After attempting to turn around the economic crisis that the neoliberal globalized economy is experiencing, the world’s greatest imperial power, the United States, is leaving a trail of new contradictions that affect humanity not only in the economic area, but also at social, political, cultural and personal levels. For people in Chile, life itself has become more insecure, more unpleasant and less satisfying, as shown in studies carried out in recent years by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
According to the UNDP report for the year 2000, Chileans complain of a lack of confidence in personal relationships, deficiencies in public institutions responsible for the security of society and problems in finding meaning and direction. The insanity of a system that seeks to impose rules on the whole world to allow big capital to increase profits has reached such an extreme that it does not care if it endangers the very existence of the planet. The war-and-fascist-like atmosphere that has been created allows ndividuals like the director of the IMF, Horst Kohler, to state the US attack against Iraq “could have a positive effect on the world economy, in as much as it will eliminate the growing uncertainty which is scaring off big investors,” as long as the attack is a quick one.

The abrogation and violation of international agreements and treaties is a key characteristic of US foreign policy. The United States distanced itself from the Kyoto Agreement aimed at limiting global warming, broke the nuclear arms limitation treaty, and is testing its anti-missile shield. The US also withdrew from the International Conference on Racism and Discrimination and rejected the Biodiversity Convention at September’s Earth Summit in South Africa. Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to sign the agreement encouraging use of renewable energy sources, turning the US into the main party responsible for the ecological problems affecting the planet. The Chilean people, and, in particular, Chilean women, opposed the war against Iraq, while at the same time rejecting the Hussein dictatorship. To speak of women and neoliberal globalization implies rethinking the place of women in today’s society, which is changing amidst these intense and dramatic contradictions. It means looking again at women workers, particularly historically “informal” women workers who work in the home. It means rescuing from oblivion the idea of women “as a social subject,” regaining what has been stolen from us: our right to create and transform life as social agents, as subjects of our own work and our own history.

For Chilean women, this year has a special meaning because it is the 30th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the people’s government of Salvador Allende, the most democratic government in our history. The coup d’etat against the people’s government was only made possible by the intervention of the United States.

This year is a time to take account of the role played by the workers and progressive forces, especially Chilean women, in the process that culminated in the victory. It is a time also for reviewing, as well, the meaning of the military coup itself and the struggle against the dictatorship.

The participation of women in workers’ campaigns for the right to vote, healthcare and education meant women were also important builders of the social and political mobilization process that brought Salvador Allende to the nation’s presidency. Chilean women joined wholeheartedly in putting the program of the People’s Unity government into effect. The Kindergarten Law, the Half Liter of Milk a Day Program that provided free milk to all children under 14, food distribution through the Supply and Price Committees (JAP), the organization of more than one million mothers in the Mothers’ Centers, their active participation in the Vigilance Committees in workplaces and in voluntary work, all speak eloquently about the enthusiasm and dedication with which women took up the tasks of people’s government.

It is no coincidence that in his last words, spoken on September 11, 1973, Allende talked especially to women: “I speak to you, above all, to the humble woman of our land, the woman farmworker who believed in us, to the mother who knew of our concern for the children…” Allende understood Chilean women as an active subject in the thousand-day revolutionary process he led.

When the bloody coup d’etat occurred, women were the first to go into the streets to look for their arrested comrades. Women were the first ones to denounce the murders, the first to organize themselves to go out and protest, conquering fear and often risking their very lives, because it was necessary to lift the people’s spirits and to confront those who were sowing terror. They have been uncompromising in the struggle for full truth and justice, and against letting the crimes of the coup-makers go unpunished.

The long night of the dictatorship was lit by thousands of initiatives by women to confront unemployment, misery and impunity that the tyranny brought with it. Communal soup kitchens, buying clubs, hunger marches, ironing-board protests, barricades, chaining themselves up to demand freedom for political prisoners and the reappearance of the “disappeared” – women participated in every form of struggle against the dictator, from graffiti to armed struggle. During the 17 years of tyranny, each International Women’s Day meant a confrontation with the dictatorship, which prohibited any kind of demonstrations. March 8th became a red-letter day of battles in the streets against repressive forces. The role of women as defenders of freedom, democracy and life became clear in the minds of the people.

Women’s conditions of life and work have also changed with globalization. Historically, the work done by women has not been very visible, and often has been unpaid. However, it is undeniable that such work has permanently increased profits. Neoliberal globalization incorporates masses of women into the workforce precisely at the moment when job instability and uncertainty has reached previously unheard of levels, along with workplace injustice and unfairness. Today the new mode of capitalist accumulation leads to the deregulation of the job market and promotes minimal state intervention in terms of establishing a minimum wage. Thus, the conditions under which workers are hired are determined by the autonomous demands of the marketplace and the persistent destabilization of working conditions: less permanent workers, more subcontracting, salary cuts, less qualified workers, etc.

