Routines of Interaction between Latin American Feminists and the State

Abstract

Comparison of feminists’repertoires of interaction in four Latin American countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile—reinforces the idea that these interactions may be contentious, collaborative, or even both. The proportions of each kind of interaction are influenced by the dominant political project of the state, the profile of the institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, the formal channels for participation, support for the feminist and gender agenda by presidents, and female presence in the legislature.

A comparação de repertórios feministas de interação em quatro países da América Latina— Argentina, Bolívia, Brasil e Chile—reforça a ideia de que essas interações podem ser contenciosas, colaborativas ou até ambas. As proporções de cada tipo de interação são influenciadas pelo projeto político dominante do estado, o perfil dos mecanismos institucionais para o avanço da mulher, os canais formais de participação, o apoio à agenda feminista e de gênero pelas presidentes e a presença feminina na legislatura.

Keywords

Participation Protests Feminism Institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women Latin America

The literature of social movements has sought to theorize the relationship between these actors and the state. While many studies have focused on contention and produced a very homogeneous view of these actors, some studies in Latin America have considered this relationship more deeply, examining areas of political participation, the social movement network, and the political projects in dispute (Abers and von Bülow, 2011; Dagnino, Olvera, and Panfichi, 2006). Abers and von Bülow have identified forms of interaction between social movements and the state that justify new approaches to social movement theory, among them efforts to influence public policy through participation and inclusion in the state apparatus, making the connections between civil society and political society more frequent and more complex than the previous literature had envisioned.

Studying the Lula government in Brazil, Abers, Serafim, and Tatagiba (2014) have sought to understand the interactions between society and the state in the areas of urban policy, agrarian development, and public security. They argue that new forms of interaction have emerged as a result of the combination of the inclusion of militants in the state apparatus with the heterogeneity of the Brazilian state. With the aim of broadening the focus beyond contentious action, they modify McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly’s (2004) concept of the repertoire—the culturally codified ways in which people interact in the politics of conflict—to develop the idea of “interaction repertoires”that include collaborative relations between society and the state. This new notion allows them to “incorporate the diversity of strategies used by Brazilian social movements and examine how they have been used, combined, and transformed” (Abers, Serafim, and Tatagiba, 2014: 332).

They identify four interaction routines in the Brazilian case: (1) protest and direct action (even when there is collaboration with the state and it is seen as an ally); (2) institutionalized participation (participatory budgets, public policy councils and conferences); (3) personal contacts with state actors facilitated by the expansion of links between the executive and these movements typical of leftist governments; and (4) occupation of positions in the bureaucracy.

The last of these deserves particular attention, since the research literature shows its strong presence in governments of the left (Vaz, 2014). Although some writers see it as the potential co-optation of social leaders (Doimo, 1996), others have called it “institutional activism”—a strategy for promoting change through the institutional path but anchored in the previous trajectory of the actors and in the networks of which they are part (Abers and Keck, 2017; Abers and Tatagiba, 2016).

Protest is a relationship established by the participants between dissatisfaction with and explicit rejection of political systems, traditional political parties, and other conventional forms of organization such as social and union movements marked by hierarchy and/or relationships with the state (Bringel, 2013). A similar diagnosis is offered by those who point to a contemporary crisis of political representation (Almeida, 2011; Silva, 2013; Sintomer, 2010).

The most recent protests can be characterized as a “new type of viral, rhizomatic, and diffuse political action” made up of “more mediatic and performative repertoires” (Bringel, 2013: 19). Similar approaches are adopted by analysts seeking to understand the mechanisms underlying the emergence of a “geopolitics of global indignation” expressed in protests in contexts as varied as North America, Europe. and Latin America (Bringel, 2013; Mayol and Azócar, 2011; Polanco and Silva, 2013; Valerian, 2013).

