Eaves Housing for Women - all of which support female victims of violence, have a combined income considerably lower than that of The Donkey Sanctuary, a charity that supports ageing donkeys.

As the number of Rape Crisis centres plummets, the number of lapdancing clubs has proliferated, bolstered by a 2003 change in licensing laws, which bracketed them with coffee shops and karaoke bars. Since this legislative change came into effect, the number of lapdancing clubs has doubled. In the small city of Brighton and Hove, for instance, six clubs opened in quick succession and across the country they are now opening at a rate of almost one each week. The government has recently pledged to tackle this issue, by reclassifying lapdancing clubs as "sex encounter" establishments, and while that's great, it doesn't change what we've learned in the meantime - the fact that there is clearly a massive demand for these clubs, that venues which involve women's bodies being marketed to men are patently a brilliant business proposition. This isn't surprising when you consider that the sex industry is more casually accepted than ever: one in 10 men now admit to having visited a prostitute, stag party visits to brothels are seen as par for the course, and the consumption of internet pornography has gone far beyond the point of familiarity.

The rise of the sex industry is one indication of how women's bodies are considered public property; in the wider culture, we've seen scrutiny of women reach unprecedented levels. In gossip magazines, women's bodies are pored over - a pound gained provoking headlines that they're fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they're too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they've failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye - which could just be a stray lash. What is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control. In the eyes of these magazines, a healthy body mass index could be considered seriously plump. A woman deemed too fat in one magazine could, on the basis of exactly the same picture, be deemed too thin by another magazine. The constant message is that women's bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart. Women can try to curry favour, come up to snuff, spend hours like, say, Madonna, working out, perfecting themselves. But there's then every chance that they will be derided for the veins on their hands. There's something essentially depressing about women being derided for their veins.

That intense scrutiny of women's bodies is one trend in pop culture. Another related one is the current obsession with women as mothers, a trend being played out all over our cinema screens - in films including Juno, Knocked Up, Baby Mama, Happy Endings, Waitress and Smart People. It's also being played out in the gossip magazines. In the past few years we have seen Jennifer Lopez paid a reported $6m (£3m) for exclusive pictures of her with her twin babies; Angelina Jolie is expected to clear $10m if she agrees to pose with the twins she will give birth to later this year.

In fact, the obsession is such that one magazine editor has said that "it's at the point now where some stars might decide to have more kids just to collect the money from their photos". We've seen Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, former child star Melissa Joan Hart and Myleene Klass all pose naked and pregnant in the past few years - as Keri Russell, an actor who has played a pregnant woman in two films in the past year has said, there is "this weird, crazy pop-culture infatuation with all these actresses being pregnant. Have you ever seen so many pictures of [pregnant] actresses?"

Indeed not. The message that these images strike home is that women's worth is directly tied to childbearing, the constant images of mothers are a siren call for women to get back into the home, and yet we're also seeing more and more blame put on mothers. Women whose children are murdered or abducted are increasingly blamed for not having looked after their offspring well enough, for not having been on constant watch; those who work with the victims of child sexual abuse say that this is true in those cases too - there is often more blame put on the mother of a child who has been abused, than whoever actually abused them. And on a more day-to-day basis, it seems that it's impossible for women to live up to social standards of motherhood. Mothers who go out to work are seen as neglectful, those who stay at home are seen as dullards. Today's mothers are regularly defined as too overbearing - when they're not being reviled as too lax.

The other big gossip-magazine trend is for women to be depicted as "mad". Over the past few years we've seen a massive media obsession with women who are considered to be out of control - Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan and, to a lesser extent, Paris Hilton - and it's hard to avoid the sense that people want to watch these women's story arcs reach the same conclusion as that of their predecessor, the former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith, who died of an overdose last year. Of course, at one point there was also a massive interest in Pete Doherty's behaviour, but it's notable that this was when he was going out with Kate Moss, and his transgressions therefore reflected on her. Once they had broken up, that interest quickly waned.

These pop cultural trends have been around for a few years, but one longstanding issue that renewed itself very recently was the backlash against abortion rights. This crept up on me suddenly in late Spring - I knew that a Conservative MP, Nadine Dorries, was campaigning to bring the abortion time limit down from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, but until a few days before the Commons vote on this issue, I had no idea that amendments had been tabled to bring the time limit down to 12 weeks, 14 weeks, 16 weeks, 18 weeks, 22 weeks. And while the outcome of that vote was a retention of the time limit, that was only because of the Labour majority in the House of Commons. Eighteen shadow cabinet ministers voted to reduce the limit to 22 weeks; David Cameron voted to reduce it to 20 weeks. A survey of prospective Conservative MPs found that only 9% would vote in favour of the current time limit - 86% want a lower limit.

With figures like this, there seems no doubt that it could be very difficult to retain current abortion rights if the Conservatives come to power, as many now consider inevitable. And this is especially true since analysis of parliamentary candidates shows that the already appallingly low rate of women in government - they make up just under 20% of MPs - may well fall given a Tory influx at the next election, and certainly won't rise.

"My big concern," says Rake, "is making sure that we create a feminist debate that sustains us through however many terms of Tory government we're going to have". And there are plenty of other signs that we're going to need such a debate - in fact, the backlash is intensely bound up with the current rightward shift in politics. Since taking office as Mayor of London, for instance, one of Boris Johnson's first acts has been to axe the role of women's adviser; an insider was quoted in the Evening Standard as saying that Johnson saw the role as a "throwback to the Eighties GLC".

Thankfully, there are signs that the feminist debate is growing - in fact, many of those I spoke to believe that this is exactly why the backlash is so strong at the moment. Before the abortion vote took place in the Commons, for instance, a large group of women gathered outside Parliament, and formed a rowdy protest against this potential assault on our rights. Rake says that membership of Fawcett has shot up recently, because "as the progressive space closes down at a national level, it just opens up somewhere else ... I do think that there's a general unease about the culture - we've been campaigning on the lapdancing issue, and we've had a lot of people saying, 'Thank God someone's finally saying something about the fact that I have to walk past a lapdancing club just to get home every night'. I think that there's that general concern about backslip on cultural issues, and then just a concern that, while on other issues we're moving vaguely in the right direction, the progress is incredibly slow. That's led to a kind of militancy that's re-arising now, in all sorts of quarters."

She points to the revival of the Reclaim the Night marches, and the recent Million Women Rise march. "I do think that there's a sense that people are beginning to get active, because they're also all waking up to the fact that a lot of the rights that we've taken for granted, can't be. I think that that activism and recognition is a cause for optimism."

Professor Liz Kelly, chair of the End Violence Against Women campaign agrees that we're in a time of resistance, but also sees a positive side to the situation: "I think that you always get the greatest resistance when you're actually doing something," she says. "I think it signals that there's a slightly stronger sense of feminist organisation and voice than there was 10 years ago. The irony, of course, is that you only get resistance if there's something to be resisted."

A friend of mine, a long-time feminist activist, notes that "there's always been a backlash, ever since day one of women's existence - long before it's ever been documented. So the concept of backlash is always alive, it's just that there are times when you think that we are really sinking into a cesspit. What I would say, though, is that, for all the resistance, I don't think we ever take two steps back. I think we only ever take steps forward, but those steps can be smaller and harder, like wading through treacle, or sometimes you can have a little sprint, a spurt, and think, 'That's fantastic, we've won that little battle.'

"What a backlash does is that it curtails us, but we never take those two steps back, and that's what I think can send the conservatives - and I mean that with a small 'c' - and the rightwingers, and the upholders of the traditional family, absolutely wild, because whatever they throw at us, so what? What do they think we're going to do? Go back to how we were before? Go back into the kitchen and make them a sandwich? We might be wading through treacle at the moment," she says, "but the fact is that they won't actually win".

To see this story with its related links go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/01/gender.women

2008-07-07T17:51:00.000-03:00

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis
Internal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive

Aditya Chakrabortty, Friday July 4 2008, The Guardian

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

"It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House," said one yesterday.

The news comes at a critical point in the world's negotiations on biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialised countries meet next week in Hokkaido, Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium on the use of plant-derived fuels.

It will also put pressure on the British government, which is due to release its own report on the impact of biofuels, the Gallagher Report. The Guardian has previously reported that the British study will state that plant fuels have played a "significant" part in pushing up food prices to record levels. Although it was expected last week, the report has still not been released.

"Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises," said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam. "It is imperative that we have the full picture. While politicians concentrate on keeping industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough to eat."

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".

President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Even successive droughts in Australia, calculates the report, have had a marginal impact. Instead, it argues that the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.

Since April, all petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include 2.5% from biofuels. The EU has been considering raising that target to 10% by 2020, but is faced with mounting evidence that that will only push food prices higher.

"Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," says the report. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

Other reviews of the food crisis looked at it over a much longer period, or have not linked these three factors, and so arrived at smaller estimates of the impact from biofuels. But the report author, Don Mitchell, is a senior economist at the Bank and has done a detailed, month-by-month analysis of the surge in food prices, which allows much closer examination of the link between biofuels and food supply.

The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, which Brazil specializes in, have not had such a dramatic impact.

Supporters of biofuels argue that they are a greener alternative to relying on oil and other fossil fuels, but even that claim has been disputed by some experts, who argue that it does not apply to US production of ethanol from plants.

"It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices," said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser, last night. "All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change."

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008

To see this story with its related links go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/03/biofuels.renewableenergy

2008-06-05T15:24:00.000-03:00

Press Release of the Civil Society Forum Terra Preta*: “Empty Policies for Empty Plates”

International representatives of small farmers, fisherfolks, indigenous peoples, pastoralists and Non Governmental Organisations (NGO) have expressed their disappointment with the poor outcome of the High Level Conference on World Food Security in Rome. “The final declaration will not fill any plate. The recommendations for more liberalisation would lead to more violations of the right to food”, criticised Maryam Rahmanian from the Iranian organisation CENESTA. During the official conference, the social movements held their own Forum “Terra Preta” to voice their demands to realize food sovereignty and the right to food of the millions of hungry people.

“The claims of social movements for more protection and support for sustainable and small scale food producers, for comprehensive Land and Agrarian Reforms and concrete measures against financial speculation have been totally ignored by the governments”, criticized Herman Kumara, World Forum of Fisher Peoples, Sri Lanka. “It is disappointing, that the governments still do not recognize that the present food crisis is the result of decades of structural adjustment that have systematically violated the right to food”, added Flavio Valente from FIAN International. “This is a step back. In 2004, all FAO member states adopted the guidelines for the right to food.”

“The civil society organisations are alarmed about the recommendations of the new UN-Task Force on the Food Crisis composed of UN-Agencies, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Task Force established by the UN-Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has recommended further market opening in the south, food imports subsidized with development aid and a New Green Revolution. “These solutions proposed by Ban Ki-moon would seriously undermine the food sovereignty in the global south. The proposed plan of action is not the recipe against hunger it claims to be”, said Maryam Rahmanian. “We are very concerned that this plan of action will not be presented to governments for discussions, but is meant just to reflect the consensus between UN and Bretton Woods agencies. We fear that this initiative might further undermine democracy in international food policies.”

