Marguiorina Cardozo

Marguiorina Balbuena has created an organization of peasant and indigenous women in Paraguay to promote gender equality and insert a cohesive women’s voice in national and international decision-making.

Through her organization CONAMURI, Marguiroina is bringing together women from both peasant and indigenous communities—two groups that have long been at odds—as a unified political force working for social and economic change. Although women have been active in Paraguay’s social reform movements for some time, their role has never been fully recognized. CONAMURI works to strengthen women’s voices by building their capacity for action and promoting gender equality in the legal, social, and familial arenas. Through an interchange of knowledge and joint participation in seminars, fundraising, and activism, these two long-marginalized groups of women have found common ground and a stronger base from which to fight for women’s rights and other issues that affect their lives. And by partnering with civil society organizations as well as government and international agencies, CONAMURI has for the first time created a space for Paraguayan women to participate in a meaningful way in national and international dialogue.

Indigenous and peasant women alike have long been relegated to the margins of Paraguayan political and economic life. With the advent of democracy in 1989, after 35 years of military dictatorship, many peasant women became active in the Paraguayan Peasants Movement (MCP), fighting for social change. But despite their leadership roles in thwarting a military coup attempt and forestalling the privatization of telephone and water utilities, among other victories, they were still consigned to the lower levels of the organizational structure and left out of real decision making. And by and large, the issues that most directly affect women’s daily lives were not being taken on.
Land rights is one such issue. Although women head nearly 40 percent of households, they lack the legal protections around land title that men have. They also face discrimination in the home, in schools, in health care, and in public services, even while they are expected to meet the day-to-day needs of their families and communities. Indigenous women are even more isolated, making a living off land far from urban centers and foregoing education to work in hunting, fishing, agriculture and crafts. Social services like health care rarely reach them; the tuberculosis rate in the largely indigenous Boquerón region is 15 times what it is elsewhere in Paraguay. And years of violent oppression left their communities bereft of social representation.
But despite their shared circumstances, these two groups of women have not historically worked together. Conflicts over land resulting from the continued encroachment by large landowners have created deep animosity between peasant and indigenous communities, and women, already on the fringes, have had little opportunity to interact, much less share their plights.

Marguiorina realized that creating a unified women’s movement would require first separating from the existing peasant organization, and then breaking down longstanding barriers to include both peasant and indigenous women. From that foundation, she could then begin helping women redefine their roles in their families, communities, civic organizations, and their country.
Although winning recognition for women who had already participated in the MCP was important, Marguiorina believed that the male- and peasant-dominated organization was not a space where rural women as whole could sufficiently develop their potential as a political and social force. She thus organized discussions among the women of MCP about creating a new organization, and at the same time, during the First Meeting of Peasant Women in 1999, opened a dialogue around rural indigenous issues that emphasized the great contribution of indigenous women, who were at that time excluded from any kind of oppositional social organization in Paraguay. CONAMURI was born from these meetings as an autonomous organization comprised of peasant and indigenous women alike.
Because of the increased responsibilities that these women were taking on, Marguiorina worked first to strengthen the ties between the two groups and improve their overall organizational abilities through periodic meetings, interchanges of ideas with other women’s organizations, both on the national and international level, and ongoing capacity-building trainings that emphasized techniques for increasing their self-esteem and cooperation. CONAMURI also organized meetings and courses in indigenous communities to mobilize women, build leadership skills and emphasize the shared experiences and interests women from both communities have. Adult literacy emerged as an important issue through this early process, when indigenous women observed that their peasant counterparts wrote down decisions made at meetings to inform their local bases. Their desire to learn reading and writing coalesced into an indigenous-oriented literacy program that has helped women not only improve their communications skills, but also earn new respect and take on leadership roles in their communities.
As the organization gelled, three themes developed that would underpin its activities: gender, food security, and organizational strengthening. Gender issues include equal pay, rights and protections, cultural recovery, adult literacy and greater participation for women in existing structures. Food security concerns the laws and regulation of the environment and natural resources, recovery of native seeds, exchanges of experiences with natural food, nutrition and natural medicine, and organic production. And organizational strengthening involves recognizing and celebrating women’s role in promoting social change throughout history, and creating awareness around gender and class issues, equality, dignity and participation, economic policy, organizational management and communication, and more. All of these issues bear heavily women’s livelihoods and thus formed the basis for CONAMURI’s mission.
Once the membership began to grow and CONAMURI’s priorities became better defined, the organization shifted its focus to activism: combating discrimination against indigenous women on the national and international level, including inside other activist organizations; lobbying for changes to the civil and agrarian codes to ensure equal treatment under the law; and bringing CONAMURI women into national and international decision-making processes. Every year, CONAMURI organizes a 54-kilometer march, with extensive media coverage, to defend forests from massive and indiscriminate deforestation, promote the use of native seeds, and demand specific agricultural projects for the peasant and indigenous sectors. It has also taken on legal actions, for example against landowners who are trying to expand soybean cultivation by expelling small landowners. In addition to its externally-oriented activities, CONAMURI also encourages economic independence for women by supporting entrepreneurial projects like raising fowl, milk production, and storage of consumer goods.
CONAMURI is currently made up of 280 member committees and 18 peasant organizations and indigenous communities, involving around 4,200 women. Marguiorina’s inclusion of both peasant and indigenous women in a single organization has influenced the entire women’s movement, both in rural and urban areas, and has been replicated in other social movements in the country. In addition to ties with local civil society and activist organizations, Marguiorina cultivates connections with peasant, indigenous and women’s groups throughout South America, exchanging experiences and participating in joint training courses, regional meetings, congresses, assemblies, and collaborative projects both in Paraguay and abroad.
Charged with external relations for CONAMURI, Marguiorina, has used her visibility and national and international partnerships to increase the organization’s presence and secure legislative changes. Her victories include the construction of a national headquarters with funds from the European Union; a World Bank donation to cover transportation and food for CONAMURI members; training and education courses from the Canada Fund; and support from UNIFEM for the First Meeting of Indigenous Women in 2001. The United National Development Programme also recently lauded CONAMURI for best administration of its $500,000 contribution.

Marguiorina was born into a large peasant family. Her mother was recognized for her knowledge of medicinal plants, and her father was a great storyteller. Marguiorina remembers childhood afternoons, when along with her family, community members would gather around her father to hear stories of peasant heroes and their epic struggles, stories that would linger with her for life.
During the colonial period, the Department of Misiones where Marguiorina grew up was the home of the Jesuits’ utopian communitarianism experiment, recently popularized by the film The Mission. Today, it is a very poor region where smallholding peasants find themselves surrounded by huge cattle ranches, and eke out a living on leftover swatches of arid, rocky soil. With the cooperation of the Paraguayan military, British settlers there have also steadily expanded their reach, pushing peasants further and further off the land to make room for soybean plantations and leaving extensive deforestation in their wake.
It was in this environment that Marguiorina learned about the importance of equity. She was part of a large peasant population that was constantly moving in search of better prospects, and she participated in its struggles as a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a leader, both in Paraguay and in Brazil during the dictatorship. She is a gifted leader, who, like her father, can tell the stories of interminable struggles, theft, deaths, suffering children, hunger, disease, and an unresponsive justice system, all of which she has experienced in her own lifetime. She herself, along with her husband, relatives, and friends were subjected to imprisonment, torture, and exile under the dictator’s rule. But in the same breath that she recounts her people’s history, she speaks with a great hope and confidence for the future. Living without struggling is not living, she says, and vows to continue fighting for her homeland.