This paper intends to examine the interaction repertoires of the women’s political sector—the relationship between feminist movements and the state—in the experiences of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile. The research questions were the following: (1) Does support by presidents positively impact the agenda of institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women?¹ (2) Does the combination of such mechanisms with infrastructure produce better results? (3) Does the presence of participatory institutions favor the incorporation of the demands of feminist and women’s movements? (4) Does the presence of women in the legislature influence the dynamics of these repertoires? (5) Do the protests of feminist and women’s movements increase the chance of influencing the policy agenda for women? To answer these questions, we developed a research design in which interactions between the state and the social movements were the independent variable and the dependent variables were the presence of institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, the support of presidents for these mechanisms, the existence of participatory institutions and the presence of women in the legislature, and the protest repertoires of feminist and women’s movements. The pink tide established the context for the analysis, since it was countries in which women and/or left or center-left governments came to the presidency that were examined. We determined that this tide emerged in the 2000s and reached its peak between 2009 and 2012, after which, with significant variations among countries, crises of the model began to become evident. Recently most of these countries have experienced strong disputes over the meaning of their legacy.

The hypotheses of our research were as follows: (1) Women in the presidency and/or left-wing governments positively influence the institutional mechanisms for women agenda. (2) The institutional and budgetary capacity of institutional mechanisms for women and participatory institutions allow the establishment of interactions between the executive branch of government and feminist and women’s movements. (3) The presence of women in the legislature contributes to the establishment of interaction repertoires. (4) Protest functions as an interaction in the cycle of negotiations with the state.

The thesis defended here is anchored in an analytical model with three interconnected dimensions. Its normative dimension supports a possible improvement in governance resulting from the presence of institutional channels for the participation of society in the formulation of public policy. Its policy dimension assumes that policies aimed at women can be improved if they have been developed with the participation of women. Its theoretical dimension suggests combining studies of public policy and bureaucracy with studies of social movements and their interaction repertoires (Bebbington, Delamaza, and Villar, 2008).

Repertoires of Interaction between Feminism and The State

The relationship between feminism and the state is part of an exhaustive but not exhausted debate with contributions from the North (Htun and Weldon, 2010; Kantola, 2006; Lovenduski, 2005; Mazur, 2002) and the Global South (Alvarez, 1990; 2014; Guzmán, 2001; Sardenberg and Costa, 2010) and from different currents of feminism (Paradis, 2013). More collaborative and more confrontational approaches have permeated assessments of the strategies of feminist movements vis-à-vis the state, and in Latin America these approaches have been in constant dispute (Matos and Paradis, 2013). Abandoning a binary and Manichaean view, Matos and Paradis (2014) have suggested a new feminist synthesis of the state that takes into account the complexity of the relations between society and the state, monitors the state’s political translations of the demands of feminist movements, considers how different groups of women are affected by state actions, and assesses the efforts of institutional mechanisms for women seeking to depatriarchalize the state. Adopting this framework, we can examine the repertoires of interaction between the feminist movement and the state in terms of the nature of the institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, the support of presidents for them, the association with those mechanisms with institutions for the participation of civil society, the proportion of women in the legislature, and the role of protest as an instrument of contention or an opportunity for negotiation.

There is an important debate about the role of women presidents in this regard. It is obvious that women as a group do not have all the same interests, wants, perspectives, and aspirations. As a result, there are examples of female presidents who have made no effort to pursue a feminist or gender agenda. At the same time, the election of a female president has undeniable symbolic content that can contribute to greater pressure from society and from the movements organized around special attention to feminist and women’s demands.

In Latin America, all countries have institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women in their executives. Among the main characteristics of these institutions are dialogue with women’s movements and organizations, efforts to sensitize and train public officials on gender issues, gender mainstreaming as a strategy for exercising power and achieving objectives, and a constant struggle to survive and increase their technical, budgetary, and political capacities (Paradis, 2013). Byrne et al. (1996) consider the relationship between institutional mechanisms for women and civil society a strategy for influencing policy. There is a coincidence of the existence of formal participatory structures with these mechanisms’ technical and budgetary capacities, with strong mechanisms tending to have a higher incidence of participation (Paradis, 2013).

The study of protest in Latin America has identified the existence of “cycles of confrontation” (Bringel, 2013; Tarrow, 1998; Tatagiba, 2014). The singularities of the most recent protests and, more important, the specificities of these countries’ current social, political and economic contexts may lead to the mistake of isolating certain historical contexts and/or establishing hasty parallels. At the same time, it is important to avoid the “seduction of novelty” (Bringel, 2013: 24). Nevertheless, in some countries it is possible to identify cycles of collective action from the struggle for democratization to the most recent days (Tilly, 2006).

