The responsibility of the States in the current situation of women's rights in indigenous normative systems in Latin America

• Author: María-Cruz La Chica
• Pages: 267-288

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE STATES IN THE

CURRENT SITUATION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS

IN INDIGENOUS NORMATIVE SYSTEMS

IN LATIN AMERICA

M-C L C

University of Alcala

Spain

Indigenous women often live in subjection,

they are controlled by their husbands, ma-

nipulated, they have no right to anything;

they do not exercise their rights, they do

not know them, they do not know that

they have freedoms, they do not give them

rights to study, or to go to the doctor, when

a woman is born she already knows that she

will be an object for the house

Tzotzil indigenous woman from Zinacan-

tan (El Diario de Coahuila 2013)

Besides, that’s the fate of women, that’s

the custom, at any moment the girls get

pulled [raped], and if that’s the way it

is, that’s the way it’s going to be for us

too (Candelaria, 17, young Tojolabal

Indian) (López Moya 2010, p. 76)

1. INTRODUCTION

In 1996 Carlos Lenkersdorf published a work entitled Los hombres

verdaderos (e Real Men), which was awarded the annual Lya Kostakowsky

Spanish-American Essay Prize. e work dealt with the way of life of the

268 María-Cruz La Chica

Tojolabal people, whose speakers live in the southeast of the state of Chiapas.

e author elaborates a true praise of the Tojolabal culture, highlighting its

values of internal solidarity, economic equality, cooperative capacity, respect

for the life of nature, animals, and objects, etc. In sum, the work is a celebration

of the way of life of the Tojolabal people as well as a sublimation of it in

contrast to the Western lifestyle and an example to follow. On page 25, the

author of this award-winning work explained that he leaves out the subject

of women “so as not to overload the book” (Lenkersdorf 2005, p. 25). e

silence surrounding the situation of indigenous women is very widespread in

contrast with the great academic activity on any other subject concerning the

indigenous cultures within the eld of anthropology (although today there

are already some notable exceptions). Since anthropology began to ourish in

the middle of the last century, what emerged was a male version of indigenous

cultures, which has been considered an unbiased view of indigenous cultures.

It seems that, if anthropologists had started talking about women, they would

indeed have overloaded their books, as Carlos Lenkersdorf said, for there is

much that remains to be said on such a delicate subject.1

Indigenous women suffer from a specific type of violence that results

from the intersection of race, class and sex, caused by various factors and

perpetrated by various agents. In the absence of official data, academic efforts

have been spent describing this situation based on anthropological studies,2 to

which the present paper intends to contribute. In what follows, I will focus on

the oppression suffered by indigenous women as a result of their traditional

institutions, in the name of custom, and as articulated within their normative

1 This vision has already been questioned, for example, in the work of Miguel Lisbona

Guillén (2005) in which the same editor co-signed a chapter on violence in Tojolabal com-

munities (Lisbona Guillén 2005, pp. 195-238).

2 Among them, she mentions that women are not usually authorities, but are excluded

from the spheres of power; they have difficulties in accessing land ownership and inheritance;

they may be banished from the ex-husband’s community in case of separation; the husband

has the prerogative to discipline his unfaithful wife; arranged marriages for girls and adoles-

cents persist, as does the sale of girls for marriage, as well as the expulsion of women who

marry a stranger from the community; in cases of rape, the damage is repaired by marrying

the rapist or paying a sum of money (usually to the victim’s father); women must obey their

husband’s sexual requests and there is no adequate response to cases of domestic violence;

women are more often monolingual than men and therefore find themselves in a more vul-

nerable situation when they leave their communities and go to a health center (Villanueva

Flore, 2014, pp.17-19).