Funding Women Leaders and Movements at the Frontlines, part 3

The Global Women’s Funding Movement is a strong pipeline for sharing information, trends, strategies, and resources.

It is also the vehicle for women’s funds to collaborate with each other to support, strengthen, and help defend women’s movements and the women human rights defenders that lead them. In 2009, a decade before it would hit researchers’ radars two women leaders, Marusia López Cruz and Lydia Alpizar Durán, began detecting a pattern of violence against women leaders, in particular Indigenous women, in their networks across Mesoamerica—the historical region and cultural area in the southern part of North America and Central America. Women leaders throughout the region were being targeted for violence, and, ultimately, a number were murdered. They were being arrested and exiled systematically as they resisted threats to their freedom and their community’s wellbeing.

This detection work was compiled through a mapping process supported by JASS (formerly Just Associates) led by Lisa VeneKlasen, their founding Executive Director. Two women’s funds funded these women leaders at the time: Global Fund for Women and Fondo Semillas. Mama Cash later provided additional funding through the Dutch Lottery and managed through the Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres (Central American Women’s Fund). This mapping also unearthed the continuing discrimination by human rights movements against women leaders in this region. Indeed, there was also a lack of knowledge regarding this dire situation in the women’s movement.

As the information emerged, Marusia López Cruz and Lydia Alpizar Durán co-led a political alliance named the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women’s Human Rights Defenders, also known as IM-Defensoras. At the same time, leaders in women’s funds convened a donor gathering in 2014, where information was shared regarding the mapping project, and additional women’s funds joined in the “building of a movement of protection.”

This protection movement focused on the countries of Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. The most vulnerable to violence were those in rural areas and Indigenous women defending land rights and fighting environmental justice, lesbian and transgender activists, and feminists advocating for an end to violence against women. Based on this mapping, the initiative prioritized a combination of plans: urgent action, social media activism, human rights advocacy, research, training, and self-care.

They began to raise awareness about the critically important, increasingly more dangerous, but often invisible leadership role played by women defenders in advancing human rights. To date, the initiative has helped over 100 female human rights defenders who were at risk of violence and needed services, including relocation for them and their families. In 2013, the work of IM-Defensoras led to a UN Resolution on the Protection of Women Human Rights Defenders. Today, IM-Defensoras has expanded to five national Defensoras networks in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua.

In 2018, Nicaragua’s IM-Defensoras network began sounding the alarm that their nation’s women’s movement infrastructure was under a new method of attack by the government of the despotic ruler, Daniel Ortega.

The women’s movement in Nicaragua has been his steady opponent since he took power in 2007. According to IM-Defensoras, Ortega’s regime has a new approach to speed up attacks on Nicaraguan women’s movement infrastructure using a 2020 law that requires any group receiving funds from international donors to register as a “foreign agent.” The wave of massive cancellations of feminist groups led to an average of 47 feminist and women’s rights groups being illegally and arbitrarily shut down each month.

This crackdown has been accompanied by the forced removal of prominent women human rights defenders from the country, with at least 16 women defenders banished from Nicaragua since 2018.59 IM-Defensoras defends the Nicaraguan women’s movement infrastructure by relying on the movement-sustaining circuitry of the global women’s movement. Reproductive healthcare services, shelters for survivors of gender violence, and loans and training for peasant women—to cite just a few activities run by feminist groups—are vanishing because of the government ban. As Ortega’s actions chillingly demonstrate, erasing feminism is autocracy’s and patriarchy’s primary strategy. In response, the strength and solidarity of feminist movements and the sustained support of the Global Women’s Funding Movement are crucial.

In an interview with Mallika Dutt (now with the Hewlett Foundation), Lydia Alpizar Durán said: “The nature of capitalism is to create fragmentation, to break the wholeness. And I think feminists want very deep transformations for the whole of society, including for Mother Earth. Part of my effort to bring us together—different issues, different actors—it’s because I think we really need to work on the fragmentation and there’s so much we need to learn from each other. Building the collective project is crucial and there’s so much learning from movements on the ground.”

Tomorrow we learn about: Funding Women Leaders and Movements at the Frontlines, part 4