The Case Studies

Chile

The Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (National Women’s Service—SERNAM) was established in Chile in 1992, the first time that an institutional mechanism for the advancement of women has appeared in the top tier of the executive branch of government (Paradis, 2013).² The SERNAM is the strongest institutional mechanism for women among the countries analyzed here and one of the strongest in Latin America in terms of its bureaucratic structure and its budget. In 2011 it had 15 regional offices and just over 500 employees (including temporary employees) (Paradis, 2013). Its budget represented approximately 0.07 percent of the general budget, US$4.60 per woman (Paradis, 2013). Despite its not establishing a direct relationship with civil society, the SERNAM relied on a consultative council composed of government bodies and civil society movements and organizations that evaluated its policies and proposed action (Chile, 2011). In addition to the council, the service conducted public consultations, meetings with nongovernmental actors, and research (Chile, 2010).

The election of President Michelle Bachelet was considered a milestone for the incorporation of the gender equality agenda into the governments of the region (see Tobar, 2009: 21), although some challenges and weaknesses were present in her first term. In an excerpt from her inaugural speech, Bachelet recognized that her election was an expression of new times, in part because she was a woman (Chile, 2006). Early in her term she announced a parity cabinet (with 10 female ministers), including women in strategic sectors of the government such as the General Secretariat of the Presidency and the Ministries of the Economy, Planning and Cooperation, and Defense. In Planning, Health, and the General Secretariat, the female ministers had a recognized history of commitment to gender equality (Waylen, 2016). The number of women in the cabinet varied in the first term. After the initial parity, Bachelet was under pressure from her base and charged with having nominated people who were inexperienced or in some way “outsiders” from the perspective of the political elite to whom she owed allegiance. After falling to 30 percent in October 2008, the government ended up with near-parity in 2010 (Waylen, 2016). In the 2010 Global Gender Index report, Chile gained 16 points in the ranking compared with 2009. This improvement was guided by Bachelet through her appointments and her concern for equality in education (World Economic Forum, 2012).

With regard to political support for the SERNAM, Fernández and Oliva (2012) say that during Bachelet’s term the institutional mechanisms for women obtained a significant increase in their budgets. According to Waylen (2016), the agency’s prestige and influence increased in this period, since it was considered vital to advancing the interests of women and feminists, especially because there were few women in the legislature (15 percent in the Chamber of Deputies and around 5 percent in the Senate) (IPU, 2006). In general, however, the achievements of the first Bachelet government were considered limited. Escobar (2014: 5) described it as marked by an “economicist and technocratic conservatism, with some redistributive touches.” Waylen (2016) recognizes that proposals for change that needed congressional support were unsuccessful. While in the 1990s the contradictions between feminists working in political institutions and those belonging to autonomous groups were latent, in the twenty-first century polarization opened the way for diversification and fragmentation that undermined the political support and further advances of the Bachelet government in favor of gender equality (Tobar, 2009). A significant part of the movement remained averse to collaboration with the state.

The protests that have taken place in Chile have been seen as a politicization of malaise or a reaction to the inability of the political system to process the society’s demands. Also observed is a pluralization of associativism, with a predominance of action by young people mobilized through new networks and an increase in the support for student protest of broad sectors of the population. In addition, other actors took over the country’s public space, indicating the “social overflow” pointed to by Bringel (2013) in the Brazilian case.

The Chilean feminist movement today is marked by the pluralization represented by Mapuche feminism and the post-/de-/anti-colonial discourse of indigenous and Afro-descendant feminists, among others. Although Gajardo’s (2014) analysis indicates a cooling of direct action and protest, Tobar (2009) points to the emergence of the “young feminists” also identified in Brazil (Alvarez, 2014), with substantial participation in the national conference of feminists of 2005.

