This Wednesday, March 8, the annual 8M march for International Women’s Day will take place. The Feminist Intersocial called a international women’s strike the PIT-CNT joined.
Although the different groups will carry out their own activities and meet in different parts of Montevideo -and the country- the Intersocial will march from Plaza Libertad to the building of the University of the Republic (Udelar) at 6:00 p.m. with the slogan “Feminist Struggle against hunger and oppression”.
“Everything that the State does not do, women do”, ensures the proclamation of the movement, read this Monday and published on its website.
“Abandonment of the State”
“A new 8M finds us women together in the streetsfighting against patriarchal oppression, denouncing violence and the abandonment of the State. We are in 2023, the first year out of the pandemic, and despite government announcements indicating improvements in economic conditions Hunger hasn’t stopped.” the text begins.
Precisely, Intersocial points to “unpaid and persecuted double work” when referring to the fact that “the withdrawal of the State and the dismantling of public policies carried out by MIDES (Ministry of Social Development)” implied that women assume “care tasks for women and children who suffer violence” and that they take charge of “to guarantee food to hundreds of thousands of families who eat in popular pots”.
The movement denounced a “attack on solidarity and collective actions” and indirectly alluded to the case involving the former head of presidential custody, Alejandro Astesiano. “We emphatically reject the practices of spying on social activists and the persecution of high school students for being “feminists” by authorities close to the presidency,” says the proclamation.
Murdered women and fire in the Mides shelter
The proclamation also recalls that “So far this year, 5 women have been murdered and 45 in 2022.” Also that eight children were “murdered by their parents in the same year” and that they still await “justice for the murdered trans women.”
“In recent years, some state responses to women in situations of violence have weakened,” says Intersocial, mentioning the case of the 31-year-old woman who died in a fire at the Aramaya Hotelwhich functioned as a refuge for the Mides.
Projects, social security and the LUC
The movement rejects “the bill voted in Deputies that expands surrogacy because it opens a market for rental wombs.”
He also criticizes the current project of social security reform because “It affects women more, due to the fact that they receive 78.4% of the total income of men” and because “the lengthening of working life” exacerbates “the tension” between the “double working day (paid and unpaid work)” that many women have.
On the other hand, it also points to article 74 of the law of urgent consideration, which set a sentence of four to 15 years in prison for anyone who tries or manages to bring drugs into prisons, hospitals or educational centers. “Micro-trafficking has the face of a woman, young, with a family in charge and violated by multiple forms of violence, most of whom enter drugs because they are emotionally manipulated by their partners or for fear of reprisals against their relatives deprived of liberty”, argues the Intersocial.
Racism and multinational companies
“Afro womencontinue to be victims of colonialism, capitalism and prevailing racism, which subjects them to poverty, indigence, criminalizes them, kills them and discards them and their children as garbage“, denounces the movement. “It condemns them to precarious jobs, poor pay, informality and job insecurity,” it adds.
Likewise, the proclamation refers to the “extractivist production model that Large multinational companies are set up to make use of our natural assetslegitimizing macho and patriarchal practices, placing women as a bargaining chip”.
And he recalls “cases of sexual workers violated in productive enterprises in the forestry sector” as “a clear and sad example.” For example, in UPM 2 properties in Paso de los Toros (Tacuarembó) a Polish worker of the company attacked and left with several fractures a Dominican sex worker.
From the Organization of Sex Workers of Uruguay (Others) pointed out against the police action once the woman called after being attacked.
The leader of Otras, Karina Núñez, said in Informative Sarandí that the victim suffered “all kinds of insults” by a policeman, while “screaming” to call the ambulance. From the union they understood that the woman was discriminated against by the police because of her status as a sex worker.
