Direct Action Seminar ON THE FRONTLINE: Women & the Struggle for Liberation Saturday Mar 27, 2010. Speech by Lourdes Garcia, Centre for Latin America Studies & Solidarity, Mexican activist recently returned from Mexico.

When we look to the situation of women in Latin America today, the scene seems both encouraging and disgraceful. It is true that in different spheres women had succeeded in achieving both professional and political recognition. Many top professional are women, and we even have female presidents, like Michelle Bachelet, Cristina Kirtchner or the recently elected president of Costa Rica. For the urban middle classes, access to tertiary education and paid professional job have dramatically increased in the last 40 years. However, the highest proportion of people living under the poverty line are women and their children, the majority of the people displaced for internal conflict, like the case of Colombia, are women; women continue to be brutally killed in the northern and southern border of Mexico in some of the most cruel expression of hate against women. All the mentioned situations are aggravated for the fact of being poor, black or indigenous, and for being women. In most countries, abortion continues to be penalized, women have little decision making power over their own bodies and lives.