The Struggle by Latin American Feminisms for Rights and Autonomy

Abstract

We end this volume with a chapter by Virginia Vargas, a feminist activist of the ‘historic’generation who has participated in the struggle for democracy and women’s rights at the national (Peru), regional and international levels. She is a founding member of the feminist NGO Centro Flora Tristan in Lima, and was Coordinator ofLatin American and Caribbean NGOs for the fourth World Conference of Women. She has participated in debates and discussions in many countries both as activist and academic/researcher. In Peru she has long been engaged in the struggle for democracy and was candidate for Congress in 1985. In recent times she has been an outspoken critic of President Fujimori and was one of the leading activists in a coordinating organisation Women for Democracy (Mujeres por la Democracia). Here Vargas offers a critical evaluation of the emergence and use of the rights-based discourse in Latin America over recent years. In so doing, she highlights many of the issues raised by the other contributors, drawing our attention to a theme we highlighted in Chapter 1: that democratisation and the struggle for women’s rights cannot be separated. Furthermore, she also emphasises that rights must be understood in the broadest terms in order to enhance their strategic usefulness. In this respect she sees the state as an important terrain on which to pursue the various struggles around rights, as long as social movements retain their autonomy and work in other ‘spaces and places’.