Argentina

After the redemocratization in Argentina, two new agencies focused on social assistance were created under the Ministry of Health and Social Action. The Consejo Nacional de la Mujer (National Women’s Council—CNM), established in the Presidency in 1992, was by 2011 only a third-tier agency with very limited technical capacity and budget (among the most deficient structures of this kind in Latin America.³ That year it had 28 employees, and its budget represented 0.002 percent of the general budget, US 11 cents per woman. As a federal institution it brought together those responsible for policies for women in the subnational governments (Argentina, 2010). Matos and Paradis (2013) report that, according to militants interviewed in 2010,⁴ the council did not provide real dialogue with the movements and gradually lost power, prestige, and resources.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was the first woman ever to be reelected in Latin America, with the highest presidential vote in 28 years of Argentine democracy (de Dios, 2011). In her inaugural speech in 2007 she recalled Eva Perón and recognized the role of the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in the construction of Argentine democracy (Argentina, 2007). Her initial cabinet had only three women, in Social Development, Defense, and Health. In 2008 she appointed a woman to head the Ministry of Industry (Salinas, 2015). According to the country’s report to the Eleventh Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, from 2008 to 2009 the CNM saw an increase of just over 20 percent in its budget and personnel (Argentina, 2010). However, according to Fernández and Oliva (2012: 128), gender policy during her term was marked by “discontinuity, lack of funding and ambiguity in the definition of equity.”

The women’s and feminist movements in Argentina were characterized by three general trends: their presence in the human rights movements, collective action by the popular sectors especially in periods characterized by fiscal adjustment and economic crisis, and their inclusion of middle-class women (Di Marco, 2011; Gajardo, 2014; Mayol and Azócar, 2011). The protests in 2001 in the context of the economic (and later, political) crisis were decisive in the incorporation of agendas from different sectors of the feminist field. The annual national women’s conferences organized by various feminist movements and organizations since 1986 and the struggle for the legalization of abortion and for reproductive rights created what Di Marco (2011) has called “feminist people.” The articulation of feminist discourse with that of women from other social movements made it possible to construct a heterogeneous “women” in relation to a common adversary, the traditional and patriarchal forces, generating a political identity captured by Di Marco’s term. The women’s conferences became a privileged space for shaping common agendas and demonstrating women’s activism (Di Marco, 2011) and radicalized their demands by articulating a wide range of women’s sectors to form a more autonomous field but one that was not totally averse to the state.

In addition, the significant presence of women in the legislature, benefited by the quota law, meant that interaction routines were centered more on the legislative than on the executive branch. More recently, Argentine feminists have produced new waves of protest. The broad feminist response, using primarily social networks (Facebook and Twitter) and employing the hashtag #niunamenos, to the cruel murder of a pregnant 14-year-old by her boyfriend in April 2015 created the basis for mobilization (Rovetto, 2015: 18): “The immediate viralization of the call brought together behind a single slogan a polyphonic ‘crowd’ formed by an anonymous mass of people that were indignant about the growing number of femicides.” The call for protest brought 200,000 people out into the streets and attracted the attention of many public figures (Cué, 2015). The protest was replicated in 120 other cities and towns and in countries such as Uruguay and Chile and became a permanent campaign with a public agenda. Its demands included public policies, access to justice, and actions aimed at cultural transformation, and many of them were directed to the state. During the presidential elections, the campaign had a strong presence, taking advantage of the moment to seek the commitment of national political leaders. All of the candidates signed the “five points to commit themselves to fighting male violence” (Ferozo, 2016).

Brazil

In Brazil, the Conselho Nacional dos Direitos da Mulher (National Council for Women’s Rights—CNDM) was created in 1985 and, linked to the Ministry of Justice, served as the country’s first institutional mechanism for the advancement of women. It functioned as a political space for articulation of representatives of government and civil society in relation to the demand for democratization and the expansion and deepening of women’s public agenda. Its deliberative character and its financial and administrative autonomy were ensured only until 1989, when it became a consultative body (Bohn, 2010; Montaño, 2003).

In 2003 the Workers’ Party government created the Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Women’s Policies, with ministry status under the Presidency, but by 2011 it was receiving only a very small portion of the general budget (0.005 percent), US 52 cents per woman. Despite not having any local structure, it provided considerable institutional and budgetary support for the establishment and maintenance of institutional mechanisms for women in the states and municipalities.

