March 8, 2011
In the International Women’s Day, the men and women that are part of the international coordination of the Via Campesina’s End of all Violence Toward Rural Women Campaign, send greetings and solidarity to all women that are becoming subjects of our own history. Our campaign is one of the commitments of all members of Via Campesina to build our Buen Vivir (Good Living). It is not just another task or another demand. It is a process of change of men and women in the way we look at each other, in the way we treat each other; it is the right to a life with dignity and relations with equity. This is the way we commemorate this day.
Rural women live the expressions of the capitalist and patriarchal violence maintaining us at the margins and in the most precarious conditions. We know that the hegemonic system brings many forms of exclusion and sexist practices that replicates in our daily lives in our personal relations and in our political relations, when our knowledge, our work, and our economic contribution is devaluated or negated. The patriarchal capitalist model nullify the possibility of recognition of women’s work and the contributions from rural women such as the conservation and recreation of our ecosystems, our biodiversity, our health systems and the transmit ion of agricultural knowledge.
This Campaign attempts to make visible the structural violence behind the savage advance in territorial control through the expansion of the agro-export mode of production, land grabbing, transgenic crops, carbon markets and green markets. Also, the growing militarization of our fields in which women confront war conditions in a daily basis. Nowadays being rural people and defend our living space has been criminalized and women and children suffer direct and indirect forms of repression. Women and girls also suffer many types of gender violence: domestic violence, sexual violence, forced prostitution, forced marriages, rape, murder, systematic rape as war strategy and the impunity of all who commits this acts against women and girls.
We condemn all forms of violence against women and girls. We call all organizations to be aware and continue working on collective ways to prevent and end violence against women. We know that all rural women and girls create nonviolent work in our daily lives when we work in the land, harvest and select seeds, provide food to our families. Our work creates and celebrates life and it is in its own a form of prevention of violence.
MEN AND WOMEN TOGETHER ENDING VIOLENCE AGAISNT WOMEN!
8 March 2011