“It is a shame that some governments do not prevent transnational seed, grain and food processing companies from using the food crisis to increase profits for transnational seed and grain companies”, concluded Dena Hoff, National Family Farm Coalition and Via Campesina, USA. “In the first quarter of 2008, profits of Monsanto have already shot up by 108 per cent, while Cargill registered profit increases of 86 per cent. A new Green Revolution and more food aid would help these companies, but do not offer any solutions for the poor and hungry.” Diwirgai Martinez, Movimiento de la Juventud Kuma, Panama, adds: “Transnational companies have been given more space than ever in an FAO conference this time, while indigenous peoples, pastoralists, small farmers and fisherfolk have been marginalised more than ever.” In the final declaration of “Terra Preta” and the statement “No more failures as usual” signed by 900 organisations, civil society organisations have made very concrete proposals on how to combat hunger. “Heads of States should not only speak about farmers but rather listen to what they propose”, concludes Akylbek Rakaev, Kyrgiz Sheep Breeders Association

Contact: Antonio Onorati (++39-3408219456), Isabelle Delforge (++39-3491610296) or Armin Paasch: (++49-0049-176-22630755)

*Terra Preta: “black earth”

La Via Campesina - International Secretariat:

Jln. Mampang Prapatan XIV No. 5 Jakarta Selatan,

Jakarta 12790  Indonesia

Phone : +62-21-7991890

Fax : +62-21-7993426

E-mail: viacampesina@viacampesina.org

Website: http://www.viacampesina.org

2008-04-24T14:29:00.000-03:00

Activists Call for Urgent Land Reform

Inter-Press Service (IPS)
By Walter Sotomayor

BRASILIA, Apr 17 (IPS) - An urgent call to speed up the land reform process in Latin America was issued Thursday by rural activists at the 30th FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean, who also sharply criticised agribusiness interests and large estates in the region.

"We are carrying out occupations of land, marches and protests to demand the settlement of 150,000 families living in camps and greater investment in rural development," said a communiqué released by Brazil’s Landless Movement (MST).

The MST has held demonstrations this week in memory of the 19 peasant farmers massacred by police 12 years ago in Eldorado dos Carajás, in the northern Brazilian state of Pará.

The delegates of 33 Latin America and Caribbean countries taking part in the Apr. 14-18 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) conference paused in their deliberations Thursday to receive two dozen representatives of the MST and other social movements and to pay homage to the victims of Eldorado, who were shot by the police while taking part in a peaceful march for land reform.

Brazilian activist Maria das Graças Amorim, the spokeswoman for the Agrarian Reform Forum, a coalition of 47 organisations, urged the government delegates to consider the need to set a limit on the size of rural estates in Latin America. "How can it be that a few have so much property while so many have so little," she said.

More than 2,000 MST activists who were camping out near Brazil’s Foreign Ministry, which is hosting the conference, took part in a simultaneous march that ended in front of Congress.

Brazil’s Minister of Agrarian Development, Guilherme Cassel, said the FAO had learned a great deal from the exchange with the rural activists. "An agency like the FAO, which forms part of the United Nations, cannot operate at the margins of civil society, without taking advantage of its knowledge and experience. This is living democracy," said the official.

FAO regional representative José Francisco Graciano acknowledged that the inequality that characterises Latin America also marks the countryside, and said agrarian reform is an imperative for the region.

But he clarified that the FAO can only point out possible directions to take, and that it is up to each government to reach its own decisions.

The FAO conference incorporated this week in its debates the demands of a number of social organisations that held a parallel gathering in Brasilia.

Small farmers and representatives of indigenous communities and non-governmental organisations who met for four days in the Brazilian capital issued a declaration in which they defended food sovereignty, called for a moratorium on production of biofuels, and condemned the use of genetically modified organisms.

"We assert that hunger and poverty are not the product of chance, but part of a model that violates people’s right to a decent life," says the document, which also declared support for South America’s coca farmers.

"Economic liberalisation, seen as the sole route to development, is directly proportional to the growth of poverty and hunger in the region," adds the declaration.

The MST called demonstrations in 16 of Brazil’s 27 states to commemorate Apr. 17, the International Day of Peasant Struggle.

Tens of thousands of small farmers took part in roadblocks, protests outside of government buildings and large corporations, occupations of state-owned banks and companies considered enemies of agrarian reform, and marches on rural highways and in cities around the country.

The MST is calling for the urgent distribution of land to 150,000 families who are living in camps along highways or on unproductive portions of large estates, waiting for plots of their own on which to grow crops for survival.

Since the 1980s, nearly one million rural families in Brazil have received land as part of the ongoing agrarian reform process, according to official figures. (END/2008)

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Article Originally Available @: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42034

2008-04-24T14:23:00.000-03:00

WMW International Newsletter, Volume 11, Number 1, February 2008: Editorial

Dear sisters,

As an anti-capitalist, feminist movement, one of the four focus action themes of the World March of Women is Women’s Work. The political objectives of this theme are to continue our work with regard to feminist economic alternatives, but also to denounce the impact of neoliberal and patriarchal globalisation on the lives of women, on their working conditions and on their financial autonomy. And it is ‘free’ trade agreements that are not only one of the corner stones of neoliberalism, but are in themselves the rules of a system based on the sexual and international exploration of labour. For this reason, one of the desired outcomes stated in our Strategic Plan 2007 – 2010 is to “Strengthen the WMW's participation in the struggle against free trade”, and with this objective in mind, we have chosen to dedicate the 1st edition of 2008 to this subject.

In the first section of the newsletter, we look at the concepts of free trade and integration, and analyse the impacts of the former and the feminist alternatives to the latter. We examine: the threat of the North American PSP to civil society, and resistance to it; the “Africa-Europe: What Alternatives?” summit held in Portugal in December; and the advance of, and struggle against bilateral agreements (Costa Rica; Israel – Mercosur). While in the second section of the newsletter we highlight five anti-neoliberal globalization alternatives around the world in which the March has taken part / will take part in: the 3rd ‘Connecting Alternatives’ meeting in Peru that will take place in May; the International meeting to discuss Participative Democracy in France in December; the 1st Encounter of Zapatista Women with Women of the World; the 26th January: ‘the day the WSF went truly global’; and the launching of our newest National Coordinating Body in Bangladesh, South Asia.

Our challenge as an International movement is to ensure that the global struggle against free trade is superior to the sum of its parts. In other words, how can we share experiences and learning from each mobilization / event with each other within the March and with other allies in constructive and creative ways? How do we exchange ideas and mutually construct common strategies against the advance of free trade and other neoliberal policies? The 26th January, Global Day of Action and Mobilization of the WSF, was one such way and the 8th March, International Women’s Day, will be another…Let’s not lose the opportunity to make ourselves heard and seen and to demand another world based on feminist, anti-capitalist, truly democratic principals.

Newsletter available at: http://www.marchemondiale.org/bulletin_liaison/2008/200801/200801html/en

2008-04-24T14:19:00.000-03:00

The WSF Global Day of Action and Mobilization II: The day the WSF went truly global

26th January 2008: it’s a –5ºc, snow on the ground day in Montreal, Quebec, and a 32ºc humid day in Manila, Philippines. But on this day – despite climatic differences – the WMW was present in mobilizations around the world. From Pakistan to Peru, Guatemala to Galicia, France to the Philippines, Bangladesh to Brazil, March activists united to occupy the streets in solidarity with women who are prevented from doing so. Under the slogan “They are Present”, the women of Burma, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iran, Kenya and Mexico were remembered, while the current violence and abuses against them were denounced in the strongest possible way.

Mobilisations took a different form in different countries, but the WMW’s feminist ‘batucada’ (drumming group) was present in several: in Manila, Philippines where women animated the march “On with the struggle: Jobs and justice, land and freedom!” with feminist drumming rhythms for the first time; in the birthplace of the ‘batucada’ - Brazil - in several different cities around the country; and in Montreal where WMW activists warmed themselves and onlookers up with their funky beats.

In other countries, the WMW took part in seminars and forums: in Pakistan 200 grass-roots women and others (peasants, fishers, journalists, lawyers…) took part in a very successful Social Movements Assembly (unfortunately the authorities did not permit the planned rally so the ‘batucada’ was not able to play); in Galicia the March was present at the Constituent Assembly of the Galician Social Forum where the International meeting of the WMW in October was announced; in Mexico there was a women’s tent in the Zocalo in Mexico City in which the WMW participated in the debates (and on 31st January there was a mobilization against ASPAN in which the WMW was also present), while in Cuba the WMW National Coordination promoted a reflection session on the present and future of the March in the country. In yet other places, cultural events were on the agenda, such as in the city of Villa El Salvador in Peru, where the 26th was a day of culture – graffiti, mime, theatre, cinema – and debate, and in France where cultural activities and debates followed the festive march through Paris. In Bangladesh, the recently formed NCB organized a human chain in front of the National Parliamentary building in the capital, Dhaka.

We will continue marching until all women are free!

2008-01-30T15:33:00.000-02:00

The WSF Global Day of Action and Mobilisation I: WMW International Declaration

On the 26th January 2008 thousands of women, men and children will occupy the streets to denounce injustices and affirm the economic, political and cultural alternatives that they are creating. Once again, the World Social Forum is asserting that neoliberalism is not the only means to manage the world, and furthermore, has shown itself to be the most tragic.

We, from the World March of Women, are united to assert that a world based on the values of equality, freedom, solidarity, justice and peace is possible. We affirm our resistance to the commodification and privatisation of our territories, the environment, women's bodies, and relationships between peoples.

Economic, politcal and religious interests attempt to impose themselves on us thorough arms, occupations of foreign territories, the militarisation of our daily lives, the criminalisation of the poor and of activists. Violence against women is central to these patriarchal and military strategies: as a tool of control, as a way of trying to silence us and destroying the solidarity between peoples and within communities.

For these reasons, on this day we are occupying the streets in solidarity with women who are prevented from doing so. We are drawing attention to the human rights violations in Burma, Haiti, Iran, Mexico, Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya, countries in which the current situation is brutal, affects a huge number of people, and is institutionalised by the State or in a context of total absence of the State.

In other countries, violence might not be as visible and is not always to be found in the headlines, but it is present in all times and spaces, and always much closer to every one of us than we might think. The fact that women's rights violenations are common doesn not mean to say that they are natural or tolerable. Our indignation is here with us in the streets.

We will continue marching until all women are free!

2008-01-05T17:13:00.000-02:00

I Encounter of Zapatista Women with Women of the World

New Year’s Eve 2007 was not spent on a Brazilian beach dressed in white as it was last year, but in the company of Zapatista women and men in the mountainous Lacandona Forest of south-east Mexico…

Today is the 1^st day of 2008 and I’m waiting for the minibus which will take us down the mountain and back to the city after 4 days at the I Encounter of Zapatista Women with Women of the World… What an amazing, emotional experience.

Refusing to remain ignored, marginalised and exploited by the Mexican government and the Neoliberal capitalist system which it promotes, indigenous men and women of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (ZNLA) showed their faces to the world (although not literally - they are never seen in public without balaclavas, therefore they have no identity) on 1^st January 1994. 14 years ago to this day Mexico woke up to find the state of Chiapas, south-east Mexico, under control of a left-wing rebel group, its members having spent 10 years in clandestine preparation, organisation and mobilisation in the Lacandona Forest of the region. Their spokesperson and leader is the infamous Marcos, entitled Sub-commander because it is the people who are the commander.

Essentially a political, anti-neoliberal globalisation movement, the Zapatistas (named after Emiliano Zapata: leading force of the Mexican Revolution that broke out in 1910, outstanding national hero and symbol of rebelliousness) resorted to taking up arms as the last hope for putting into practice the basic principals of the Mexican Constitution and to defend the 38 municipalities of Chiapas state that is their autonomous territory. Here, since the 1^st January 1994 uprising, the almost exclusively indigenous rural population are no longer treated like animals and subjected to slave labour by extremely violent plantation owners. They are still extremely poor, but they are finally free from hundreds of years of exploitation and have put enormous effort – with the help and defence of the ZNLA – into creating autonomous education, health and hygiene, production and justice systems. And they have achieved all this while “in resistance”, in other words without accepting any financial or technical from the State, whom they know as the ‘Bad Government’.

