The Issue of Autonomy: An Address to the Venezuelan People

Last year, the repression notably increased, resulting in hundreds of injuries. At least 20 students were killed by police or military forces. With the creation of the universities under government control, oriented to ideological indoctrination, the number of college students increased notably in Venezuela: From about , students in to about , in However, the number of students graduating remained relatively low, at about 10, per year.

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There are two ways to interpret these numbers. The second is that the programs offered in the universities created by the regime do not maintain an adequate level of quality. It is obvious that this meagre income, in a country with hyperinflation and undergoing a deep recession, results in a massive brain drain. Venezuela is running out of university professors.

Some universities have lost half of their scholars, according to the non-governmental organization Aula Abierta. Students are also leaving universities and even the country. Aula Abierta has also reported that, in , between 30 and 40 per cent of those who entered undergraduate programs in autonomous universities had left their studies.

All this occurs in a context of repressive violence by police, military and paramilitary forces of the Maduro regime.

Professors and students have been arbitrarily detained. December 18, Report. November 30, Dispatches. Most Shared November 30, Dispatches. November 26, News Release.

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December 4, Dispatches. November 28, News Release. Get updates on human rights issues from around the globe. Join our movement today. Can you contextualize some of these advances for our international readership?

Additionally there are laws and norms that address the right to having a life free of violence, particularly the law , which represented an advance at the time and and still does, ten years later. We can also point to some victories in the area of labor, for instance, the labor law , which guarantees maternity leave and breastfeeding rights. That is important to mention because all the legal advances so far have gone hand in hand with organization and demands from the feminist movement.

They have happened with a lot of pressure from below, with debate, and with mobilization and action.

So what are the issues that are still a priority in the legal realm? The issue of bodily autonomy, the right to legally interrupt pregnancy — that is an urgent struggle. There is a great deal to do in the realm of sexual and reproductive rights, which implies access to sex education throughout the whole schooling process, access to contraceptive methods, etc. Also, in the political realm, issues of parity and alternation should be brought to the forefront. That happens through norms and laws.

There have been important oversights in this regard and even some steps backward. Finally, another important field for struggle is in the realm of dissident sexualities. The Venezuelan State does not recognize same-sex unions, nor does it recognize trans identities. There have been some steps regarding dissident sexualities, but they actually have been very timid, and they haven't been put in practice.

The document says that in the last year in which state published statistics there were 97, formal accusations of gender violence. Of those, only 14, went to court and a mere 1, resulted in guilty verdicts.

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In Venezuela, politics on the state level fails to grasp the structural problem of gender violence. This is a deep cultural problem: As I indicated, there have been some legal advances regarding access to justice, but the results have been very limited. In part this is due to there having been practically no advances in the area of prevention, and prevention must go hand on hand with a cultural transformation. That, of course, seems like a gigantic undertaking because it is the struggle to bring down patriarchy itself!

For example, a reform in school pensums and teacher formation, developing media campaigns, controlling media to eliminate sexist stereotypes, etc. The spaces that reproduce and consolidate sexist and patriarchal culture in our society must be changed. We are convinced that, with a coordinated effort, we will be able to first reduce and eventually eliminate this societal scourge. That is why the advances are so slow. As I mentioned before, the area where we have advanced most is in the legal framework. We find ourselves face to face with situation where the main lawbreakers are those who operate the justice system.

In fact, the degree of impunity is overwhelming.

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The sad truth is that women go to the justice system expecting and, of course, needing a legal solution. There, however, they run into many obstacles from reporting the aggression to investigating it and bringing it to trial. Along the way, they suffer a process of revictimization and institutional violence against women which begins to crush them once again. Faced with this situation, what has the state done? The state has injected resources into the education of public officials, but this educational process has, for many reasons, not yielded the desired results.

Now a proposal for reforming the law against gender violence is making the rounds. Nowadays, if an official ignores a blatant case of gender violence — a femicide, for example — nothing happens! So the reform proposes to punish those who disregard or discard complaints. Gender violence is one of the most serious human rights problems in Venezuela today. We are talking about some reported femicides in So we know that this number underrepresents the problem. Further, when we talk about femicide, we should also take into account maternal mortality rates, which we [the feminist movement] consider indirect femicides.

We are talking about maternal deaths in [2].

Together with Paraguay, Venezuela has the most backward legislation regarding abortion in the whole continent. Although the struggle to make abortion legal here is not new, the Chavista feminist movement has staged important mobilizations during the past year or so, demanding that women gain control of their bodies.

The decriminalization of abortion is a historical struggle and a global one.