The election of Dilma Rousseff had important repercussions. In her inaugural speech, she affirmed her commitment to women: “I come to open doors so that many other women can also, in the future, become president, and so that—today—all Brazilian women will feel the pride and the joy of being a woman” (Brazil, 2011). Despite not having gender parity in her cabinet in her first term, she appointed women for social areas, culture, the environment, and the Ministry of Planning, Budget, and Management. In 2011 the Chief of Staff of the Presidency and the minister of institutional relations were replaced by women. Luiza de Bairros of the Ministry of Racial Equality and Eleonora Menicucci of the Special Secretariat for Women’s Policies had strong connections with the women’s movement and recognized feminist trajectories. As had Rousseff, Menicucci had been arrested and tortured during the military dictatorship. While there was a significant increase in the ministry’s budget between 2012 and 2015, only 30 percent of it was spent (Carvalho, 2018). Under strong political pressure and experiencing an economic crisis and a drastic reduction of public resources, in September 2015 Dilma created the Ministry of Women, Racial Equality, and Human Rights and reduced the status of the Special Secretariat.⁵

With the creation of the Special Secretariat in 2003, the role of the CNDM had changed from being responsible for formulating policies to monitoring equality policies for women (Brazil, 2008). It is one of a few deliberative women’s councils in Latin America. Another mechanism of participation was the Conference of Women’s Policies, the first three of which (in 2004, 2007, and 2011) involved around 200,000 women in municipal, state, and national events in all of the country’s federative units. The result of these conferences was the development of a national women’s policies plan. According to Matos and Paradis (2013), interviewees from various movements, parties, and international organizations were almost unanimous in saying that the relationship between the movements and the Special Secretariat was close. As Bohn (2010) has shown, another form of dialogue was the allocation of at least two-thirds of its budget to the financing of projects presented by civil society and local state actors (municipalities, state departments, etc.). In this context, Sardenberg and Costa (2010) have identified the emergence of a participatory state feminism facilitated by the growth of activism and the articulation of feminist and women’s movements, the rise of the Workers’ Party, with its commitment to participatory forms of government, and awareness of the patriarchal political system, which limited women’s representation in the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government. In this sense, in the absence of support from women in these areas, an important way of consolidating advances was through the development of policy by the Special Secretariat.

Alvarez (2014: 18) has contributed to clarifying the complexity of contemporary Brazilian feminisms by interviewing various leaders of the movement active in the 2013 protests. In her proposed interpretative framework, feminisms are framed as discursive fields of action that “much more than mere clusters of organizations focused on a specific problem . . . encompass a wide range of individual and collective [female and male] actors from social, cultural, and political places.” Such fields are articulated in formal and informal ways, through “political-communicative networks—or, better yet, reticulated webs and meshes. In other words, the actors that circulate within them intertwine in stitches sewn by crossings between people, practices, ideas and speeches” (Doimo, quoted in Alvarez, 2014: 18).

The pluralization of the feminist field in Brazil encompassed relationships established with increasingly broad sectors of society, in particular the less institutionalized sectors (Alvarez, 2014: 34). In addition to the popularization of feminism among students, there was a shared desire for feminist action in the streets and for a multiplication of popular feminisms in the city and in the countryside. One of the important protests of popular feminism was the 2000 March of the Margaridas (named for a union leader), which brought together around 20,000 women from various regions of the country. In 2003 the number of women marching doubled, in 2007about 50,000 rural workers participated, and in 2011 more than 100,000 women gathered in Brasília (IPEA, 2013). The mobilization process combined training, denunciation, and pressure with political dialogue and negotiation with the state, especially during the Workers’ Party governments, that resulted in documents handed over to the federal government and Congress and some achievements with regard to policy (CONTAG, 2015). The March of the Margaridas and the participation of its leaders in councils, conferences, and policy monitoring committees produced documentation policies for rural women, credit for production, property titles for women, and policies to combat violence against women in the countryside.

Bolivia

The rise to power of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS) in Bolivia in 2006, after the election of the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, meant a sharp rupture in the country’s social imaginary that involved the protagonism of the indigenous population and the construction by the state of a new civilizatory framework. In 2009, in the framework of the new constitution, the Vice Ministry for Equal Opportunities, linked to the Ministry of Justice, was created. Only a second-tier institution, in 2012 it had precarious budget levels—0.001 percent of the general budget, around US 3 cents per woman. It was responsible for implementing policies for women and also for children, youth, the elderly, and people with special needs (Bolívia, 2012). At times this vice ministry was led by a man, reinforcing the idea that it was not seen as feminist, and it had no formal channels for the participation of civil society. In Morales’s second term a cabinet with gender parity was created with the appointment of female heads of the Ministries of Justice, Planning, Transparency, Development, Employment and Welfare, the Environment, Cultures, Health, and Rural Development (Uriona, 2010). Many of them were indigenous and came from social organizations and union movements of the MAS base (Carrasco, 2013).