Zapatista communities are organised into autonomous municipalities and these in turn are grouped into 5 Caracoles (meaning the large snail-shells which, when blown, make a sound that is traditionally used by the indigenous as a summons for the community to face its problems and resolve them collectively). Here the laws of the Federal government are not recognised, nor are taxes paid; instead the Zapatista autonomous authorities (indigenous men and women who hold their positions of authority according to a 3-year rotation method) serve, organise and govern their communities, obeying the people without receiving a salary. They are elected in Community Assemblies and can be replaced at any time. Their duties include resolving community problems or conflicts, punishment of crime, control of natural resources and protection of the environment, and organisation of public services, collective work and agricultural production, all founded on the philosophy, community-based democratic values and ‘cosmovision’ of the indigenous populations, descendents of the mighty Mayas (a spiritual people of engineering, mathematics, astronomy and an incredibly rich culture - including the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas - in Eastern Mexico and Guatemala before the Spanish destroyed their cities in the 1500s and 1600s). In other words, the autonomous Zapatista authorities are independently implementing the 'San Andres Agreement' (see 'Chiapas in Conflict' below) negotiated with the Federal government but that the State has always refused to respect. Immense national and international support - technical, financial - and solidarity have been vital to this process, as has the Zapatista's use of the internet and independent media sources around the world.

With the establishment of the ‘Revolutionary Law of Women’ by the ZNLA before the 1994 uprising and the adherence to it by Zapatista communities since that date, the position of women has improved significantly. Where once girls were not sent to school because it was believed they had no need for education, they now attend autonomous Zapatista schools with their brothers. Where once traditional midwives charged less for their services if a girl was born than if it was a boy, now children are taught that they are equal. Where once young women were obliged to have sex with the plantation owners before their arranged marriages, they now marry who they want without being raped beforehand by these bosses (who no longer exist because in 1994 the Zapatistas reclaimed huge tracts of land that had been stolen from indigenous communities). Where once women worked for no pay or in exchange for leftover food in the plantation owners houses – where they were at constant risk of sexual violence and pregnancy as a result of rape - they now work for their communities and families. Where once they were not permitted by their husbands to leave the house on the grounds that they would go and find themselves another man, they now hold positions of responsibility and participate actively in community life.

However, despite all these advances for women since the uprising (Zapatista and non-Zapatista have benefited in the Zapatista autonomous territories because the movement does not discriminate according to affiliation), the inequality between women and men is still strong and the oppression of women is evident in public and private spheres of life. Men are still reluctant to let the women leave the house, and they are still responsible for all the house work and looking after the children and food preparation, although “the men help us a bit more now” (Health promoter Sandra, Caracole Oventik, 30^th December 2007). And they are still in the minority at all levels of Zapatista autonomous authority and suffer the ridicule of men who doubt their capacity to lead, make decisions and take on community responsibilities.

The Zapatista women commanders – community authorities and a handful of military captains from the ZNLA - shared all these advances and challenges with each other and with us (women from other organisations in Mexico and internationally) at the I Encounter of Zapatista Women with Women of Mexico and Women of the World from 28^th – 31^st December in the Caracole ‘La Garrucha’. Although it was the III Encounter of the Zapatistas (men and women) with People of the World, it was the first time in 14 years that an Encounter was organised by the women for women, and therefore an important step in the recognition of the inequality that exists between sexes and in the struggle against this reality. As members of a mixed movement (men and women) traditionally lead by men, in a strongly patriarchal society, they are facing the challenge of carving out a space for themselves as equals.

2008-01-05T17:10:00.000-02:00

Zapatista Quotes:

“[O]ne day… you will understand that there exist men and women such as us, without a face and without a name, who have abandoned everything, even their own lives, so that other children… can get up everyday without having to remain silent and hiding their faces to confront the world. When that day comes, we, those with no face and no name, will finally be able to rest under the earth. Dead, of course, but happy…” (Sub-commander Marcos, letter to a little boy, 6^th March 1994)

“One fine day, we decided to become soldiers so that the next day soldiers would no longer be necessary. In other words, we chose a suicidal profession because it is a profession whose objective is to disappear: soldiers who are not soldiers, because one day no one will be a soldier… And it seems that these soldiers who no longer want to be soldiers – us – have what books and discourses call patriotism.” (Sub-commander Marcos, letter to a little boy, 6^th March 1994)

“We knew that we would die from illness in any case, therefore it was better for us to die fighting [in the 1994 uprising]” (Captain Elena, ZNLA, 29^th December 2007)

“We showed our male comrades that we have the courage and force needed to demand our rights. Even though we don’t know how to read and write, we are learning. The people are our guide.” (Marina, Zapatista leader of La Garrucha, 29^th December 2007)

“Durito says that freedom is like the dawn. Some sleep while they wait for it, but others wake up during the night and walk in order to achieve it. I say that we, Zapatistas, suffer from insomnia…” (EZLN, 18^th May 1996)

“[W]e want democracy, freedom and justice for all Mexicans.” (6^th Declaration Lacandona Forest Declaration, ZNLA, June 2005)

“We have decided to look for others like ourselves who think that the solution to the main problems of this country is not above, but down below among the simple and humble people” (Sub-commander Marcos, ‘The Other Campaign’, 1996)

For more information about the I Encounter of Zapatista Women try:

http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=153435 http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=153432

http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=153356

http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=153291

For more information about the Zapatistas in general (in English) try:

http://www.zmag.org/chiapas1/index.htm

http://www.ezln.org/documentos/ (Declarations and other communiqués until 2005)

http://encuentro.mayfirst.org/communicado.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation

(Indymedia photos: http://chiapas.mediosindependientes.org/)

2008-01-05T16:37:00.000-02:00

Chiapas in Conflict

For 14 years, the indigenous Zapatista communities and the ZLNA have resisted the violence of the Mexican State. After the original 1994 uprising, the civil population was subjected to bombing raids, massacres, torture and ‘disappearances’ on the part of the Mexican Federal and Chiapas armies, extreme violence that was only reduced after huge demonstrations and solidarity around the world put pressure on the government.

Since then the Zapatistas have tried and retried to find a pacific solution (including declaring a cease-fire on the 12^th January 1994 that they have never broken) to guarantee the rights and protection of the Indigenous population, but on every occasion they have been betrayed by the government – 3 different administrations. During the first round of dialogue between the ZNLA and the State (in 1994), instead of sending their negotiators as agreed, the Federal government went against their word and sent 40,000 troops to try to capture the rebel commanders. They failed. In 1996, after a huge Encounter of over 6000 people representing the whole of Mexico organised by the Zapatistas, the government was forced to come to the negotiating table but after months of negotiating the ‘San Andrés Agreement’ (that granted autonomy and special rights to the Indigenous of Mexico). The then President Ernesto Zedillo and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), however, ignored the agreements (the Interior Minister calling Sub-commander Marcos to explain that he had drunk too much at the time he signed the Agreement and that it was no longer approved by the Mexican government) and instead increased military presence with the political support of the other important political parties.

And so began the low-intensity war that the government has waged against the population of Chiapas ever since. With the intention of destroying the community organisation of the indigenous peoples and crushing support for the ZNLA, the Mexican army have also trained and financed paramilitary groups of coerced rural workers to invade Zapatista land, threaten and carry out violence, persecution and torture and violate basic human rights.

The State claims, via the general media, that the conflict is ethnic – indigenous against indigenous – that it is not they who are responsible for the violence in the region, and that they want to continue the dialogue with the Zapatistas. When Vicente Fox began his term as President in 2000, for example, he fulfilled 2 of the conditions imposed by the Zapatistas in order to restart negotiations: he withdrew certain military bases and released many of the indigenous political prisoners. But instead of sending the ‘San Andrés Agreement’ to be voted in as law by Congress, an adapted law was approved, one that is empty of the political contents of the original Agreement. Another betrayal.

The current situation in Chiapas is critical. While the administration of the new, fraudulently elected President Felipe Caldarón brutally represses civil society demonstrations around the country (Atenco, Oaxaca…), in Chiapas the number of Federal soldiers has been doubled and paramilitary groups are ever more numerous and violent, acting with total impunity. Rural indigenous workers are being thrown off their land and autonomous authorities are threatened, while the government uses every means available to divide indigenous communities and create ethnic conflict, including giving Certificates of Ownership of indigenous community land to enemies of the Zapatistas, and making large sums of money available to families and communities (for the building of schools, etc) that declare themselves against the ZNLA.

2007-11-23T15:01:00.001-02:00

World March of Women Declaration

25^th November 2007 – The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

In our Women’s Global Charter for Humanity we, activists of the World March of Women, affirm the world that we are building. A world where, “all human beings live free of all forms of violence. No human being is the property of another. No person may be held in slavery, forced to marry, subjected to forced labour, trafficked, sexually exploited.”

On 25^th November 2007 – International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women – we are mobilised around the world to reassert the values of the Charter: freedom, peace, justice, solidarity and equality.

We denounce patriarchy, a system that for thousands of years has imposed inequality, exploitation, privilege, discrimination, values, standards and policies based on the presumed natural inferiority of women as human beings and on a hierarchy of social roles assigned to women and men. It is this system that generates violence.

We denounce machismo, which denies the right to sexual, reproductive
and corporal freedom and to happiness and female pleasure. Machismo
uses sexual violence and in this way negatively affects our capacity for
enjoyment, the fulfilment of our desires and the exercise of all our rights.
Machismo reduces women to the state of sexual objects, condemns lesbians
and promotes sexism, prostitution, trafficking of women and girls, violence
against women, girls and boys.

We denounce the racism present in our countries that - together with class and gender oppressions - forms a mesh of domination that condemns indigenous, afro-descendent, immigrant and peasant women to the appalling life conditions.

We denounce neoliberal capitalist globalization, which is supported by a sexual division of labour that creates additional inequality between men and women and concomitantly, the potential for increased violence. Our goal is to put an end to violence against women!

On this day we pay homage to the three Mirabal sisters assassinated by order of the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic on 25^th November 1960.

To this day Authoritarian States still use violence against women activists of social and women’s movements. Just in the last week we received calls for solidarity concerning women from Burma, Colombia, Guinea, Iran and Pakistan.

But where there is violence, there is also resistance. Mexican women are denouncing the links between militarization, the criminalisation of the poor and social movements, and patriarchal violence. Their ‘One million signatures for women’s security’ campaign will be launched today, 25^th November 2007, and run on to the 24^th May 2008. This campaign enables the voices to be heard of the victims of sexual abuse in the heavily-militarised frontier zones with the United States, or in regions repressed by the State such as Oaxaca and Atenco.

We know that despite all obstacles to the contrary, impunity can be ended through the collective strength of women. On 4^th December 2006, women from the Philippines won a great victory when an American soldier was declared guilty of rape of one of their Philippine sisters. It was the first time that an American soldier had been brought to trial for a crime under the jurisdiction of the VFA (Visiting Forces Agreement) – a victory for the exercise of National Sovereignty - and that the anti-rape law had been enforced with a view to consolidating the rights of women.

Our organisation needs to remain very strong and deep-rooted to counter the daily violence suffered by women in regions of conflict. We express our solidarity with the women who struggle against violence suffered by women – sexual abuse, rape, sexual and domestic slavery, torture, murder – in Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Darfur, Sudan. We demand punishment for the perpetrators and the immediate resolution of these conflicts with the participation of women in every stage of the process.

