Jorge Capelán, Managua con Amro, April 18th 2021
https://managuaconamor.blogspot.com/2021/04/gioconda-belli-derechos-de-…
Gioconda Belli with CIA agent Carl David Goette-Luciak
during the failed coup attempt of 2018 in Nicaragua
In a futile exercise of denial of reality, the "feminist" writer Gioconda Belli posted in Confidencial, the Chamorro family website, a curious argument against women's right to political participation. "Of course I agree that there should be women in electoral structures, but demanding a 50-50 in terms of gender representation is an artificial measure that assumes a reality distant from ours," Belli writes.
First of all let's clarify a couple of things on the subject: this week, the National Assembly submitted an initiative to reform the Electoral Law to the corresponding legislative Commission that, among other aspects and following what was established in the Constitutional Reform of seven years ago, in 2014, seeks to promote the "gender equity of the members of the Supreme Electoral Council, departmental, municipal councils and Voting Boards in all positions of popular election". So this proposal advocates that 50% of all electoral officials should be women.
Although the reform sent to the Commission contains several other proposed changes, among them provisions to prevent elected legislators switching parties and to avoid illegal electoral financing by foreign powers, the common argument among the opposition parties against these reforms has been that the provisions to guarantee gender equity would somehow be "unfair" discrimination against them.
But if Nicaragua's opposition had real popular roots, it would no problem at all presenting 50% women both as their candidates and their electoral officers. After all, a putative "feminist" movement has been presented as one of the pillars of that opposition, at least in Western media coverage of the failed 2018 coup attempt. One might almost conclude this supposed "feminist" movement opposing the government is in fact just another propaganda fiction to legitimize Nicaragua's anti-popular, reactionary and anti-democratic political opposition.
According to Belli, President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, i.e. "the Ortega-Murillo couple" (which is how the opposition personalize politics in Nicaragua aiming to deny that Sandinismo is a mass movement with very broad support across society) manipulate the World Economic Forum, the World Inter-Parliamentary Union and the UN with false statistics on women's participation.
Belli acknowledges that there are many women ministers in the Sandinista government, but they are mere "tokens" of Ortega-Murillo. True or not (and it is not), it is worth asking what makes "Ortega-Murillo" able to populate their entire electoral line up with "token" women while the opposition cannot - quite a conspiracy theory!
In Nicaragua, 58.82% of the ministers are women, and they occupy some of the most important positions: Government (Interior); Health; Education; Family, Cooperative, Associative and Community Economy (a strategic sector, which today is carrying the weight of the country's economy); Environment and Natural Resources, just to name a few examples. Nicaragua is in fact the country with the highest representation of women at the ministerial level in the world.
In terms of other institutions, women head the Supreme Court, the Attorney General's office and the Public Prosecutor's Office. Likewise women lead Nicaragua's Institute of Tourism and the Techological Training Institute, both strategic sectors for the economy. As regards municipal governments, among the many dozens of outstanding women mayors throughout the country, the popular Reyna Rueda, Mayor of Managua, deserves special mention.
According to Belli, these ministers and leaders "are so irrelevant that the population does not even know their names". Hmm... it would be interesting to run the experiment of recording a walk by Reyna Rueda, through Managua's huge Oriental Market, the largest open-air market in the region, and compare it with another recording of a walk through the same place of, say, Gioconda Belli herself, or any of her fellow women accomplices from Nicaragua's coup-mongering right wing and their NGO hangers-on. When they are not traveling overseas these women frequent the capital's high-end shopping malls or exclusive beach resorts. They indeed are total strangers to the great majority of Nicaraguan people.
Talking of "tokens" and deception, up to 2019, property titles were extended to more than 138 thousand families in both the countryside and the city. Women make up 55% of the people those titles name as the property owners. That is not an invention. There are the properties, there are the titles, and there are the women. If all those women are "Ortega's tokens", then clearly "Ortega" has many "tokens" across all of Nicaragua... and for very good reason. How do you build 18 hospitals that everyone can see and use, but which according to people like Belli are just Potemkin village props? And almost 180 maternity homes for rural women? And about 60 police centers attending women re-inaugurated with better facilities in recent months?
Belli says that the reform will be approved "without consultation and following orders 'from above'". Let's look at the process:
- For the 2006 elections, won by the Sandinista Front, one of current President Daniel Ortega's promises was to have 50% women in his cabinet, and he was working to fulfill that promise from the very start. This is not at all unusual since equality between men and women is part of the historic program of the Sandinista Front formulated as early as 1969.
