We are women from Latin America and the Caribbean, Indigenous, Black, of mixed race and white, who have joined the call for the Global Women’s Strike on 8 March, which we are coordinating in our countries. We present this call as a continent because today more than ever our voices and our opposition to the genocidal policies of the IMF and World Bank, must be heard.

It is women who pay the highest price for each ‘adjustment’ and each privatization of basic services: water, health, sanitation, gas, electricity, transport . . . With each cut, each price increase, we have to work harder to try and ensure the survival of our families and communities: in the home, the fields, neighbourhoods, schools, hospitals . . . work without wages or with poverty wages. Mothers are the first to go without food in order to feed our children; women and girls are the ones who walk for hours to fetch water, wood and other necessities; and it is again mothers, daughters, wives and partners who fight for justice when our children and other loved ones are murdered or disappeared because they were not silent in the face of injustice.

They tell us there is no money, that the economy is in crisis, that our countries are in debt with the World Bank. But we know very well that the ’Third World debt’ has nothing to do with us. As our Aymara sisters from Puno, Peru have said: ‘The money the government borrowed we have never seen it, we don’t know what it was used for and yet it is us who have to pay it back. The government has bigger debts with us and we demand that they meet their commitment to that social debt.’ It is us women who do 2/3 of the world’s work for 5 % of the income who are owed everything and for ever.

More than US$900 billions are invested each year in military budgets. The military budget of the US, the only global power, is higher than that of the 15 European countries put together. And they don’t even want to invest US$80 billion which would end poverty in the whole world! Instead, they sell arms and impose dictators everywhere to protect their dominance and their profits. The corruption we are facing in our countries is not only a local product: it comes from the top to the bottom. The IMF and the World Bank look for thieves or create them in order to impose their will, and the governments of countries of the South accept it because it enables them to enrich themselves at our expense.

Military budgets command and train men to do ‘more important things’ than caring for people; they ensure that we carers are ghettoised and told that we are unable to do anything else; they idealize dying in war as well as the macho art of killing, raping, torturing; they impose and promote every violence against women and children turning us all into ‘collateral damage’; they even make our partners, comrades and sons want to be our masters. In refusing military budgets, we refuse not only the exploitation they exist to defend, and not only our children being turned into cannon fodder. We uncover and attack the biggest source of violence which we have to face every day in the home, on the street, in work places, in bed. We demand that the billions now spent on making men the enemies of women, must be spent on women and men taking care of each other.

With the Global Women’s Strike, this international call which demands to INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING, those of us who are Indigenous women and have never accepted the borders imposed by the conquest, those of us who are Black women descendents from African women brought as slaves and who benefited little from the independence achieved in our American countries through much spilling of Black and Indigenous blood, and those of us who are of mixed race or of European descent and have often collaborated with the racism imposed by the countries of the North, first Europe and then the US, who told us that we were better than the rest – we unite now because only together we will have the strength needed to defeat the sexist and racist discrimination which divides us. Because only together, starting with the autonomy of those sectors most discriminated against, we’ll we be able to highlight and share our experiences of exploitation and of leadership in the struggle: as Indigenous, Black, white, rural and city dwellers, single mothers and married women, younger and older, with disabilities, lesbian, those who work only in the home and those who do the double or triple day, those who get no wages and those who get low wages for a long intense day at the maquila, hospital, school, those who are domestic workers or sex workers . . . Because only together we will be able to defend ourselves against the multinational corporations which come to our countries in order to pay us less for harder work, and where women workers and trade unionists of both sexes who fight for better working conditions are murdered without getting any protection from the trade unions of Northern countries. Because only together we’ll be able to change the economic priorities of genocide which are reducing us to destitution, which destroy our autonomy and create economies of dependence where no one can subsist, where dignity and liberty are not allowed.

The American and Caribbean continent has been under US dominance because we are divided among ourselves, because the colour of our skin and the smell of money have determined, not only what employers decide to pay us but the relationships among us. In countries with populations of people of colour, the governing classes and the middle classes are predominantly white – that what you see on the TV programmes and UN delegations, the official ones and often also those representing NGOs.

Those who have had a little power have sometimes believed that to form an international network is an illusion or an abstraction which we can endorse without paying too much attention to it. We prefer our national flags because we think that we will be able to achieve our demands alone or because we are not interested in whether we achieve our demands at the expense of others with less power than ourselves. But, as demonstrate today’s Argentinian economic and political crisis, the wars against Afghanistan, Palestine and Colombia, and as those of us who never had anything and those who first lost what little we had have been saying: there is nowhere left to hide, we will all get it.

Those who had a little did not want to listen, but now there is no help for them but to go out onto the streets and to recognise how much time was lost in thinking that there was no need to join with the rest of us because they would have a way out. The same is true internationally, and those of us who never had anything or lost what little we had long ago, know that a national anthem and a flag do not change the economic reality which oppresses us. Now more than ever politics is global and the flags which in each country aim to unite us, also hide the differences that exist among us and which we must overcome: they divide us one from the other, native from immigrant, native from countries with much poverty from native from countries with even more poverty.

The Zapatistas who bring together a number of Indigenous peoples and are therefore organically international, have demonstrated with each of their actions that survival depends not only on the struggle in grassroots communities but on how we can mobilize the support of communities internationally so that they identify with and support our struggle and protect us. That’s why our international which manifests itself today, 8 March, with the Global Women’s Strike, is not a choice but a necessity. It is not the action of one day, but a commitment of every day and every action in every country: the commitment that everyone of us will represent all the grassroots women of this continent, starting with those of us who are most discriminated against and have least, and to be accountable to all with every action we take.

Women, who with children are the majority of victims in armed conflicts and 80% of refugees, are the first to oppose wars. Our work as carers teaches us to value life and to fight for the survival and welfare of our communities by predominantly peaceful means – from Chiapas where women formed autonomous cooperatives which are the support base of the Zapatista movement, and Cuba where the unwaged community work of women saved the revolution after the fall of the Soviet Union on which its economy depended, to the organizations of mothers and other relatives of detained-disappeared people who were the first to denounce military dictatorships, to the self-organized neighbourhood assemblies in today’s Argentina where women are major protagonists. Only the coming together of grassroots women on the continent and worldwide, with the support of women in the US and other countries of the North, will enable us to defeat militarism and avoid the armed struggle it provokes.

The women of Latin America and the Caribbean call on our sisters -- Latinas, Black and other women of colour and grassroots women in the US and other countries of the North – to unite with us. We tell them: your support is an immediate necessity for us, and it is for you too. If you don’t support our struggle against the military budgets and the politics of exploitation of the most powerful government in the world – which also exploits you, denying you or cutting resources, rights to benefits, healthcare, maternity and pay equity, living wages, compensation for accidents, and polluting the planet – the same rapacious madness which intends to destroy us will destroy you and the planet in which we live. It is only a question of time, and there isn’t much time left.

Power to all the sisters and compañeras who STOP THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT, and who with this Global Women’s Strike commit themselves to struggling together for a world which VALUES EVERY LIFE AND INVESTS IN CARING NOT KILLING.

Signed so far by: