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Date: Tue, 12 Jul 1994 13:18:56 -0700
From: sgastete@u.washington.edu
Subject: LATINAS LEAD THE WORLD IN NETWORKING

Copyright 1994 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune
July  10, 1994 Sunday, CHICAGOLAND FINAL EDITION

SECTION: WOMANEWS; Pg. 1; ZONE: CN
HEADLINE: LATINAS LEAD THE WORLD IN NETWORKING
BYLINE: By Catharine Reeve. Special to the Tribune.
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

   Women's groups in Latin America have taken the lead in the use of
networks and communication systems and are becoming models for other
women's organizations around the world.

   In Peru, a pioneering national feminist broadcast network will go on
the air later this year. In Mexico, a women's center is translating health
data from a Boston women's collective. Chile hosts one of two offices for
Isis International, a major women's information and communication service
that networks with 150 countries. And last year women from a Dominican
Republic center began networking with a sister center in Haiti.

   "One of the most striking phenomena of the contemporary women's
movement in Latin America is the creation of all these networks," said
Francesca Miller, author of "Latin American Women and the Search for
Social Justice" (University Press of New England, $16.95) and a specialist
in comparative women's activism in Latin American and Caribbean countries.

   The networks are all the more remarkable, Miller said, because of their
"inventive use" of ways to communicate ideas "within and across
communities of great linguistic and cultural diversit

   Take, for example, the national commercial broadcast network for
feminist programming that will go on the air in Peru later this year.
Owned and operated by women and beamed to women's "kitchens, cars and
offices," the network aims to empower and unite the women of Peru through
information and interactive programs.

   "I don't know anywhere else this is happening," said Miller, who
teaches history and women's studies at the University of California at
Davis. "This is very important and has the potential to be a model for
other women's groups."

   It's also right in line with Latin American feminist tradition.

   "There were feminist broadcasters in the 1930s in Latin America," said
Miller.

   News of the pioneering broadcast network came from Mariella Sala, a
Peruvian journalist affiliated with the network, during a recent interview
on the Radcliffe College campus here.

   "Almost everybody in Peru has a radio," she said. "This is the first
time Peruvian feminists are going to have mass media; that means political
power.  We want to act as a mediator between women and government policy.
We want women to feel that they are connected to the great political
issues of our time."

   Sala announced the broadcast network during a panel discussion,
moderated by Miller, at the "Women, Information and the Future"
international conference June 17-20, sponsored by Radcliffe's Schlesinger
Library.

   Stressing that "if women are to take their rightful place in the world
of the future, the sharing of information will be crucial," the conference
brought together more than 200 librarians and other information
specialists from 46 countries to share ideas and experiences relating to
women's access to information.

   In many nations, women's history, along with contemporary information
about women's issues, is gathered, organized, stored and disseminated in
"documentation centers." These centers parallel libraries in the United
States but are much more closely linked with advocacy and grassroots
activism than in this country, Miller said. Many centers produce
publications and videos that are widely distributed.

   It is primarily the Latin American and Caribbean women activists who
have been models for women worldwide in using the documentation centers
and feminist networks to help change women's lives.

   In Peru, for example, Sala said that "10 years ago, when we were
talking about violence against women, people said, 'You feminists are
bringing ideas from abroad; our Peruvian situation is not like that. In
the Andean culture, it is OK that men beat women, and women accept that.'
"

   In the interim, Centro Flora Tristan, the center with which Sala is
affiliated, went full-tilt into communicating information about women's
issues, including violence against women.

   "We had a feminist radio program and a magazine, and we did television
interviews and started a feminist library, and we had brochures and
posters," Sala said.

   Now, she says, only 20 percent of Peruvians believe that violence
against women is a cultural norm.

   "I believe," Sala said, "that, together with the feminist movement, we
have made visible problems nobody seemed to see."

   Her list includes sexual harassment in the workplace, domestic violence
and rape as a social and not an individual problem.

   Documentation centers address issues that affect women, and in the
process they often turn to international feminist networks. Rocio Suarez,
of Mexico, said that when she and her colleagues were unable to obtain
certain health information they needed, they contacted a feminist network
in the United States, the Boston Women's Health Collective.

   "We have a longstanding relationship of exchanging ideas with them,"
she said. "Now Our Bodies, Ourselves (a popular Health Collective
publication) is in Spanish."

   Suarez believes that the coordination of all women's networks will
facilitate one goal she envisions: "We need to become protagonists of our
own lives."

   Isis International, one of the primary networks for women's information
and communication in the world, has offices in Chile and the Philippines
and reaches about 150 countries via letter, telephone, fax and e-mail.
Among its publications is a catalog that documents how the 1973 coup in
Chile (when the Pinochet regime violently overthrew President Salvador
Allende) affected the lives of women.

   "After the coup," said Isabel Duque, a Chilean who represented Isis
International at the Schlesinger conference, "the grassroots women's
organizations were disrupted. People hid or left the country. The economy
was terrible. Men were losing their jobs, so the women were trying to feed
themselves and their families. The women set up income-generating projects
and sold to the international community. Women were no longer only mothers
and wives."

   As protests against the Pinochet regime increased during the 1980s,
Duque said, women searching for husbands and children who had
"disappeared" formed the first women's group of that time. In 1987, they
took to the streets in a major and dangerous protest.

   The Pinochet regime stepped down in 1990, but what the women did during
those years will not be lost to history.

   "We've gathered all that information in a catalog," said Duque. "It is
a very good tool for researchers and policy-makers and women's groups. And
we are still gathering information."

   Currently, Duque said, Isis International is serving as a model for
grassroots women's organizations that are becoming established in
Southeast Asia. It and other networks also share information with feminist
organizations in the emerging Eastern European countries. A recent East-
West Women's Network conference addressed the issues of women and the
environment, violence against women and poverty.

   "Documentation centers have become depositories for the collective
memory of women," Duque said.

   "There is a tremendous need on the part of women in the Caribbean to
get information about themselves and what is going on in the larger
world," said Teresa Peralta, of the Dominican Republic, another
participant in the conference. "We in the Dominican Republic are working
very hard to help the centers in other small countries."