The word REXISTIR relates to the historical RESISTANCE of nations and women to the patriarchal and capitalist way of life as such as the social and environmental destruction. Their resistance DEFENDS to live decent lives in harmony with nature, genders and nations. This resistance responds to the necessity to defend the women rights to violence. We consider that uniting our bodies and lands in Latin America means to RESIST to the new colonization of the extractivism. We are standing up for our knowledge, our fights and our alternatives to respect and reach women ́s Good Living. We are standing up, then, to create a new world, to REXISTIR. More…
The word REXISTIR relates to the historical RESISTANCE of nations and women to the patriarchal and capitalist way of life as such as the social and environmental destruction. Their resistance DEFENDS to live decent lives in harmony with nature, genders and nations. This resistance responds to the necessity to defend the women rights to violence. We consider that uniting our bodies and lands in Latin America means to RESIST to the new colonization of the extractivism. We are standing up for our knowledge, our fights and our alternatives to respect and reach women ́s Good Living. We are standing up, then, to create a new world, to REXISTIR.
The extractivism is an economical and political system based on the neoliberal and patriarchal understanding. It consists of the extraction,usufructuary and commercialization of the elements, bodies, processes and functions of nature. The extractivism is based on patriarchal culture responding to the domination patterns of women and nature. Both have been concurrently and historically dominated, controles and exploited.
This capitalist, patriarcal and colonial system would not be able to work if it could not commercialize, divest and control women bodies such as the social unity which reproduces life.
This system cause multiple violences to our bodies and lands and violates the Human Rights of the women who defend them. The extractivism provokes environmental devastation and decline the quality of life of the population violating the right to live, the right to health, the right to adequate housing, to property, food, work, and to a healthy environment. In addition, extractivism subverts the right to political participation, protest as such as the freedom of speech, organization and the right to assembly.
These are the reasons why it is urgent to awaken that violence and denounce them publicly in order to ensure attention, protection and defense of our bodyland.
Territories are also the object and scene of dispute and dispossession by the patriarchal and colonial extractivist model, which consider nature subordinate to the needs of the human being, just as women are considered, in turn, subordinate to men and women. capital accumulation.
Extractive activities alter the reproduction cycles of life, through the contamination and disappearance of water sources, the alteration of soils and ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, among others, which affects the survival of communities, mainly peasant and indigenous women and it is an overload in the work of caring, mainly, by us women.
There is a link between women and the territory, this is the space where life is reproduced, they are united by a stronger bond than the economic one, it is a symbolic bond, a historical and situated bond of roots and belonging.
Most of the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean have established a model of violent and aggressive development over territories and bodies, especially those of women, which omits the existence of diversity, and is based on power relations hierarchical that are based on the repression of some for the well-being of others.
Despite these effects, women have taken actions to strengthen themselves as leaders and to face discrimination generated by social dynamics that stem from approaches such as development and progress. In addition to the above, women have organized and actively participated in processes of building alternatives focused on protecting common goods.
Therefore, the Latin American Network of Women Defenders of Social and Environmental Rights, CENSAT Agua Viva and ACKnowl-EJ (Academic-Activist Co-Production of Knowledge for Environmental Justice) have established an alliance to make visible the struggle of Latin American women in defense of their sovereignty, women who have historically organized to take care of the ways of life that allow them to remain with dignity in their territories and with their communities.