With this unheard of devaluation of work, labor relations have deteriorated, leaving little or no room for the majority of workers to participate in decision-making. Work as a central existential and cultural reality has been replaced by client-ism, where one lives on handouts, given in exchange for one’s loyalty, silence and passivity. Social space has been displaced by the mass media and is also monopolized by big capital.

In the midst of the impoverishment of growing sectors of the population, women appear, along with indigenous peoples, as one of the most affected groups. The “feminization of poverty” is not a mere catchphrase. It now appears the quality of life has thinned to the point where we are asked to believe there is no link between home life, life at work and the life of the nation. Today, consumption determines culture, including political culture, modes of creation and procreation, lifestyles, production and idleness, personal identity and belonging, and even emotional, sexual and social relationships.

Social and gender inequality have increased, leading to various forms of marginalization and intimate relationships that promote abuse, mistreatment and violence. The woman worker finds herself boxed into service work, commerce, and temporary employment, with all the associated lack of protection and super-exploitation. Women’s unemployment rate is much higher than men’s (in Chile, female unemployment is at 11.7 percent according to the 1998 Casen Survey). Women receive salaries that are as much as 40 percent lower than those of men, while facing sexual harassment, lack of proper attention to their health problems and less access to preventive care and services.

Concertación (the current governing coalition in Chile) governments have not introduced major changes that benefit women. Laws against domestic violence and other laws benefiting women, such as the Support Program for Female Heads of Household or the Pregnant Teens Program, exist on paper only, due to lack of training and technical and financial support, because women must dedicate a great part of their time to the home and caring for children. There is no retirement, no preventive health care available for female heads of households. Chile remains the only country in the world that has no divorce law and one of the few that criminalizes therapeutic abortion.

It is bizarre that when one tries to open a discussion on this theme, a woman’s right to choose regarding her own body is never taken into account, nor is her right to bear healthy children with minimum prenatal risk.

What is more, the Ricardo Lagos government’s proposed healthcare reform measures further undermine the right to healthcare, particularly for women. The most serious problem is that none of the three Concertación governments to date has been able to advance the democratization of Chilean society, as they all promised to do. Over 30 years after the military coup, the central institutional pillars of the Pinochet dictatorship remain firmly in place: the 1980 Constitution, the binominal electoral system, the designated senators-for-life, the Constitutional Court and the National Security Council. The Armed Forces continue to guarantee the institutional status of the current political system, while the neoliberal economic system guarantees 70 percent of all Chileans live in poverty.

The present neoliberal model cites as its ideological centerpiece the concept of “family” in order to maintain an authoritarian and conservative system. Its reference point is the bourgeois family, with its patriarchal, male-dominated and authoritarian norms, something that is very far from the way the overwhelming majority of Chilean families live today. The reality is that there is not a single type of woman, just as there is no one type of family.

This notion hides class differences, the civic, political and working faces of women. Neoliberal ideology defends women as housewives, confined to the home, a situation that no longer exists in the great majority of households. It does not speak to the rights of women as citizens. It incorporates women into the workforce, but it does not bother to reform the Labor Code to assure them the right to an eight-hour workday, a decent wage, the right to join a union or to strike. On the contrary, labor reforms pushed by the Concertación governments have worsened the working conditions of Chilean workers even more. This is demonstrated, for example, by the lack of legislation protecting women farmworkers from exposure to pesticides, chemicals that not only damage their health but also affect their reproductive capacity, endangering the very continuity of the human species. The predominant gender inequalities bring about abuse, mistreatment and violence. Inequality shows itself in the decline of civic public participation and motivation. The fact that there are five women cabinet members in the present government, that seven sub-secretary posts are held by women, as well as 14 governorships, have a purely symbolic and token value given the ruling system of sexual and gender discrimination. But these gestures do not hide reality. We have not seen any indication these tiny tokens of power can ever be translated into radical transformation in the way politics work, either from a gender point of view or with the objective of creating a project of democratic participation.

Now more than ever, our transformative powers must begin to exert power on the state and on the politicians in power, with the strength that comes from organization, mobilization and participation, as the only way to begin to overcome exclusive and elitist forms of conflict resolution and decision-making.

Today, together with the women of the whole world, we are called to block US war madness, to defend the lives of our children and the future of the planet.

--Gladys Marin is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Chile.