Statement on the meeting in Guatemala
We, feminist women, indigenous women, peasant women, rural and urban women, academics, all diverse, who come from the territories of Abya Yala and meet at the Meeting Women and Feminist Economy for Life, from October 22 to 24, 2019, in Guatemala, to bring together our knowledge, experiences and life practices and reaffirm our political pact to walk towards emancipation, recognizing the traces of our ancestors who opened paths and have historically contributed to the sustenance of life for us, our daughters and granddaughters.
In this space we share reflection and analysis of the various forms of exploitation of the work of rural women, peasants, merchants, domestic workers, academics; the double and triple shifts that weigh on us, depriving us of time and energy, limiting our right to autonomy and to decide about our bodies and our lives.
We denounce that the land, water, common goods, the cosmos, spirituality, and all of humanity are being impacted by the patriarchal, colonialist, racist, neoliberal, capitalist, and extractivist model that is attacking our bodies, minds, memory, words, history, and the networks of life.
We denounce that economic, political, and religious fundamentalisms, through corporations, states, and churches, drug trafficking, and organized crime, are exacerbating poverty, exclusion, and misery, installing megaprojects and privatizing our resources, threatening the food sovereignty of our peoples and their self-determination, causing forced displacement, criminalizing migration, and normalizing the hierarchy of bodies and lives.
They are destroying the minimum rights recognized for women and peoples, resorting to militarization to preserve the privileges of the elites, repressing with more ferocity, and declaring war on the peoples who are standing up in protest.
We reject the brutal violence that governments, particularly in Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Brazil, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Colombia, in collusion with the centers of power such as the IMF, the IDB, transnational corporations, extractive companies, and imperialist countries, are perpetrating against those who are raising their voices and putting their bodies on the line against neoliberal measures that threaten dignity and rights.
We condemn sexual, economic, epistemic, political, institutional and ideological violence against women who resist and defend rights in the multiple territories of Latin America.
Given this situation, we reaffirm our conviction to continue building together, from our diversity and resistance, emancipatory thoughts, proposals, worldviews, and cosmovisions.
Therefore, we strongly condemn the neoliberal, anti-popular, militarized, and repressive onslaught against our peoples, especially against women, youth, and Indigenous peoples. And in this hour of continental protest, we stand in solidarity with the women and feminists of Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Argentina, Honduras, Nicaragua, and with all the women of Abya Yala who confront these infamous powers.
We are inspired by and stand up for the women who are in the streets, in the territories, in the homes, in the schools, in the countryside, in the cities, in the communities, in the families, in the organizations, in the institutions, resisting and creating, resisting and speaking out, resisting and sustaining life. We express our unrestricted SISTERHOOD with each one of them, and with their collectives in this commitment to a feminist economy for life.
October 2019
CLACSO Working Group
Feminist economics