Discourses that evoke the rights of women and their need for ‘protection’ are used to justify military occupations (for example, in Afghanistan) and the rise of racism and intolerance. In Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere not only are a very high number of victims of war women, but it is they that very often end up responsible for material survival in a context of infrastructural destruction, and emotional survival in a context of total insecurity.

Violence against women in not a cultural, geographical or class phenomenon, violence is transversal and concerns all of us. We will not allow the rhetoric of women’s rights to be used to nourish xenophobia and the repression of immigrants.

No form of violence against women should be tolerated! On these grounds European WMW activists have launched their ‘Not One More’ campaign, which particularly emphasises domestic violence. They demand that laws regarding violence against women are voted on and implemented in all their dimensions: prevention, support centres and shelters, actions for the economic independence of women, etc… They highlight the importance of the work carried out by feminist associations with local populations with the objective of confronting the causes of violence against women.

With respect to the state, our demands are many. But we also call on our collective and individual responsibilities, women and men, to take a stand against sexist violence wherever we encounter it.

We will march until all women are free from oppression!

2007-10-12T18:24:00.000-03:00

World March of Women Manifesto

17th October 2007

We are once again mobilising on 17th October in order to denounce and demand an end to the oppression of women and to the domination, exploitation, egotism and unbridled quest for profit breeding injustice, war, conquest and violence.

Our feminist struggles and those of our foremothers on every continent have forged new freedoms for us, our daughters and sons and all the young girls and boys who will walk the earth after us. In 2000, we collected 5 million signatures demanding the end of poverty and violence against women. In 2005 we took to the streets again, inviting humanity to join us in our struggle for Equality, Freedom, Justice, Peace and Solidarity, weaving our dreams at the same time as we wove and constructed our global quilt.

Today, as before, we denounce capitalism, patriarchy and their institutions - such as transnational corporations and national oligarchies - that extract profit through: discrimination, oppression and exploitation of our peoples and especially of women; the looting of our territories, water, earth, biodiversity and sources of energy; the non-recognition of our individual and collective rights. We condemn these systems, which are sustained by the privileges held by men over women, of whites over blacks and indigenous peoples, as well as the exclusion of lesbians, immigrants, and many other life situations, by them considered “abnormal”. We denounce their repressive character and the criminalisation of our struggles.

This 17th October – the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty – we draw attention to the reality lived by us as women: our work within our families and community is not recognised and increases with every public service budget cut, we have less ownership and control of resources, we have lower salaries, our employment conditions are precarious and companies control our sexuality and bodies. We do not have the same educational opportunities and our knowledge and qualifications are less recognised. The links between poverty and violence against women manifests itself in the trafficking of women and sexual exploitation, in feminicide, in the use of women’s bodies as spoils of war.

We recognise the various forms of oppression against women in all four corners of the world. We have manifested many times - and we will continue to do so - against the military occupations of Palestine, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Iraq. At this time, we particularly want to show our solidarity with women struggling against the military dictatorship in Burma, who played a central role during the initial protests against rises in fuel prices and thus ‘opened the way’ for monks, students and the general population. We support our sisters in Costa Rica in their NO vote in the national referendum on the subject of the Central American Free-Trade Agreement with the USA. We commit ourselves to the struggle to overcome the terrible violence suffered by women in the armed conflicts in the regions of Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur, in western Sudan.

We reaffirm our pathways in the struggle against poverty and violence against women:

Women’s economic autonomy and the redistribution of wealth: Decent employment, along with workers rights and fair remuneration; management, use and control of resources and means of life; strengthening of the solidarity economy; valorisation of women’s reproductive and productive work. Non-payment of external debts that threaten the national sovereignty of countries, and surveillance of new loans. Non-negotiation or signing of free-trade agreements, whose aim is the protection of transnational corporations’ interests.

For food sovereignty and against the privatisation of nature: self-management of our environmental resources based on a development model that respects the basic needs of present and future generations. The right to maintain our means of life, to produce our own food in the way we want to and to feed ourselves according to our own cultural traditions.

No to violence against women: Fight against sexist violence, which is the instrument of control of our lives, our bodies and our sexuality, that turns us into objects subject to the desires of others. Commitment and practical actions on the part of the State and of society – particularly social movements – in the prevention and punishment of violence against women.

Peace and demilitarisation: To put an end to impunity and the use of women’s bodies as spoils of war and of rape as a weapon of war. Participation of women in the resolution of conflicts. Policies for disarmament and against occupations and foreign military presence, including military bases and exercises.

We will march until all women are free from oppression!

Granja do Ulmeiro, Portugal, 8th October, 2007
International Committee of the World March of Women

2007-09-30T15:43:00.000-03:00

The final triumph of Saint Che

Forty years after his death in Bolivia [9th October, 1967], Guevara is a living force in the town where his body was paraded

Andres Schipani in La Higuera, Bolivia, September 23, 2007
The Observer

By 8pm in the main square of the dusty town of Vallegrande, the only sound is the buzz of prayer coming from the church. Inside, devoted Catholics sit and stand around the image of Our Lord of Malta - the only black Christ in Latin America, brought to this Bolivian town during the Spanish conquest.

But this is not the only foreign element of devotion. Father Agustin, the Polish priest, reads out prayers written down by local people: 'For my mother who is sick, I pray to the Lord and ...', hesitantly, 'to Saint Ernesto, to the soul of Che Guevara.' 'Saint Ernesto,' the parishioners murmur in response.

It was here in Vallegrande, 40 years ago, that the corpse of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara lay on display, eyes open, in the hospital laundry. And it is here that his unofficial sainthood is becoming firmly established. 'For them, he is just like any other saint,' Father Agustin says ruefully. 'He is just like any other soul they are praying to. One can do nothing.'

On a bench in the square, Freddy Vallejos, 27, says: 'We have a faith, a confidence in Che. When I go to bed and when I wake up, I first pray to God and then I pray to Che - and then, everything is all right.' Freddy wears a cap bearing Alberto Korda's iconic image of Guevara. 'Che's presence here is a positive force. I feel it in my skin, I have faith that always, at all times, he has an eye on us.'

Guevara, born in Argentina to an impoverished aristocratic family, was caught on 8 October, 1967, by US-trained Bolivian rangers as he was trying to open up a new front in his revolution. Guevara was executed the following day in a little adobe school in La Higuera, and his body brought the 70 miles to Vallegrande.

Forensic experts found his skeleton 10 years ago and it now rests in a mausoleum in Cuba, where he achieved his most impressive victory in 1959. Standing at the site of his first grave, the president of the Che Guevara Foundation, Osvaldo 'Chato' Peredo, said: 'Why do we say Che is alive? Because of his grandeur, his transcendence. For us, Che is here, very much alive, in everything we say.'

Eight-year-old Juan Ernesto (named after Che), who lives amid Vallegrande's eucalyptus trees, says: 'I feel good that he is right there, close to me.'

In his 1967 dispatch to the Guardian, journalist Richard Gott, in Vallegrande on the day of Guevara's death, wrote: 'It was difficult to recall that this man had once been one of the great figures of Latin America. It was not just that he was a great guerrilla leader; he had been a friend of Presidents as well as revolutionaries. His voice had been heard and appreciated in inter-American councils as well as in the jungle. He was a doctor, an amateur economist, once Minister of Industries in revolutionary Cuba, and Castro's right-hand man. He may well go down in history as the greatest continental figure since Bolivar. Legends will be created around his name.'

Gott was right. Susana Osinaga, a nurse who cleaned Guevara's body back then, recalls: 'He was just like a Christ, with his strong eyes, his beard, his long hair.' Today the laundry where Guevara's corpse was laid is a place of pilgrimage. On the wall above Osinaga, an engraving reads: 'None dies as long as he is remembered.' Osinaga has an altar to Guevara in her home. 'He is very miraculous.'

Gott's companion that day, Christopher Roper, compared Che to a medieval painting of John the Baptist, 'who then became the iconic figure in death for millions who had paid little or no attention to him while he was alive'. Osinaga admits she had no idea who Che was until his death.

In this region, images of Che hang next to images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Pope John Paul II and Bolivia's President Evo Morales. Stories of miracles have mushroomed. The winding road that connects Vallegrande to La Higuera leads to a cluster of humble houses, walls plastered with Che's images and graffiti. In the middle of the village is a cobbled star-shaped square with a small bust of Che; next to it is a large altar with a cross and a big grey sculpture of Guevara. Melanio Moscoso, 37, sits against a wall next to a Guevara poster. 'We pray to him, we are so proud he had died here, in La Higuera, fighting for us. We feel him so close,' he says. His neighbour, Primitiva Rojas, professes devotion: 'I have lots of faith in him. Because he stopped existing does not mean he is not here with us.' A few days ago, when feeling sick, she prayed to him and soon felt better. 'That same night I dreamt of a man with a black beard and tender eyes, who was telling me: "I was the one who cured you".'

According to his executioner, Mario Teran, Guevara's last words were: 'Calm down and point well; you are about to kill a man.' What came after the shots, according to inhabitants of La Higuera like Manuel Cortes, was that 'Saint Ernesto was born in La Higuera'.

In Pucara, Remi Calzadilla wears a beige cap that says 'Che'. He prays to him every day. 'And he helped me; a few years ago I couldn't walk at all', he says, describing how every time he 'speaks' to Che he feels 'a strong force inside of him'.

'I am devoted to him as if he were a saint,' Remi's grandfather, Conrado Calzadilla, 83, adds, jutting a proud chin in the direction of one of the images of Che plastered on the wall of his home. 'Still, 40 years after his death?', I asked. 'Always', he replies. 'Always.'

With local sainthood and worldwide immortality, history has not proved true the claim that Guevara made on the day he was captured. 'Halt, do not shoot, I am Che Guevara and I am worth more alive than dead,' he said, as he lay wounded on a rock. In that same stone today, a shiny white inscription reads: 'Che is alive.'

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2175016,00.html

2007-09-16T17:25:00.000-03:00

The figure that shows it pays to be a man

· Gender pay gap among managers on rise again
· Number of senior women quitting also on increase

John Carvel, social affairs editor, September 5, 2007, The Guardian

The gender pay gap among managers across Britain has widened for the first time in 11 years as women, from trainees to chief executives, have failed to keep pace with the rise in male earnings, the Chartered Management Institute disclosed yesterday. In a survey of more than 42,000 managers in every sector, it found women averaged £43,571 last year, while the men averaged £49,647.

The gap had been shrinking, from 13.6% of earnings in 2003 to 11.8% in 2005, as more women have broken through the glass ceiling blocking career progression. But last year it widened to 12.2% among managers of all grades - and at director level the gulf was even more pronounced, increasing from 20% to 23%.

The institute said this departure from the trend was worrying. And the Equal Opportunities Commission said: "It is alarming to hear that for this section of the workforce the gender pay gap is actually getting worse."

The biggest bastion of inequality was in the food and drink industry, where male managers earned 46% more than their female counterparts, closely followed by people working in pensions and insurance, where the gap was 43.2%. In human resources - the managers who are supposed to enforce the equal pay legislation - the gap between men and women was 40; and in retailing it was 33.9%.

The most equal sectors were IT, where the gap was 11.7%, the public sector and charities, where it was only 0.7%.

The survey found that more than a third of Britain's managers are women and they are climbing up the corporate ladder faster than their male colleagues. The average female team leader is 37, five years younger than her male counterpart. The average female department head is 40, three years younger than her male equivalent. And the average female director is 44, four years younger than the boardroom males.

Women managers were also more likely to be awarded a performance bonus. Last year 63.4% of the women got a one-off payment, compared with 55.9% of men. Yet their average overall earnings lagged £6,076 behind the men's and there were indications that more women were responding by quitting their jobs, in many cases to set up their own businesses outside the discriminatory world of paid employment.

Last year 7.8% of female managers handed in resignations, compared with 6.4% of male colleagues. It was the highest female resignation rate since 2002. Jo Causon, the institute's marketing director, said: "It is clear the pull of promotion is not being matched by parity in pay. Despite the weight of legislation and the reality that reward should match responsibility, gender bias seems to be getting worse, not better."

The widening earnings gap might be partly due to a relatively high proportion of women managers in the public sector, where pay increases were lower last year after a period of substantial growth. But Ms Causon said employers should be worried that the earnings gap was more than £6,000 and rising. They were struggling to recruit and retain good managers and increasing gender inequality was not the answer. The survey also found women wanted more opportunities for training and career development, a better working environment and flexible working, she said.

Skills crisis

Val Lawson, chair of the Women in Management Network, said: "The fact that the proportion of women in senior positions continues to grow is encouraging, but their increasing likelihood to resign is a cause for concern. If employers allow this trend to continue the knowledge gap in UK organisations will be exacerbated at the very time we are trying to challenge the skills crisis."

Jenny Watson, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, said the evidence of a widening pay gap was alarming and underlined the need for updating anti-discrimination legislation.

The Department for Communities and Local Government ended consultation yesterday on a "single equality bill" that the government is expected to publish in draft form next year. Ms Watson said: "The Equal Pay Act has been in place for more than 30 years and is now in serious need of modernisation. The EOC is calling for employers to tackle systemic pay inequality effectively."

Jenny Westaway, project manager of the Fawcett Society, said this "worrying evidence" highlighted the need for the government to act to "stop women being short changed thousands of pounds a year". Last week a Guardian survey of Britain's top 100 companies found only two had female chief executives last year and their pay lagged well behind the male average.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,,2162640,00.html

2007-08-27T17:04:00.000-03:00

salut les ami(e)s,

i'm in france right now, on the last 'leg' of my luuurvely europe trip before going home to sao paulo early friday (31st august) morning. it's been a wonderful few weeks with family and friends and 'little' bro's wedding on saturday...

but it always feels a bit like life is on hold while i'm away from brasil and i'm really looking forward to getting back and starting my new 3-year contract with my new colleagues at the world march of women on monday (3rd sept):

do come out and see me, you'll always be very welcome. and i'd love to hear from you via this blog or my email (celiaalldridge@gmail.com)...

love,
x c

2007-07-31T06:23:00.000-03:00

Biofuels, Biodiversity, and Our Energy Future
The Dark Side of Biofuels: Horror in the "Brazilian California"
Raúl Zibechi July 23, 2007

Brazil is staking its claim as a great emerging power thanks to the leadership it maintains in biofuel production. The price of this ambition is paid by the environment and by the cane cutters, who are the invisible characters in this story.

"When the airplane passed, pouring out that bath of poison, my father was soaked. He fell ill because of the toxins that are sprayed over the cane. This is the end for many young people here, " says a female cane cutter from the region of Ribeirao Preto, in São Paulo state.

"The people work and they give them a slip of paper to shop with in the supermarket. The people don't see money, just the bill of what they owe," confirms a worker from the same region, where seven of every 10 cane cutters did not finish primary school.1

Other cutters explain that they are cheated by the scales that the bosses control—they calculate that they have to carry 110 kilograms for the scale to reach 100. Almost all of them were lured from Brazil's poorer Northeast by promises that they would earn very high salaries. Many moderate analysts see working conditions as reminiscent of slavery. But the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said before the G-8 Summit that biofuels have "enormous potential to generate jobs and income" and that "they offer a real option for sustainable development."2

Behind the "politically correct" jargon lurks a reality poised to destroy the Amazon, a reality that destroys millions of young bodies and promises lucrative business to investors. The very name biofuels seems to be destined to foment the confusion. João Pedro Stédile, head of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), points out that the defenders of ethanol "use the prefix bio3 to make it seem like it's a good thing," and that because of this its opponents prefer to call it like it is and use the term "agrofuels" because the term refers to agriculturally produced energy.3

Backtracking Four Centuries
According to the ex-governor of São Paulo state, Claudio Lembo, agrofuels will spread monoculture farming across the whole country. Although he is a conservative politician and member of the Liberal Front Party (now the Democratic Party), he thinks that Brazil "backtracked 500 years to the same place" as it was as a Portuguese colony. In his opinion, agricultural land will be lost when used for sugarcane and the history of those four centuries will be repeated, when "thousands were expelled from their communities by the leviathan of monoculture, which creates concentrated wealth."4

Looking closer at the cane cutters' working conditions, a terrifying world appears—a world that should give people who are enthused by the idea of substituting fossil fuels with agrofuels something to think about. According to various reports, around a million people work in the industry, of which 500,000 are in the agricultural sector. Close to 80% of cane harvesting is manual. The workers only get paid if they reach the output set by the bosses, which in the Ribeirao Preto region is some 12 tons a day, double the 1980 target. If they don't reach it, they aren't paid at all.5 To reach this output target they must work some 10 or 12 hours a day, but sometimes 14, many of these under the burning sun. Many parents bring their small children to help them reach the production goal.

Although the numbers of working children have declined, in 1993 one in every four cane cutters in the state of Pernambuco was between seven and 17 years old, and many did not receive any salary. In the last two harvests, 14 people died as a result of excess work. The cutters are recruited in other regions and have to live in the same hacienda, in mattress-less cabins, with neither water nor a kitchen; they have to cook in tins over little bonfires and buy their groceries in the same hacienda at prices exceeding market values.

The cane is cut after being burned, which facilitates harvesting but gravely endangers the environment and produces serious respiratory complaints.

In the Piracicaba municipality, in São Paulo, hospitalizations of children with respiratory problems increase 21% during periods of cane burning. For every 10 tons, the cutter must make 72,000 machete blows and flex their legs 36,000 times. They lose around 10 liters of water per day and walk 10 km a day while they complete their job. The monthly salary ranges from US$150-200 a month. According to the sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, the cutters' average lifespan is less than that of colonial slaves.6

The minister of Work, Carlos Lupi, admitted before the International Labor Conference in Geneva that part of the production of cane in Brazil is done with degrading work in awful conditions: "They work without protection and even lose fingers."7 Maria Aparecida de Moraes Silva, who has studied the work on sugarcane plantations for 30 years now, affirms that 45% of the cutters come from the Northeast. The migrants are preferred by employers because while far from their families they tolerate the abuses unquestioningly, and after the seven-month-long harvest they return to their villages, making it difficult for them to organize unions.8

They Call This Progress
Little by little harvesting machines are being introduced that do the work of a hundred people. As a result, the plantation owners have raised the cutters' productivity targets. They order them to cut the cane closer to the ground, as the machines do. The result is that they now choose younger and younger workers who receive one dollar per ton.

The economic journal Jornal do Valor explains how people fall into servitude: "There is a manpower middleman who covers the poorer states, especially in the North and the Northeast. He chooses the youngest ones. When they get on the bus to go to the city where they are contracted, the cutters get in to their first debt, for the transportation. The middleman earns 60 reales (US$30) for every worker that he takes. It is not unusual for him also to be responsible for the sale of the first goods that the workers need. He becomes the 'owner' of this manpower through the accumulation of debt."9

The expansion of cane cultivation destroys the social fabric. In the region of the small city of Delta, in Minas Gerais state, 300,000 hectares have been planted in the last four years. The city has 5,000 inhabitants that swell to 10,000 during the harvest. According to a report by the newspaper Correio Braziliense the small city has begun to register homicide rates that were unimaginable before the multiplication of the cane farms. Many female children and young people are kidnapped to boost prostitution in the region, where 20,000 cutters arrive a year. The cutters overflow at the edges of small cities where alcoholism and the consumption of crack proliferate.

The expansion and modernization of the cane industry inundates towns and municipalities. José Eustaquio da Silva, mayor of Delta, has recognized that "the municipality is close to collapse. The health facilities, hospitals, and schools are packed, and the worst thing is that along with the workers come all sorts of people and bandits." In Delta there isn't a single hotel but there are 27 brothels. Journalists have discovered that various public figures of the county are involved in the trafficking of minors and in cases of pedophilia with the children of cane-cutters. The middlemen (who are nicknamed "gatos" or cats) carry arms and impose their rules.

Stédile always uses the same example to illustrate the social problems generated by mono-crop farming. "The municipality of Ribeirao Preto in the center of São Paulo is considered the 'Brazilian California' due to its high level of technological development in the cane industry. Thirty years ago, this city produced all its food, had a peasantry in the interior and, in fact, it was a rich region with equitable income distribution. Now it is an immense sugar plantation, with some 30 sugar mills controlling all the land. In the city, 100,000 people live in slums (out of the 540,000 inhabitants of the municipality). The prison population is at 3,813 people—counting only the adults—while the population living from and working in agriculture is just 2,412 people, including the children. This is the cane monoculture model of society. There are more people in jail than there are dedicated to agriculture!"10

In the 2007 sugar harvest another technological "advance" will come about: for the first time, genetically modified cane will be harvested. It is lighter and holds less water, meaning it will bring large profits to the investors. But the workers will have to cut three times as much to reach 10 tons.

In this region, the owners lay off a large number of workers at frequent intervals, in order to keep the best. These are the so-called "productivity champions" who can cut up to 20 tons a day, with a monthly average of 12 to 17 tons a day.11 With the workers suffering from seizures, cramps, spinal pain, and tendonitis on top of frequent cuts, the owners found a "technical solution." The sugar mills distribute a free electrolyte and vitamin supplement, intended for athletes or workers with intense physical activity. At many mills the cutters drink this product before starting work. "Physical pain disappears, the cramps die down, and productivity increases," says Pereira Novaes. The problem is that they need to increase the dose every month.

"With supplements and medicines you can keep up the high productivity demanded by the cane. The strongest survive, like in a process of 'natural selection.' But the question is: how and for how long do they survive? Solutions and medicines can be seen as an expression of the paradox of a certain type of modernization and expansion of cane cultivation; it consumes the labor force that makes it flourish," insists Pereira Novaes. There are no official figures but it is certain that there are many young workers who retire due to disability, and dozens of deaths due to exhaustion in the "Brazilian California."

The Big Winners
In Brazil, cane production began in 1550, but has expanded greatly since 1970, fueled by the rise in oil prices. The forest of the Atlantic coast was halved, the area most affected by this expansion, but now the cane fields advance toward the center and West, where it is predicted that the rich ecosystem of the Cerrados will disappear by 2030 at the hands of monoculture. In the next seven years Brazil will double its production of ethanol and may produce almost 50% more sugar cane, which means building another 100 mills by 2010.

It doesn't stop there. The Brazilian National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES) aims for Brazil to control 50% of the global ethanol market. This implies increasing the current 17 billion to 110 billion liters a year, for which it will be necessary to plant some 80 million hectares. That is, destroy the Amazon. The government has adopted this sector as its principal development strategy. BNDES, which has more resources than any other regional bank including the Inter-American Development Bank, estimates that it will invest six billion dollars in sugar mills and cane plantations.

But Brazil wants to expand agrofuels across the whole region. The immediate plans consist of taking production to countries in Central America and the Caribbean that already signed free trade agreements with the United States (such as CAFTA), to avoid Washington's import tariffs. "The objective is to export the nearly completed product to those countries," says the magazine Peripecias, "finish the process in those nations, and from there enter the U.S. market." The Brazilian bank finances the investments in those countries, but is also negotiating a share of up to 30% of stocks in the Central American projects.

In Stédile's opinion, three big sectors come together in the ethanol project: "The oil companies (who want to reduce dependence on oil), the agro-businesses (like Bunge, Cargill, and Monsanto) who want to keep their monopoly in the global agricultural products markets," and now the transnational capital that makes "an alliance with the proprietors of land in the South, and especially in Brazil, to use large areas of land for the production of agrofuels."12

The future is not encouraging. Instead of pressure to modify the patterns of consumption and the energy matrix especially in transportation, the big investors like George Soros and corporations like Cargill are positioning themselves in the Brazilian production of ethanol to increase their profits. Neither global warming nor the cane cutters' working conditions cross their minds.

End Notes

1. Testimonies collected by the Comisión Pastoral da Terra and reproduced by Núcleo Amigos da Terra Brasil, p. 15.
2. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ob. cit.
3. Carlos Vicente, ob. cit.
4. Estado de São Paulo, 13 March 2007, on www.estadao.com.br.
5. All figures from a study by Núcleo de Amigos da Terra Brasil.
6. Francisco de Oliveira, in Folha de São Paulo, 27 May 2007.
7. O Estado de São Paulo, 11 June 2007.
8. Maria Aparecida de Moraes Silva, interview in Instituto Humanitas
9. Unisinos magazine on www.unisinos.br.
10. Jornal do Valor, Sao Paulo, 17 May 2007.
11. Carlos Vicente, ob. cit.
12. José Roberto Pereira Novaes, ob. cit

Translated for the Americas Program by Nalina Eggert and Sonja Wolf.
Raúl Zibechi is a member of the editorial board of Montevideo's weekly Brecha, teacher and researcher on social movements in Latin America's Multiversidad Franciscana, and adviser to various social movements. He is a monthly contributor to the Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org).

Sources
Carlos Vicente, "El cultivo de agrocombustibles solo interesa al capital transnacional", interviewed by Joao Pedro Stédile, Biodiversidad magazine.

José Roberto Pereira Novaes, "Campeoes de produtividade: dores e febres nos canaviais paulistas", 11 June 2007 on www.pastoraldomigrante.com.br.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, "Desafíos para la cumbre del G-8", La Jornada.
Maria Aparecida de Moraes Silva, interviewed in Instituto Humanitas Unisinos magazine on www.unisinos.br.

Núcleo Amigos da Terra Brasil, "Agronegocio e biocombustiveis: uma mistura explosive", 2006, www.natbrasil.org.br.

Paola Visca, "El combustible de los biocombustibles", in Peripecias, 23 de mayo de 2007.

Pastoral do Migrante: www.pastoraldomigrante.br.

Article originally available @ http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4414
http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=book/print/500

2007-07-13T12:01:00.000-03:00

friday, 13th july...

hola from são paulo, city of more than 19 million and my new home since tuesday (10th july)... what a shock to the system! but i've been staying at friends (other e-changer volunteers) the last few nights and have been sorting out my new flat a bit even though my stuff (a lorry load of my stuff) hasn't arrived yet! i'm hoping it'll get to me today or tomorrow (finger's crossed)...

there are lots of new photos to have a look at, just click on the links on the right: st.gabriel music festival in the interior of Bahia, mst national congress, st.john festivities in salvador, my leaving party in salvador before coming to sp... all worth a giggle!

i'll keep you posted on how things are going down here in the cold of south-eastern brazil (i've been here for 3 days, i already have a stonking cold!),

x c

2007-06-18T18:17:00.000-03:00

6/05/07 - MST Informa No 134
“Looking Forward to the Fifth National Congress”

Dear friends of the MST,

We are publishing this special edition of MST Informa in order to communicate with our comrades who are active in different peoples’ organizations. We want to speak to you all about the situation of Agrarian Reform in Brazil and also about the realization of the 5th National Congress of the Landless Workers Movement (MST).

Brazil is living in a complex moment in her history. We had an economic model of dependent industrialization that organized our economy for 50 years—and that, at least, made the economy grow. This model entered a crisis. The economy is practically paralyzed for 20 years. The Brazilian elites, more and more subordinated to the interests of foreign capital and the banks, are implementing a new model, based on this financial and international capital. It is called neoliberalism. But this model has just aggravated the problems of the people.

More Agrarian Reform does not fit with an economy that has at its center only exports, banks, and wealthy economic groups. About 200 businesses control the major part of the economy and 78% of all of the exports. Therefore, you all must hear the corporate press talk a lot about how Agrarian Reform is not acceptable.

Agrarian Reform is not only to seize the large plantation (latifúndio), divide it in lots and release it to the countryside’s poor to manage. Agrarian Reform remains more complex because foreign capital, transnational entities, wealthy economic groups control our agriculture to export raw materials, to produce cellulose and energy, for their mode of consumption. However, more than anything Agrarian Reform is necessary. A reorganization of not only the concentration of land in Brazil, but also the skills of production.

5th Congress

The MST is discussing with its bases (grassroots) and its allies a new program of Agrarian Reform. An Agrarian Reform that should begin with the democratization of landed property, but that also organizes a different form of production. Prioritizing the production of food for the internal market combined with an economic model that distributes income.

We want an Agrarian Reform that keeps people in the rural areas, combating the exodus from the countryside, and that guarantees the conditions of life for the people. With education at all levels, good housing and jobs for the youth.

These topics will be discussed in the 5th Congress, between June 11th and 15th, in Brasilia. It would be very good if you all could go to our Congress. Because it would be impossible to unite so many people, we are sending this LETRAVIVA in order to share what will be discussed there, between the approximately 17.5 thousand participants, including landless rural workers, international delegates and observers who are anticipating that this will be the largest Congress in the MST’s history.

Agrarian Reform is not only a problem of the landless, or the MST, or Via Campesina. It is a necessity for all of Brazilian society and, especially for the people, the 80% of the population that lives by their own work and that needs a new model of economic organization with incomes and jobs for all.

Certainly, we will continue in the struggle, together, in the construction of a society more just, fraternal and egalitarian, that is the dream of all honest, diligent Brazilians.

Agrarian Reform: For Social Justice and Popular Sovereignty!

National Leadership of the MST

http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=node/474

2007-05-28T14:36:00.000-03:00

if only the adults would listen...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g8cmWZOX8Q

2007-05-28T14:27:00.000-03:00

"All of us will start the day deciding where to go:

To the university, to study our planet or the medicinal plants, computing or arts, náhuatl or English. We will go to our creative work, to our own business, to our well paid jobs, to receive an equal salary for an equal work.

We will go to the market with our purses; we will be able to buy shoes and dresses, books and music. We will listen to the radio or buy newspapers, with the security of finding good news. We will choose to go to the health center or to the traditional doctor, we will enjoy our sexuality and decide with whom, when and how to have or not have offspring. We will have equitable family and sentimental relationships, with respectful partners.

We will organise parties where all the members of our peoples sing and dance until dawn and the next morning, in each house there will be enough food to have breakfast, and our children will go to school showered and dressed with colorful books and wise letters, with their empty notebooks to write their own history.

And when sunset comes, we will go to meetings with other women, to an assembly with the authorities, with the sovereignty that allows us to govern our own bodies, city halls, our countries. We will walk down the streets with no fear, smiling because life is worth living"

(extract from the final declaration of the 'Espaco Feminista e Coletivo Huaxyacac' meeting of Oaxaca, Mexico. 26th April 2007)

2007-04-17T17:48:00.000-03:00

Thousands of Brazilian Peasants Occupy Farms
By Todd Benson, 11th April 2007, Reuters Reports

SAO PAULO, April 10 (Reuters) - Thousands of peasants have occupied four farms and demonstrated in six states as part of a wave of protests to push for land reform in Latin America's largest country, a spokesman for the group said on Tuesday.

The protesters belong to the Landless Peasants' Movement, or MST, a nationwide group that routinely occupies large plantations to lobby the government to grant plots of land and financial aid to poor family farmers.

The latest campaign, which began last week and is known as "Red April," has included largely peaceful demonstrations by landless rural workers.

One occupation began on Sunday in Itapetininga in the interior of Sao Paulo state, where peasants set up camp on land owned by Suzano Bahia Sul Papel e Celulose, one of Latin America's biggest pulp and paper producers.

The MST said it chose the target to protest the expansion of eucalyptus plantations at the expense of food crops and to push for agrarian reform in Sao Paulo, an agricultural powerhouse state where farming is dominated by large agribusiness companies.

“It's time for the government to accelerate agrarian reform," said Joaquim da Silva, an MST spokesman. "We're going to keep invading properties until they do so.”

Suzano, which has previously been the target of MST occupations, said in a statement that it had taken legal action to have the protesters evicted.

Some 300 families also occupied a 45,000-hectare (111,000-acre) ranch in the northern state of Maranhao on Tuesday, the MST said in a statement. They were later joined by 450 other squatter families hoping the government will expropriate and redistribute the land.

In Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, some 400 families occupied two idle farms and demanded the permanent settlement of 12,000 landless families in the state.

In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, 300 MST militants occupied the public works office in the state capital Porto Alegre demanding road improvements, rubbish collection and school transport in four settlements, MST activist Emerson Giacomelli said.

Some 5,000 MST militants started a 110-kilometer (63-mile) march in Bahia from Feira de Santana to the state capital Salvador demanding the acceleration of land reform. [Have a look at the photo album 'MST/Bahia's State March (April 2007)' on the right...]

In the northern state of Piaui, activists occupied the state governor's palace in Teresina to press demands for rural development and respect of workers' rights.

MST protesters are usually evicted after a few weeks, then pick a new target. In some cases they have remained as occupiers on abandoned farms no longer used by their owners.

Land squabbles have long been common in Brazil, which is slightly larger than the continental United States. Millions of Brazilians live in poverty but 1 percent of the population owns almost half of all arable land, according to official data.

The disputes frequently turn violent, especially in remote regions of the Amazon rain forest. At least 1,690 violent clashes over land took place in Brazil last year, according to a recent report by 30 local human rights groups.

The MST has traditionally occupied unproductive land tracts. But in recent years it has also targeted plantations owned by large agribusiness interests, a shift that has strained its relations with the left-leaning government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Article originally available at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNewsAndPR/idUSN1033899620070411

Source: Updates from Brazil's Landless Workers Movement: Friends of the MST http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=reutersonmstredapril2007

PS. Click on the photo album on the right to see photos that I took at the opening ceremony and on the 1st day of the 110km march from Feira de Santana to Salvador (the capital of Bahia)
PPS. You can also see more informal photos from my fun birthday night out by clicking on the relevant photo album on the right...

2007-03-03T16:58:00.000-03:00

Declaration of Nyéléni: Now Is The Time For Food Sovereignty!

February 23-27, 2007
Nyéléni Village, Selingue, Mali
Available @ http://www.nyeleni2007.org/spip.php?article290

We, more than 500 representatives from more than 80 countries, of organizations of peasants/family farmers, artisanal fisher-folk, indigenous peoples, landless peoples, rural workers, migrants, pastoralists, forest communities, women, youth, consumers, environmental and urban movements have gathered together in the village of Nyéléni in Selingue, Mali to strengthen a global movement for food sovereignty. We are doing this, brick by brick, have been living in huts constructed by hand in the local tradition, and eating food that is being produced and prepared by the Selingue community. We give our collective endeavor the name “Nyéléni” as a tribute to and inspiration from a legendary Malian peasant woman who farmed and fed her peoples well.

