Home > “Creating a caring economy in Venezuela”
by Nora Castañeda
Dear Sisters and Friends,
We are proud to host Nora Castañeda, President of the Women’s Development Bank of Venezuela, on her first speaking tour of the United States in January/February 2004. Her tour is co-ordinated by the Bolivarian Circle of the Global Women’s Strike with the support of the Venezuelan Embassy, and sponsored by Pacifica Radio’s KPFK, KPFA, and WBAI, and actors Danny Glover and Ed Asner. We are writing to ask if your office or facility is interested in sponsoring our event with her in your area. Proceeds from the tour will benefit grassroots women in Venezuela involved in self-help.
“Micro credit is an excuse to empower women. We believe that the economy must be at the service of human beings, not human beings at the service of the economy. We want to create an economy based on cooperation and mutual support, a caring economy. We are not building a bank. We are building a different way of life.”
Nora Castañeda, April 2003
Someone remarked upon seeing Ms Castañeda addressing a large audience in the video, Venezuela - A 21st Century Revolution, “You don’t have to know Spanish to know that that woman is a great speaker.” She is also a remarkable woman in a remarkable time - one of great economic and social change ushered in by the people’s defeat of the 2002 coup carried out by the racist Venezuelan elite with the support of the US administration.
President Hugo Chávez was elected in a landslide in 1999 to get the country’s oil revenue back and to tackle poverty and corruption - Venezuela is the 5th largest world exporter, yet most of its population lives in poverty. He agreed with women’s demand to create a Women’s Development Bank (Banmujer) as a way of funding reforms to benefit the poorest families and communities, and appointed Nora Castañeda, an economist committed to grassroots women, to head it.
Like 80% of the Venezuelan population (including President Chavez), Ms Castañeda is of African and Indigenous descent. She is the daughter of a low-income single mother. Having helped to raise her sisters and brothers, she describes herself as a “little mother” from age seven, and a “revolutionary feminist”. She has prioritized women’s issues all her life - dealing not only with domestic violence, but with the economy and the distribution of income from grassroots women’s point of view. She has taken it as her task, to build not only a bank, but a new way of life for women. She has said, “With 80% of the population poor, we cannot give away enough money. But we can empower women.”
“We made ourselves part of the Constituent Assembly. Every day, for as long as the Assembly sat, two movements were on permanent visit there: the Indigenous movement and the women’s movement. We had been discussing it for years, and now our time had come. And there, in the Constituent Assembly, on picket duty, we women won our rights in the constitution. We won Article 88, which recognizes that housewives create added value and must be compensated with social security.”
Ms Castañeda was central to the 1999 constitutional process that won one of the most advanced constitutions in the world, for women and Indigenous people as well as for all working people and all those who face discrimination on grounds of sex, race, age, disability . . . After working for years to develop an agenda for women that included the input, and addressed the dire needs, of grassroots women, she and others picketed the Constituent Assembly daily “not to beg but to submit our proposals,” as she says.
They won more than they expected. In addition to Article 88, women are visible throughout the constitution, which has incorporated the female gender in all the text. Other articles, laws and policies favor women heads of households - 70% of households in Venezuela - who are given priority in the distribution of unused land and housing (one million hectares and five million property titles have been distributed so far); guarantee equality in the workplace between women and men; create breast milk banks and state schools in which one million of the poorest children are receiving three free meals a day in order to improve children’s health; guarantee bilingual education, recognizing the language and culture of Indigenous communities passed on from generation to generation by women. Banmujer has granted over 40,000 micro-credits to women all over Venezuela and is building a network of users.
The GWS has three times been invited to Venezuela by the Women’s Institute, and three times has met with Ms Castañeda. She is a featured speaker in the video we made after our second visit. Each time, we have been impressed with her dedication, her leadership, her revolutionary economic perspective, her anti-sexism and her anti-racism, that are rooted in her commitment to grassroots women.
We all have much to learn from such a distinguished representative of the women’s movement and Venezuela’s Bolivarian process, and we want to make that information available to as wide an audience as possible.
We plan to have several events, including a reception, meetings and press interviews, in each of the following cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. We hope you will be willing to sponsor, host, and/or help fund one of these events, which we would like to hold around the third week in January. The title of the tour
is, “Nora Castañeda: Creating a caring economy in Venezuela”.
Selma James, international coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike and Nina López of the GWS Bolivarian Circle in London, who are distinguished in their own right, will be accompanying Nora Castañeda, providing introductory remarks and translation on both the east and west coasts. We will also show clips of our video, Venezuela - A 21st Century Revolution, at the events. Phoebe Jones (GWS Bolivarian Circle/US) will coordinate and chair events on the East Coast, and Margaret Prescod (GWS Los Angeles, and KPFK presenter) on the West Coast.