Venezuela: bringing the women’s revolution to Europe & US
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In 2005, Nora Castañeda, president of the Women’s Development Bank (Banmujer), completed a speaking tour of England, Scotland and Spain. She had toured the US in 2004.
We met Nora in Caracas in 2002 when we were invited by the National Women’s Institute to the first international Encuentro of solidarity with Venezuela.
We were struck that when Nora spoke she started with both grassroots women and people of colour. And she was a consistent advocate of Article 88 of the constitution. ‘Women are the carers of the species, no work is more important. Society has a debt to women.’
To those of us who have been organizing autonomously since 1972 with the perspective of sex and race as integral to class, this was music to our ears.
Between Banmujer which works to ‘create a caring economy’, and the Strike’s demand that society invest in caring not killing, there isn’t a lot of distance.
Banmujer is part of a mass movement fighting for what we’ve been campaigning for all over the world. It was our responsibility to inform people internationally how this state institution and its Users Network were using micro-credit (51,000 so far) to ‘empower women’.
They were an example of how advanced this 21st century revolution was at a time when many on the left hadn’t even acknowledged that there was a revolution in Venezuela. Let alone that it was primarily grassroots women whose self-activity was taking the revolution forward. Organizing a speaking tour for Nora would help win that acknowledgement.
And people in the US and Europe need truthful information so they can say ‘No’ to any attempt to blockade or invade Venezuela.
Nora spoke in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York, and later in Barcelona, Edinburgh and London. She was received enthusiastically. Even the opposition that came to disrupt was disarmed.
And there were other tours. Marisol León – Banmujer user, organizer in the largely Black community of Tarmas, member of the Artesans Assn. whose beautiful artwork is based on original Indigenous stone carvings – charmed everyone in Barcelona, Belfast, Granada and London.
Angélica Alvarez – Banmujer’s co-ordinator in the state of Bolívar also toured Europe with us. Having escaped the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, Angélica Alvarez used her experience to help develop Banmujer’s extraordinary Users Network. These grassroots women are not waiting on parties, trade unions or professionals. “Con mucho amor”, as Angélica often says, and with just as much determination, they are learning to exercise power on their own collective behalf. Cooperation not competition – a recipe for the economy and for the movement.
In the past 20 years $2.5+ trillion has been transferred from Latin America to the US and Europe. We wanted to begin to reverse this by getting universities, and others to make a financial contri-bution to the revolutionary work of Banmujer’s users.
We got $14,000, and more was pledged.