Magaly Pineda on women, debt crisis
1985 1985-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 4 →
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Peasant women demonstrate in the Dominican Republic.
• SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1985 The following are excerpts from an interview conducted by Karen Wald with Magaly Pineda in Havana in June 1985. Pineda is a women's rights activist in the Dominican Republic.
In April 1984, the newly announced IMF austerity measures provoked the generalized outrage of the Dominican people. A near insurrectional situation developed. After three days, the uprising was ruthlessly put down, leaving 160 dead, 500 injured, and 3000 detained by the security forces.
The translation and abridgment of the interview are by Socialist Action.
Karen Wald: How does the immense Latin American foreign debt affect the people of the Dominican Republic?
Magaly Pineda: As in many countries of Latin America, we have become very familiar with the problem of the debt because it has affected our households in the form of an economic crisis.
In 1982, my country's debt was already $3 billion. It is estimated that during the 1985-1990 period we will have to devote nearly 100 percent of our export earnings just to pay the interest on the foreign debt.
Our current social-democratic government began to negotiate payments on the debt with the International Monetary Fund. As in other countries in Latin America, this meant applying the now familiar IMF austerity package, which places the burden of the debt on the shoulders of the popular sectors and the impoverished majority.
It does this by cutting public services; cutting public spending, which in my y Dolores since then-was 175 pesos, or $65 per month. Yet the basic food basket for a family cost 357 pesos.
Public funding for education and health have been virtually eliminated. In the Dominican hospitals two women give birth in the same bed and are asked to go home three hours after delivery. If you need to be operated on, you have to take your own anaesthesia, blood, and syringe.
The Dominican doctors went out on strike recently to demand more funds for public hospitals and higher salaries.
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Over 13,000 women representing an array of political and cultural backgrounds met at Nairobi University, Kenya, on July 10-19, for the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) Forum '85 organized around the themes of equality, development, and peace.
The NGO meeting began jive days before the United Nations Women's Decade Conference, which was also held in Nairobi.
The following interview with Zakiya Somburu, a member of the National Black Women's Health Project who recently returned from the NGO conference, was conducted by Suzanne Forsyth on Aug. 16, 1985.
Socialist Action: Could you give us There was a strong sense of internationalism at this conference-that concerns we face here in the United States are concerns of women worldwide. In that sense it was a reaffirmation of what I had been involved in politically for the past decade.
S.A.: Were there many women of color from the United States?
Somburu: There was a significant representation of African-American women. Preceding conferences did not have high attendance of African-American or African women.
Many sisters, of course, could not garner the necessary financial support to get to Nairobi so there were thouan industrialized country that has the where-with-all to provide comprehensive prenatal care but does not consider it a priority. As recently as 1979 the Black rate of infant mortality was 91 percent higher than the national rate for whites, with 29 percent for Blacks and 11 percent for whites.
Female circumcision was covered in one of the workshops I attended on traditional child and maternal health. It was clearly denounced. There is an organized African movement against female circumcision, or mutilation of the clitoris and other female genitalia.
The African women directly affected —women of Ethiopia, the Sudan, and WOMEN IN STRUGGLE States. It is known to cause intrauterine cancer and other serious side effects. It's outright genocide.
It's also common for police to invade communities and whip children, shoot, and interrogate people. To hear that first hand from women involved in the struggle has an tremendous impact on you.
What we can do in the United States