Chilean Women in Resistance and Exile

The following article was excerpted from an address presented by Gladys Diaz at the Plenary Session of the International Conference on Exile and Solidarity in Latin American held in Venezuela in October, 1979, and reprinted from W.I.R. E. Service, 2700 Broadway, Room 7, New York, N. Y. 10025.

We see the women's struggle-our struggle-in the context of the class struggle, and therefore we consider the struggle of our people to be a priority; that is why we conceive of exploited men and women as a group, as one single class. We women are an important sector of that class-50 percent of it-a sector which has been doubly exploited, oppressed since time immemorial, relegated, misunderstood, and for the most part ignored when it comes to important discussions. In the struggle for the liberation of our people, we face all the many contradictions implied in being workers, mothers, housewives, and, at the same time, committed and thinking women. That is why we carry on a double struggle, the struggle for freedom alongside our people and the often tiring and wearing struggle for our own emancipation. Experience has shown us that our struggle is only part of the battle to retain dignity, to once again become protagonists in, instead of mere observers of, history.

We understand that our liberation will not occur within capitalist society. The struggle for liberation will only really begin seriously when the working class has conquered power. We are convinced, and history and experience show us, that our liberation as women is not a gift which will automatically be given with socialism. Our struggle is a long one, as long as the history of the enemy's ideological presence within us, within our companeros, and within all of society:

During the last two decades, Latin American capitalism has exacerbated the exploitation and misery of the masses. The dominant pattern of economic development in Latin America must of necessity rest on authoritarian governments, which may take the form of military dictatorships or of controlled democracies which, in turn, rest on superexploitation and repression.

It is in this framework, therefore, that women have been brutally confronted with the gradual loss of gains made over the years. Under Pinochet's dictatorship, Chilean women have come to understand that they have nothing to`gain from the military, and that alone, as individuals, they cannot stop the steady encroachment on those small areas which had been won. The military regime has destroyed the family-arresting, executing, or "disappearing" women's brothers, husbands, fathers, sometimes all of these. Entire families have been forced into unemployment. During these six years, in addition to depriving women of the right to assembly, free speech and organization, by virtual sleight of hand they have taken away nurseries, free kindergartens, family medical services, and both the half liter of milk for children and school breakfasts have also been suspended.

The backward hands of the clock of time have thrust women into darkness, back into a period where they are no longer even second or third class citizens, but rather society's pariahs. In 1972, an important number of Chilean women, including women from sectors of the middle class, were used by the ruling class as a support base and as one of the springboards for the coup d'etat. However, once the dictatorship was installed, women were plunged into a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the dictatorship has annihilated women socially, deprived them of material and cultural means for survival, of their development as human beings, as workers; and on the other hand, by burying women under decrees and decisions which have progressively isolated them, thrusting them with greater force than ever back into

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their traditional roles. The dictatorship fills them with hatred, which bit by bit will become power, and decision.

The dictatorship forces women to leave their homes in search of food, to fulfill a more important role in the economy of the home. Women once again become the center of the home, as they were a thousand years ago, because their mates have been imprisoned, disappeared, assassinated, or are unemployed or earning the minimum wage, which is inadequate for subsistence.

And on going out to look for work, to wash clothes in the houses of the rich, to beg for charitable aid in the parish or neighborhood, Chilean working

Alfredo Zalce/Taller de Grafica Popular/LNS

women leave the ghetto, enrich their vision of what is happening, and achieve primary and at times diffuse forms of consciousness. They become restless, they ask questions, they find answers, or they seek them from other women. They exchange points of view with the wives of the other prisoners standing on the interminable lines in front of the gates to the concentration camps. That is how the first organizations arose: committees of relatives of the disapppeared, of relatives of prisoners, soup kitchens for the unemployed, workers' associations that meet in private homes, mothers' centers, shantytown women's centers, etc. These groupings represent the search for a collective answer to the women's problems, to their most deeply felt demands.

Women slowly incorporated themselves into the Resistance, in either its semilegal or clandestine forms. There are women who once belonged to a party and had dropped out, who now seek to reconnect with their old contacts; if they do not find them, they will continue working on their own, in the parish or in a Resistance Committee.

There are also women who had never been involved politically, but who now begin to be interested, to participate, to feel useful. These women take on increasingly complex tasks and dare to do more and more. One day, one of them might, for example, become part of the underground network organized by the Resistance. She will remember that day as an important one in her life, and she will feel stronger and more confident.

Today, thinking Chilean women, committed to their class, are present on the three battle fronts which the Resistance has set: underground, prison,

and exile. On all these fronts women are writing an important page seeking to win a protagonist's role, to be a part of the fighting army which will one day free our people. With the firmness of a conscientious artisan, with a high sense of responsibility, of discipline, of creativity, the women in this struggle have been learning and teaching their companeros and organizations that they are capable.

This is a subject we used to speak about in the dark, late into the night, evading the guards' vigilance, in the Tres Alamos concentration camp. Women have had to earn their place in political and mass organizations with an effort double that of the men. Women have had to constantly prove themselves if they were to be trusted. Before the military coup, it was common for women members in the left parties to be assigned tasks that accorded with those that society permitted them in their social roles. During the first years of the Resistance, party women began functioning as couriers, or hiding underground companeros. This was natural, for men were the principal targets of the repression and, for a short time, the enemy was less rigorous in its vigilance and searching of women.

Today no one would dream of saying that the tasks of liaison should be done only by women. The fact is that the companeras did the liaison job well, under the inclement sun or in the rain, leaving their children alone at home or carrying them along, thus claiming the right to participate without giving up motherhood, love, joy. And from this, from these small and routine tasks of liaison, women moved on to organize Resistance Committees, to participate alongside the working class in the elaboration of tasks for the front or a small program for a factory. They began working on the underground newspaper which was so harassed by the enemy.

The party women have now proved themselves in many battles; like their male comrades, they have had their ordeal by fire. This was at the moment of torture.

In the case of the women, this was a difficult moment-one of a brutal encounter with the role to which the capitalist system has assigned us, and one of an equally brutal and cruel encounter with all the contradictions yet to be overcome. All of this we women had to carry with us in the interrogation by the enemy.

The military has a deep class hatred. They despise doubly those of us who have committed ourselves to the people's cause. They despise us because we are their class enemies; they despise us because we have dared to break out of the roles to which we had been assigned. We have dared to think; we have dared to rebel against the system. The ferocity of the military is redoubled in angry and attacking response to the women's emancipation from that traditional role.

During interrogation, the military would threaten to bring a woman's children and kill them in her presence if she did not speak. Or they would already have them there and would make them cry in a neighboring room in order to remind the woman of her basic maternal function. They undressed the women, they ran their hands over their bodies, they raped them, they gave them electric shocks on their naked bodies which had developed in a context of modesty and virginity. They beat women on the face and body in order to mutilate them. Within the conception of femininity, society has given great importance to symmetry, to bourgeois models of beauty. Some women were forced to confront their bleeding, dying companeros; the torturers hoped that this would demoralize the men, that the women would beg the men to confess. Thus they were forced to weigh their love for their companeros against their

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May, 1980/What She Wants/Page 9