After the approval of the new constitution in 2009 and the establishment of the objective of “decolonizing the state,” the women’s organizations framed a demand agenda around the “depatriarchalization” of the Bolivian state and society (Chávez et al., 2011; Paredes, 2012). One of the actions derived from this process was the creation in 2010 of the Depatriarchalization Unit, linked to the Ministry of Cultures, within the Vice Ministry of Decolonization with the objective of proposing actions to destabilize patriarchal domination. On the one hand, the unit represented a milestone in recognizing that patriarchy was a political problem and had to be the object of state action (Cárdenas et al., 2013; Ortiz, 2012; Uriona, 2010). Nowhere in Latin America has it been possible to build a public management model that focuses on the deconstruction of structurally entrenched powers such as colonialism and patriarchy. On the other hand, the unit was rife with contradictions. In the resolution creating it was presented as a fourth-tier agency (subordinate to the General Directorate of Plurinational Public Administration, which, in turn, was subordinate to the Vice Ministry of Decolonization) (Bolívia, 2014). The Ministry of Cultures itself recognized a struggle within the state to expand its institutionality and understood that the term “depatriarchalization,” although it had captured the collective imagination of Bolivian society, was only beginning to be theoretically developed (Cárdenas et al., 2013).

Some writers have pointed to contradictions between the indigenous and the feminist agendas (Htun and Ossa, 2013; Ortiz, 2012) that permeated both the Depatriarchalization Unit and the Vice Ministry of Equal Opportunities. The prevailing view in the government, associated with a worldview of gender complementarity, did not recognize the importance of specific instances of gender in public management (Htun and Ossa, 2013). In addition, in the Ministry of Cultures the term “depatriarchalization” seems to have acquired a sense refractory to the “different variants of feminism”. In this sense, feminists would constitute for depatriarchalization “neither nightmare nor consolation but rather social variants that reproduce their origins and pay the consequences in practical results” (Cárdenas et al., 2013: 39).

The protests of the feminist and women’s movements in Bolivia can be analyzed in terms of the construction of a common agenda around actions in favor of including the theme of gender equality in national legislation and in the state. The convening of the Sucre constituent assembly enabled the mobilized social forces to defend their conceptions about power, the country, and democracy in the process of formulating proposals for the restructuring of Bolivia’s foundational structures. Approved on January 25, 2009, by referendum and enacted on February 7 of the same year, the magna carta ensured social and gender equity, equivalence in representation, and the prohibition of discrimination by sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity (Uriona, 2010). Although the constituent process incorporated a wide range of demands from feminist and women’s movements, it was not successful “in recognizing the principle of depatriarchalization as a pillar of the process of transformation, inclusion, and disruption of power relations that exclude and oppress women,” which was incorporated only later (Uriona, 2010: 34). The elections of 2010 did, however, culminate in the presence of 47 percent women in the Senate and 25 percent in the Chamber of Deputies (Uriona, 2010). Today parity is a reality in both chambers.

It is worth highlighting a second scenario of the movements’ activities around a new normative framework involving new laws, decrees, and policies. To this end, a wide range of women’s organizations was organized and articulated with the aims of building consensus with respect to and in recognition of the diversity and plurality of movements and producing a common agenda for action. As a result, a national agenda was reached and mobilization strategies and alliances were built. Many actors from these movements participated in protests such as those over water and gas, which gave rise to big changes and again combined street protest with activities in the institutional spaces of the state. In contrast to these more collaborative forms was the powerful autonomous radical movement Mujeres Creando (Women Creating). Although the idea of depatriarchalization, fully incorporated by the government, had first been enunciated by this movement, it denounced patriarchy and co-optation in the transformation process promoted by the MAS (Roig, 2013).

In summary, protests under the Morales government assumed the character of negotiation and reinforcement of the state’s reform guidelines, based on the ideas of decolonization and depatriarchalization. However, they did not remove from feminist agendas the most contentious actions, especially those of radical feminists in favor of sexual and reproductive rights and those of the rural and indigenous sectors in opposition to the government’s extractive policies. Also noteworthy was the significant increase in female representation in the legislature as a result of the electoral law. Furthermore, a broad participatory institutionality was created, especially at the local level, that enabled yet another channel of frequent communication between the state and the social movements. The success in creating a national agenda for feminist and women’s movements was expressed in the creation of new laws and the establishment of the Depatriarchization Unit. The interaction between the feminist field and the state was much more articulated between civil society and the legislature, with the Vice Ministry of Equal Opportunities remaining outside this framework because of its weakness.