Most of us are food producers and are ready, able and willing to feed all the world’s peoples. Our heritage as food producers is critical to the future of humanity. This is specially so in the case of women and indigenous peoples who are historical creators of knowledge about food and agriculture and are devalued. But this heritage and our capacities to produce healthy, good and abundant food are being threatened and undermined by neo-liberalism and global capitalism. Food sovereignty gives us the hope and power to preserve, recover and build on our food producing knowledge and capacity.

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. It defends the interests and inclusion of the next generation. It offers a strategy to resist and dismantle the current corporate trade and food regime, and directions for food, farming, pastoral and fisheries systems determined by local producers. Food sovereignty prioritises local and national economies and markets and empowers peasant and family farmer-driven agriculture, artisanal - fishing, pastoralist-led grazing, and food production, distribution and consumption based on environmental, social and economic sustainability. Food sovereignty promotes transparent trade that guarantees just income to all peoples and the rights of consumers to control their food and nutrition. It ensures that the rights to use and manage our lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations.

In Nyéléni, through numerous debates and interactions, we are deepening our collective understanding of food sovereignty and learned about the reality of the struggles of our respective movements to retain autonomy and regain our powers. We now understand better the tools we need to build our movement and advance our collective vision.

What are we fighting for?

A world where…

…all peoples, nations and states are able to determine their own food producing systems and policies that provide every one of us with good quality, adequate, affordable, healthy, and culturally appropriate food;

...recognition and respect of women’s roles and rights in food production, and representation of women in all decision making bodies;

…all peoples in each of our countries are able to live with dignity, earn a living wage for their labour and have the opportunity to remain in their homes;

...where food sovereignty is considered a basic human right, recognised and implemented by communities, peoples, states and international bodies;

…we are able to conserve and rehabilitate rural environments, fish stocks, landscapes and food traditions based on ecologically sustainable management of land, soils, water, seas, seeds, livestock and other biodiversity;

…we value, recognize and respect our diversity of traditional knowledge, food, language and culture, and the way we organise and express ourselves;

…. there is genuine and integral agrarian reform that guarantees peasants full rights to land, defends and recovers the territories of indigenous peoples, ensures fishing communities’ access and control over their fishing areas and eco-systems, honours access and control over pastoral lands and migratory routes, assures decent jobs with fair remuneration and labour rights for all, and a future for young people in the countryside;

...where agrarian reform revitalises inter-dependence between producers and consumers, ensures community survival, social and economic justice and ecological sustainability, and respect for local autonomy and governance with equal rights for women and men...where it guarantees the right to territory and self-determination for our peoples;

...where we share our lands and territories peacefully and fairly among our peoples, be we peasants, indigenous peoples, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, or others;

…in the case of natural and human-created disasters and conflict-recovery situations, food sovereignty acts as a kind of “insurance” that strengthens local recovery efforts and mitigates negative impacts... where we remember that affected communities are not helpless, and where strong local organization for self-help is the key to recovery;

...where peoples’ power to make decisions about their material, natural and spiritual heritage are defended;

... where all peoples have the right to defend their territories from the actions of transnational corporations;

What are we fighting against?

mperialism, neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism and patriarchy, and all systems that impoverish life, resources and eco-systems, and the agents that promote the above such as international financial institutions, the World Trade Organisation, free trade agreements, transnational corporations,and governments that are antagonistic to their peoples;

The dumping of food at prices below the cost of production in the global economy;

The domination of our food and food producing systems by corporations that place profits before people, health and the environment;

Technologies and practices that undercut our future food producing capacities, damage the environment and put our health at risk. Those include transgenic crops and animals, terminator technology, industrial aquaculture and destructive fishing practices, the so-called white revolution of industrial dairy practices, the so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ Green Revolutions, and the “Green Deserts” of industrial bio-fuel monocultures and other plantations;

The privatisation and commodification of food, basic and public services, knowledge, land, water, seeds, livestock and our natural heritage;

Development projects/models and extractive industry that displace people and destroy our environments and natural heritage;

Wars, conflicts, occupations, economic blockades, famines, forced displacement of people and confiscation of their land, and all forces and governments that cause and support them; post disaster and conflict reconstruction programmes that destroy our environments and capacities;

The criminalization of all those who struggle to protect and defend our rights;

Food aid that disguises dumping, introduces GMOs into local environments and food systems and creates new colonialism patterns;

The internationalisation and globalisation of paternalistic and patriarchal values that marginalise women, diverse agricultural, indigenous, pastoral and fisher communities around the world;

What can and will we do about it?

Just as we are working with the local community in Selingue to create a meeting space at Nyeleni, we are committed to building our collective movement for food sovereignty by forging alliances, supporting each others’ struggles and extending our solidarity, strengths, and creativity to peoples all over the world who are committed to food sovereignty. Every struggle, in any part of the world for food sovereignty, is our struggle.

We have arrived at a number of collective actions to share our vision of food sovereignty with all peoples of this world, which are elaborated in our synthesis document. We will implement these actions in our respective local areas and regions, in our own movements and jointly in solidarity with other movements. We will share our vision and action agenda for food sovereignty with others who are not able to be with us here in Nyeleni so that the spirit of Nyeleni permeates across the world and becomes a powerful force to make food sovereignty a reality for peoples all over the world.

Finally, we give our unconditional and unwavering support to the peasant movements of Mali and ROPPA in their demands that food sovereignty become a reality in Mali and by extension in all of Africa.

Now is the time for food sovereignty!

2007-01-24T17:22:00.000-02:00

the new link on the right, 'Human Rights Watch Report, Events of 2006: Brazil', takes you to human rights watch homepage (www.hrw.org) from which you can access their 3-page summary of human rights abuses in brazil during 2006 (click on 'publications' in the top left-hand corner, then on 'world development report', then on 'americas' and 'brazil')... it includes reports on: police violence; torture; prison conditions; rural violence and land conflict (which mentions the death of 2 mst leaders in august 2006); forced labour; impunity; human rights defenders; and key international actors.

the report's findings are very negative, but i recommend you spend 5 minutes reading the brasil pages if you want to get a feel for some of the human rights challenges the country is facing...

2007-01-17T14:09:00.000-02:00

just to let you know that there are lots of funky 'work-event' photos downloaded into 3 new albums:

1) MST/Bahia's christmas parties: Celebrating the reelection of Valmir (19th December 2006)
2) MST/Bahia's christmas parties: State head-office 'secret santa' dinner (21st December 2006)
3) MST/Bahia's 19th Annual State Conference (9th - 13th January 2007)

just click on the links on the left...

happy new year to you to all.

love,
celia

(at my desk - beginning of january 2007)

2007-01-17T11:41:00.000-02:00

end of year holidays in Rio and in Costa Rica (i know, i'm spoilt!)...

rio really is as beautiful as the postcards

christmas day drinking champagne on top of sugar-loaf

mountain, rio

with dad and fi enjoying the beauty of costa rica's national parks

baby blue herons in costa rica - the variety and richness of the wildlife there is just amazing

2006-12-23T13:16:00.000-02:00

FELIZ NATAL!
JOYEUX NOEL!
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

it's the day before the day before christmas and i'm at the computer for the last time before the hols (thank goodness, i'm exhausted!)...

the latest edition (and last of 2006) of my newsletter, em movimento 16, is ready and has been sent out by email, as usual. if any of you have not yet received it, do let me know and i'll get it to you asap.

wishing you all a very peaceful, relaxing christmas and holiday period with friends and family. no need to be too jealous of us in tropical far-off places, it's far too hot to feel like christmas and, frankly, snow-covered pine trees and santas sweating under layers of clothing and fake beards in 35ºc is just silly!

thinking of you,
x c

(everyone deserves a wee christmas drink!)

2006-12-18T11:49:00.000-02:00

Celia’s Christmas Appeal

On the 16th December, I will have been in Brazil for 3 ½ years… It’s a fair while and I feel very much at home here now. 8 months of this time was spent working for the CMP in Aracaju (see the first Em Movimento newsletters), and since March 2004 I have been supporting the work of the ‘Gender Sector’ of the MST in the state of Bahia (the size of France!). 2006 has been a year of both:

Successes…
- Never before has the word ‘gender’ been used and discussed so much within the movement in this state. At the beginning of the year, the theme was included – for the first time in 17 years of the movement’s existence in Bahia - as part of the programme of the yearly State Conference… a huge victory!
- Despite serious money shortages the ‘Gender Sector’ has been able to maintain its yearly time-table of activities: the I State Women Leaders’ Conference from 18th – 20th January; the VI Women Rural Workers Camp, with 1300 participants, from the 5th – 9th March; 7 Regional Women’s Conferences; workshops in rural camps; the production of 2 educational leaflets distributed to women and men in the rural camps for use in study groups (the central themes of which were ‘Violence against Women’ in the 1st and ‘Reproductive and Sexual Rights’ in the 2nd); Gender trainings with ‘Gender Sector’ coordinators and camp women and men; the launch of a “No to Violence Against Women” campaign…

And challenges…
- With the regional offices finding it difficult to keep their accounting up-to-date (imagine, for example, vouching for every centavo spent, when many of the rural camps are accessible only by moto-taxi, none of whose drivers even carry receipts!), financial project instalments are delayed and, therefore, so too are activities that had been planned a long time in advance.
- Communication continues to be one of our greatest challenges as a movement. It’s easy to get frustrated after spending 4 days trying to speak to one key person in a decision-making process because the public phone in the rural camp where they live isn’t working and their mobile phone (if they have one) doesn’t have any reception!

As you already know, I am supported financially in my work here by E-CHANGER, a Swiss-French NGO (Non-governmental Organisation) based in Fribourg, Switzerland. As well as my work with the MST, as part of my contract I am required to share with you all – my ‘support group’ - the reality of life here, and the general struggle and work of the MST - hence these Em Movimento newsletters and the Blog (address given below). E-CHANGER recognises that the work of a small number of people (us, the volunteers) has a limited impact on redressing the imbalance between ‘north’ (the minority world) and ‘south’ (the majority world). What is crucial, therefore, is that those in rich, ‘developed’ countries, not only understand that this imbalance exists (by learning about the struggle of rural landless workers for land and survival in Brazil, for example), but also why it exists (the huge inequality between rich and poor, colonial systems of land distribution still in existence, 3rd World debt, the ‘free’ market, privatisation of state assets and other capitalist and neoliberal politics) and how they can use their power (political, economic, social) to challenge this reality…

Every month I receive £364 to pay my rent, food and other living costs, and I am required (by contract) to raise between £141 and £281 of this per month, approximately £2529 per year. Some of you have already, very generously, made a donation, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you enormously. But many of you have up to now chosen not to – and of course I respect that decision totally - and that might be because you hadn’t realised just how much a small amount goes a very long way. If 15 of you were to give £10 a month (perhaps by setting up a direct debit to the Barclays account given below), or 7 of you were to give £20 a month, I would already be close to raising what is required of me. How amazing that would be! I realise that you have lots of other worthwhile commitments, but if you feel you could support my work with the MST – a people’s movement that is a worldwide reference and with whom I feel very privileged to be working – I, E-CHANGER in Switzerland and the MST in Brazil would all be very grateful.

A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you. May 2007 be a year of peace, participation and fulfilment for all the world’s peoples.