- The Law on Equal Rights and Opportunities of February 2008 (i.e., passed with opposition votes when the Sandinista Front was a minority government) establishes in its Chapter II the proportional participation of men and women in all elected positions.
- From the minutes of the debates on that law (and Articles 8 and 9, which are the basis of the current reforms to the electoral law) it is clear that there was consensus of all parties, including the now renamed Sandinista Renewal Movement to which Gioconda Belli belongs. Now this same opposition opposes what it supported in 2008. In reality, what they are saying is that it is one thing to talk up gender equality and quite another to practice it.
- This provision was specified in even greater detail in the 2014 reform to the Constitution, in articles 131 and 178. The reforms establish the principle of 50% representation for the election of deputies to the National Assembly, deputies to the Central American parliament, municipal councilors, regional councilors, mayors, deputy mayors, and so on.
It must be said that from 2014 to date the only party that has been truly consistent in honoring these principles established in the Constitution and the law has been the Sandinista Front, which both before and after 2014 has put it into practice in all elections. Now, for the 2021 elections, it is simply a matter of regulating it via the electoral law but also of deepening the equality principle by demanding, for example, that even the political parties' electoral officers should be 50% women.
Up to this point, the incongruities of Belli's approach are self-evident. However, what is truly embarrassing about Gioconda Belli's position is not the denial of verifiable facts established in multiple international instances about the participation of women in Nicaragua, nor even the strange conspiracy theory according to which the presidential couple could have somehow manipulated those international bodies with false data. What is truly embarrassing is her "feminist" argument.
According to Belli, Nicaraguan women (apparently even French women, a reference that is not very clear in her article) cannot participate in politics because:
- "We bear the full responsibility of caring functions within our families and homes." Gioconda, "we" bear, really? This is like the the mosquito sitting on the back of the ox saying "we're ploughing..." Gioconda Belli has far too much money to need to worry about domestic responsibilities, and that seems to make her think it's ok for her to participate in "grubby politics," something forbidden to ordinary women. Unless we are missing something, that looks like a clear class perspective behind Belli's point of view.
- Housework, according to Belli, "has impeded and truncated, in many cases, the education of the female population". An elegant way of declaring night what has been a centuries-old darkness, one which, fortunately, now in Nicaragua is beginning to come to an end, thanks to the social policies of the Sandinista government. Something Belli cannot acknowledge in public, naturally.
- "There are many young women in universities, but few of them, after they get married and have children, can access jobs that demand them to be absent from their homes from 8 am to 5 pm." No need to have gone to college, since hundred of thousands of women in Nicaragua work very long hours in order to support their families. In fact, they are now the majority of Nicaragua's main breadwinners - without that making a great many of those women give up political participation. To see this reality just look at the woemn in the crowds at any Sandinista mass rally. However according to Belli, true to her "class perspective", only "better off people" can become government Ministers.
- "Those who do so depend on other women, relatives or hired women, who do the housework" Precisely those Mexican and Central American, including Nicaraguan, women who clean and cook for Belli and her upper class friends in their residences in the United States and Nicaragua.
- According to Belli, another obstacle for women is that taking on "political functions is to expose oneself to constant deprecation". Very true, and for a case in point just look at the hundreds of caricatures of the right-wing newspaper La Prensa of Managua dedicated to Vice President Rosario Murillo over the years, a truly obnoxious collection of hateful political propaganda. In fact, almost all Sandinista women ministers have been the object of extremely vicious hate campaigns by an opposition guilty of committing the most heinous crimes while showing an angelic, "what, me?" face. No woman has ever been given a right for free, women have always had to struggle to conquer their rights, and that struggle generally includes, unfortunately, the possibility of being exposed to vexatious attacks from sectors that see their privileges under threat.
- Finally Belli concludes that "the present organization and culture of the political classes is adverse to female presence, so women lack incentives to get involved". Again: Nicaragua's laws state that there must be gender equity; the parliament is full of women; the government cabinet is full of women; women have access to property as never before in the entire history of the country; Nicaragua's universities are full of young women (because, by the way, today there are scholarships for thousands and thousands of young women as there have never been before); there are police centers attending women practically everywhere; there are more Child Development Center preschools than ever before in popular memory but, according to Belli, women "have no incentives" to participate in politics. Of course there is machismo, of course there is violence and femicides are committed, of course there is teenage pregnancy, of course women still assume a disproportionate burden in the home... but that is precisely why women have every reason in the world to participate in politics. Moreover, even if it were only a matter of choosing figures from among the "political elite," it is of prime importance for women not just to exercise their right to vote and also to oversee the counting of those votes so it is done in a transparent manner.