Repertoires of Interaction of the Feminist Field in Comparative Perspective

The interaction repertoires of the four countries may be summarized as shown in Table 1.

Table 1

Interaction Repertoires of Latin American Feminists

Country	Institutional Mechanisms for Women	Women in Parliament	Women in Executive Branch	Formal Participatory Spaces	Nature of Protests
Chile	Strong: first-tier, considerable budget, considerable personnel and administrative structure	Low: 14 percent (IPU, 2011)	Female president supporting gender equality; parity in the cabinet during most of the government, some ministers with feminist trajectories	Civil Society Council	Fragmented movement, increase of autonomist sectors, therefore more contentious than collaborative
Brazil	Relatively strong: first-tier, medium-sized budget, with difficulties in execution, reduced structure, but strong support for subnational mechanisms	Low: approximately 8 percent (IPU, 2011)	Small number of female ministers but feminist heads on gender equality and racial equality	National Council for Women’s Policies and national conferences, among others	More collaborative, with growth of contentious actions and sectors since 2013
Bolivia	Weak: fourth-tier, divided between Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Cultures, very limited budget	High, especially after the approval of constitution and parity law	Parity in the cabinet	Constituent process	More collaborative; mostly women’s movements in the base of MAS; Mujeres Creando as the contentious exception
Argentina	Weak: fourth-tier, large budget deficit	High because of quota laws, approximately 37 percent (IPU, 2011)	President has ties with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo; few women appointed to ministries	n.a.	Contentious and occasionally collaborative. national women”s conferences as convergence process

The analyses undertaken here, although initial and in need of further research, have sought to reinforce the idea, present in the literature of social movements, that the interactions between the feminists and the state are not simply contentious but also collaborative. The proportions of each kind of interaction are influenced by the dominant political project of the state, the profile of the institutional mechanisms of advancement for women, the formal channels of participation, support for the feminist and gender agenda by presidents, and female presence in the legislature.

In Chile, interactions occurred more with the executive branch than with the legislative power and also through the consultative council, which included representatives of civil society. Protests were somewhat fragmented and more contentious than collaborative. In Brazil, interactions were more centered on the executive and formal spaces for participation, which periodically brought together a very significant number of women’s organizations. Protests were part of a continuum of interaction that combined participation in councils with mobilization at conferences. The March of the Margaridas was a collaborative protest, but from 2013 on a more contentious element emerged. In Bolivia the interaction did not benefit as much from the executive branch’s institutions. The constituent process created a space for fundamental interaction between government, parties, and women’s movements and organizations, one of the fruits of which was the parity law. Finally, in Argentina, given the weakness of the institutional mechanisms for women, interaction took place primarily in the legislative sphere, where deputies had considerable impact. The national women’s conferences functioned as opportunities for alliances among women’s movements and the development of political proposals. More recently, the “Ni una menos” protests have provided a platform for demands of parties and governments.

These interactions obviously do not exhaust the formal relations of women’s movements and organizations with Latin American states, and they are not free of controversy. In all four countries, we can find contentious actions and organized sectors that mobilize outside the collaborative frameworks with the state. A certain contradiction in the projects of some of these governments has reinforced the emergence and strengthening of more autonomous sectors. However, collaborative interactions are so prevalent in the region that Matos (2010) has suggested that this is one of the main characteristics of a new feminist wave. The analysis of these interaction repertoires suggests that future research might benefit from two analytical perspectives that have the potential to capture the multiple forms of feminist activity in the region: the deliberative-systems approach of Mansbridge and Parkinson (2012) and the social network analysis that Silva and Ribeiro (2016) have recently applied to the subsystem of policy councils in the city of Belo Horizonte.

Footnotes

Notes

Eduardo Moreira da Silva is an adjunct professor and subcoordinator of the graduate program in political science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Clarisse Goulart Paradis is an adjunct professor at the University of International Integration of the Afro-Brazilian Lusophony and a researcher at FEMPOS. Luis Fierro is a translator living in the Miami area.

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