Much love,
Celia

Bank account details…
In Switzerland (the same account used by both Jean-David and I in the past): U 3264.25.97 BCGE CITY (Banque Cantonale de Genève)

In Britain: Barclays Bank, sort code: 20-59-42, account no: 90891983
(account name: Celia Alldridge Re: Brazil)

For more information about…
- My work and personal life:
www.celia-emmovimento.blogspot.net and former editions of the newsletter Em Movimento (ask me to send you back copies in pdf, if you’d like them)
- The MST:
www.mst.org.br (Portuguese) / www.mstbrazil.org (English)
- E-CHANGER:
www.echanger.ch (French with some English)
www.echangerbrasil.org.br (Portuguese)

2006-12-18T10:48:00.000-02:00

“Then who, asked I, tripped the Fall if it weren’t for Old Georgie? […]

The Prescient answered, Old’uns [humans] tripped their own Fall.

O, her words was a rope o’ smoke. But Old’uns got the Smart [knowledge]!

I mem’ry she answered, Yay, Old’uns Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’ humans, yay, a hunger for more.

More what? I asked. Old’uns’d got ev’rythin’.

O, more gear, more food, faster speeds, longer lifes, easier lifes, more power, yay. Now the Hold World is big but it weren’t big ‘nuff for that hunger what made Old’uns rip out the skies an’ boil up the seas an’ poison soil with crazed atoms an’ donkey ‘bout with rotted seeds so new plagues was borned an’ babbits [babies] was freakbirthed. Fin’ly, bit’ly, then quicksharp, states busted into bar’bric tribes an’ the Civ’lize Days ended, ‘cept for a few folds’n’pockets here’n’there, where its last embers glimmer.

I asked why Meronym’d never spoke this yarnin’ in the Valleys.

Valleysmen’d not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too. I know it from other tribes offland what I stayed with. Times are you say a person’s b’liefs ain’t true, they think you’re sayin’ their lifes ain’t true an’ their truth ain’t true.

Yay, she was prob’ly right.

Mitchell, D. (2004) Cloud Atlas Sceptre Paperbacks: 286 - 287

2006-11-14T19:53:00.000-02:00

annual e-changer volunteers' get-together, 6th - 10th november, 2006

last week, e-changer's brasilian volunteers - and representatives of the local NGOs/movements we work for - spent a week together in the southern bahian city of ilhéus. the programme included: evaluation of the last 10 years of e-changer's brasilian coordination (the current 2 coordenators will begin to hand over their responsabilities to a new team in january 2007); visits to local communities and presentations of reflections resulting, and conclusions drawn, from those visits; and looking ahead to the future...

along with this message, i've included links to 2 new albums in which you'll find photos of the get-together itself (volunteers and their families, etc), and of the community visit i organised in the middle of the week for 15 get-together participants to 3 mst camps in the region. we were all very moved by the welcomes given to us by the residents of camps 'luanda', 'ojeferson' and 'patria livre' (in the form of theatre, songs and capoeira), and felt privileged to be able to learn more about their struggle for land and agrarian reform.

2006-11-13T17:29:00.000-02:00

a 'what does celia look like now?' update 2...

it's not even been 2 months since i posted the 'what does celia look like now?' update number 1, but already it's out of date! long hair just wasn't me, so after letting it grow since i arrived in brasil i recently decided to chop it all off... feel free to leave comments!

2006-11-13T17:00:00.000-02:00

celia and the mst

i've been writing a 'celia and the mst' page in the em movimento newsletter for over 3 years, but i don't think i've ever described the office i work in (the mst/bahia's state head office in salvador). so i'd like to present to you both the phyiscal office space and my colleagues who work in it. i'll let the photos do the talking...

all of us outside the office. from left to right:
(back) isadora, heloiza, jaqueline, joatan, lourdes, benedito, maricarla, ednaldo
(front) mara, me, a woman from one of our camps, ana rita, adenilsa, tâmara

heloiza and isadora's office ('projects sector'). with them in this photo is vagner, who works for one of the 8 regional mst/bahia offices. my desk is on the other side of the sliding door you can see at the back behind isadora.

adenilsa, the 'education sector' coordinator in her office.

fabya, my boss and office coordinator (she's not in the photos unfortunately - she's studying for her MA in a different north-eastern state), has seen to it that our office team is highly capable, dynamic, young... and mostly female! here's some of my beautiful colleagues:

maricarla (left) and mara (accounts and admin)

tâmara (reception)

jaqueline & baby (accounts)

me at my desk! ('gender sector')

and last but not least, more gorgeous mst/bahia staff:

bené (finances)

ednaldo (general admin)

2006-10-30T16:01:00.001-03:00

tired but happy...

yesterday (29th october) was a big day for us in brazil and, especially, for supporters of leftwing president 'lula' (luiz inácio lula da silva). last night, at 19:30, he was announced overwhelming winner of the second round of the presidential elections, with 60.82% of valid votes (around 58,2 million, compared to the 37, 5 million votes gained by his rival, geraldo alckmin).

a resounding victory.

having already led the country for 4 years, he now has the possibility of amplifying his administration's social welfare programmes and implementing much needed political reforms . will he have the courage? will he be blocked at every turn by congressmen and deputies from other political parties? will the word 'socialism' reappear in official PT (partido dos trabalhadores - the workers party) documents?

here in bahia the commemorations went on into the early hours of morning, at a street party organised by the PT party in the state (to whom the new state governor, jaques wagner -elected in the first round of the elections on the 1st october - belongs). after so much celebrating, it is probable that the 78.15% of bahian women and men who voted for 'lula' are today tired but very happy...

(have a look at how the guardian reported lula's victory at http://www.guardian.co.uk/brazil/story/0,,1934753,00.html )

(photo from: www.atarde.com.br )

2006-10-13T10:33:00.000-03:00

just to let you know that the latest edition of my newsletter, Em Movimento 15 (September 2006) is ready. if you haven't already received a copy by email, do let me know (celiaalldridge@gmail.com) and i'll send you one.

have a fun weekend,
celia

ps following a request from my favourite forester friend vince, here's a photo of beautiful brazilian nature in all its glory (taken from http://www.nature.org/wherewework/southamerica/brazil/)...

2006-09-27T13:41:00.000-03:00

i'd like to share with you all a couple of photos taken by jean-david yesterday. they're beautiful and they sum up the season well.

the first is of an 'election candidate car'. on sunday (the 1st october), the brazilians will be voting for new (or, most probably, the same) president, federal and state deputies and federal senators. so it's 'all go' at the moment, as much in the interior of the country as here in the capital - as well as flyers being handed out at every street corner and huge posters of smiling candidates, the candidates' election numbers have been painted on every avaliable wall space and loud speakers fixed on top of cars and vans drive round and round the city with jingles blaring at full volume...

the second photo is of a common scene in the 'sertão' (the very hot, dry area of the interior of the north-eastern states in which the farm that jean-david now lives on
is situated), a small, white church in the
background with a typical, barriguda, tree
dominating the village square in the foreground.
a stunning but very harsh, drought prone, environment in which to live (survive)...

2006-09-27T12:20:00.000-03:00

a 'what does celia look like now?' update...

for those of you who've forgotten what i look like after more than 3 years away, here's a quick reminder (photos taken at the beginning of september). it seems that the rate my hair continues to grow is making up for my lack of growth in height when i was younger!

2006-09-25T10:26:00.000-03:00

for those of you who are interested in learning more about the MST, i've recently read an excellent book - in english - that i would highly recommend. here's how 'Cutting the Wire' is described on the back cover:

Cutting the Wire: The story of the landless movement in Brazil
Sue Branford & Jan Rocha (2002) London: Latin America Bureau

Access to land is one of the key issues for developing countries – and Brazil has one of the most inequitable land distributions in the world, with vast tracts of land held by often absentee landowners. Meanwhile thousands of peasants live in marginal lands in cities and rural areas.

The Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) has proved a huge success with the disenfranchised rural and urban poor in Brazil – becoming one of the largest social movements in the world. Cutting the Wire is the first account in English of the origins, history and current challenges faced by Brazil’s majority. The authors have travelled the vast expanse of the country to record the words and actions of hundreds of activities who have taken their lives into their own hands.

Cutting the Wire is how the MST describe the act of occupying the land, the cornerstone of their movement. It is the baptism of fire for the militant, as essential part of their identity and it plays a key role in the mística, the moment of collective ritual that kicks off all MST events.

“We have always been told that agrarian reform is a good idea in principle, but the conjuntura, or present moment, isn’t right” says Mônica, an MST leader. “Well, we make the conjuntura right.” The activists become subjects of their own history and by doing so they turn their world upside down. Cutting the Wire is their story, told in their own words, in vivid first-hand accounts of a continuing struggle.

“Cutting the Wire documents a struggle which will resonate with campaigners and activists all over the world. It will become essential reading for anyone hoping to understand where the new politics came from and how it works.” George Monbiot

“This is the fullest account of what is probably the most ambitious social movement in contemporary Latin America – essential reading for anyone interested in that continent.” Eric Hobsbawm

2006-09-12T17:18:00.000-03:00

'eldorado': a photo journal of an MST camp

'eldorado' is the MST's permanent camp nearest to salvador, 1 1/4 hours drive away. despite being so close to the capital of the state, the 35 families who have made their homes there face all the usual challenges of surviving in the countryside - lack of basic services (no piped water in the houses, a health post that has never worked, etc), lack of tecnical accompaniment, little access to credit, few leisure opportunities... though facing significant problems, the MST and camp members manage one of our most regularly used training centres within the camp, a centre that I have stayed at several times. most recently, I helped out at a regional women's conference held there, and took the opportunity to photograph images that seem to sum up 'eldorado' well...

click on "Photos: MST Camp 'Eldorado'" in the links section to your left to get a feel for the camps i work in and for what life is like in rural brasil. it's well worth it!

2006-09-12T11:22:00.000-03:00

as promised, a few photos from the youth conference back in august. unfortunately no digital ones where taken, so the quality's not great, but at least they give a feel for the event...

2006-08-18T16:15:00.000-03:00

it's the end of a busy week and the start of a busy weekend... one of many busy weekends in august / september.

last weekend (12 /13th august) i co-facilitated a couple of workshops (the theme being 'reproductive and sexual rights', the discussions were very revealing - both in terms of how mature the young people we were working with really are, and some of the life experiences they've already had) at our youth conference...

900 young people, from rural and urban areas, camping out in our of our permament rural camps (a 7 hour drive from salvador) to take part in a programme of talks, workshops and cultural events = lots of music and noise, interesting debates, mudbaths (it rained the entire 3 days) and very little sleep for the organisers!

this weekend (19 / 20th august) i'll be at a regional 'gender sector' conference (the MST/Bahia is split into 8 working regions, each with their own coordenation), helping out in general and facilitating a day of gender training for the regional and micro-regional coordinators...

then from the 22nd i'll be back in the same region to participate (rather than organise, which'll make a nice change) in a state university run training programme for 5 days before taking part in the MST/Bahia's state coordenation meeting at the end of august.

and so it goes on, and on, and on... i'll let you know how it all goes and will get some photos onto the blog soon so you can get a feel for our events.

2006-07-28T18:45:00.000-03:00

it's not often that you meet a national pop star so i forgive myself for being a bit of a toungue-tied groupie when i met geraldo azevedo (brasilian music legend) at the recent são gabriel music festival in the interior of bahia. his son lives in london, apparently!

2006-07-28T18:26:00.000-03:00

the blogging world...

what better way to share what i'm up to in Salvador - professionally and personally - than by way of a blog of sorts? the first 'em movimento' site is still up and running, but won't be updated anymore, so it'll be here that i share my news and views and photos with you... enjoy!