In short, according to Belli, as long as there is no "parity in housework" and a "culture of the political classes" favorable to the presence of women, "it is a political trap to demand that there be parity in the electoral structures" one aimed at giving luster to the image that Vice President Rosario Murillo wants to give of the country. Clearly, in making this argument, Belli is really interested not in women's rights but "something else".
By Belli's reasoning the struggle of women for their rights in the last 200 years has only been a chimera, a pure naivety, because women were the ones who washed the dishes and fed the babies. The "suffragettes" who at the beginning of the 20th century fought for women's right to vote, and who were branded as "crazy" and much worse, wasted their strength. Not to mention Flora Tristan, the Peruvian founder of Marxism in the 19th century, nor Jenny Marx, nor Klara Zetkin, nor Rosa Luxemburg. Poor deluded women, according to Belli, mere victims of a vile manipulation by the Ortega-Murillo family!
Likewise, so many thousands of Sandinista women who gave and give their lives to serve Nicaragua's people. For Belli, they fought then and fight now, in vain. According to Belli, they are nothing more than "tokens" in the service of "Ortega-Murillo". Of course, Belli omits all the women of proven revolutionary commitment and trajectory who, unlike Belli and her coup mongering cronies, have always remained faithful to the Sandinista Front, such as Vice President Rosario Murillo, former Minister of the Interior Ana Isabel Morales, guerrilla commanders like Doris Tijerino, Gladys Baez, Leticia Herrera and so many other militants. Nor, of course, does Belli mention the young revolutionary Sandinista women murdered by Belli's accomplices in the defeated coup attempt of 2018, such as police inspectors Juana Francisca Aguilar Cano and police lieutenant Zaira Julissa López.
"There is no doubt that Nicaraguan women have stood out for their presence, courage and energy in our country's struggles, but this power is moral, rather than real," Belli writes. For Gioconda Belli, only she and her clique who joined the MRS and entered the service of Western embassies, under the banner of the Chamorro family and diverse varieties of post-modern Somocismo, only they are worthwhile. Belli, a famous writer, married into the global oligarchy by the hand of Hollywood screenwriter Charles Castaldi, is entitled to broadcast imperial feminism on some sunny California beach, while telling the Mexican or Central American (very likely Nicaraguan) maids who clean her mansion, that they are wasting their time dreaming of a country where women have property title, maternity homes, police centers for women and, yes, at least 50% of all publicly elected positions and State institutional appointments.
In the meantime, women in Nicaragua who truly want to be enjoy full rights and freedoms have to face the terrorist violence of people like Belli and her fellow coup mongers. It would be interesting to see how Belli's imperial political patrons, such as the notorious ex-Nicaraguan Bianca Jagger, also a member of the global cultural oligarchy thanks to her career as a "token" Rolling Stone, would justify the "feminist" discourse that scorns women's struggle for the right to political representation. Absolutely no one in the "woke" circles of the US Democratic Party or EU country Social Democrat party imperial progressives would dare to claim publicly that it makes no difference to women having, by law, 50% representation in government ministries, lists of electoral candidates and in oversight of electoral processes.
Belli's outlandish argument exposes the falsity of her "feminist" posturing. No, Belli is not a fighter for women's rights, nor are people in North America and Europe that claim to promote progressive causes but who support people like Belli in Nicaragua. Three years ago, in 2018, Belli and her accomplices in Nicaragua launched a coup attempt based on gross manipulations, downright lies and horrendous crimes, such as kidnapping, torture, rape, atrocious murder and desecration of the dead. They tried to sell that criminal adventure abroad as "progressive", "revolutionary", "alternative".
Now, three years later and with an electoral process upon them for which they have done nothing to prepare because they are too engrossed in infighting over internecine power struggles, Nicaraguan opposition leaders and supporters like Gioconda Belli say:
"Look, 50-50 men and women in politics is wrong. Our politics does not really take women seriously, nor do we take the poor or indigenous peoples seriously. We are the party of the oligarchic class that for 200 years has considered Nicaragua to be our private property and its inhabitants our servants. We want to sell our country to the highest bidder. That is why it's so inconvenient that now they want to make us fill with women all the candidacies of the seats we intend to win in order to loot the public treasury, nor is it convenient for us that they make us fill with feckless women our lists of oversight officers at the voting tables so it's harder for us to invent election fraud and continue receiving money from the 'embassies'. Typical Sandinista injustice!"
That is Belli's real message and it has nothing to do with women's rights.