Miren Gutiérrez

POLITICS: Mum, Can a Man be President?
By Miren Gutiérrez*

ROME, Jan 9 (IPS) - “Do you think a man could ever be president?” the little boy in Ireland asks his mother. All his life he has only seen women presidents, currently Mary McAleese.Joanne Sandler, deputy executive director for programmes at the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), tells this little anecdote to show that in some places it can be routine for women to be found in leadership roles.

“In places like Ireland and Finland it is becoming less extraordinary to see a woman in power,” says Sandler. And it is this kind of female power that could bring more women into leadership, she says.

“When you see women in positions of power, in ministries, obviously the self-image of girls changes, and they envision themselves in those places. But that kind of change will take a very long time, though it has started,” she adds.

The change does not necessarily correspond to a nation’s level of economic development.

Italy ranks 84 in the latest Gender Gap Index (GGI) of the World Economic Forum, where the number one marks the smallest gap. That places it behind Bolivia (80), Peru (75) or Armenia (70), even though it is among the world’s biggest economies.

Panama is number 38 among 128 countries surveyed, while Liberia with Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as president is not ranked. Sri Lanka is ranked 15, the United States 31, Argentina 33, Mongolia 62, Indonesia 81, Nicaragua 90 and Bangladesh 100. The Philippines fares extraordinarily well at number six, after Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand. Pakistan ranks 126, with the biggest gap only after Yemen (128) and Chad (127).

Like national wealth, personal wealth is not an essential pre-requisite. “There is not a relationship between more money and less gender discrimination,” says Sandler. “Money and power have an influence in those women achieving power. But money alone doesn’t explain it.

“Look at the elections in Liberia. A woman who has education, a former employee of the World Bank and the U.N., with an impressive resume, against a man who had no high school education, a soccer player (George Weah). Imagine the opposite: against a man with Johnson-Sirleaf’s background, would a woman with Weah’s credentials be a serious contender? To be a contender for high level political office, women have to bring a lot of extra qualities in order to get into the race. They need the same things as a man, plus others.”

Ayesha Kajee, researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs and board member of Transparency International’s South Africa chapter, says “money is most certainly a partial equaliser for women, in terms of access — access to education, capital, property and opportunity. But even amongst wealthy elites, men tend to wield considerably more power than women. Thus, wealth does not guarantee equity between men and women.”

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En español

POLITICS: For Women, Leaning Doesn’t Make For Leading
By Miren Gutierrez**

ROME, Jan 9 (IPS) - “A woman who enters politics changes; a thousand women who enter politics change politics,” Chilean President Michelle Bachelet told the Spanish television channel TVE in a recent interview.It is the former that seems to ring more true. Most powerful women, particularly though not only in developing countries, are or have been members of elite families: widows, daughters, wives of powerful men, in societies where women do not have equal access to most things.

The list of female rulers who have derived their leadership from men is a long and telling one.

Mireya Moscoso (president of Panama from 1999-2004) was widow of three times former president Arnulfo Arias (who was deposed each time by the military). Before her, Isabel Martínez de Perón was president of Argentina from 1974-1976, following the death of her husband, President Juan Domingo Perón. Argentina has just elected its second woman president: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who succeeded her husband Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) in December.

The success — or succession — of women began in Asia in recent times with Sühbaataryn Yanjmaa, widow of Mongolian hero Sühbaatar. She was the equivalent of head of state from Sept. 23, 1953 to Jul. 7, 1954. “If we consider such a post as having a real ruling status, she would have been (excepting queens) the absolute first woman political ruler in contemporary history,” says Zárate’s Political Collections (ZPC), a record of worldwide leadership.

Corazon Aquino was president of the Philippines from 1986 to 1992, after her husband Benigno Aquino — the leader of the opposition against dictator Ferdinand Marcos — was assassinated. Chandrika Kumaratunga, Sri Lankan president from 1994-2005, followed in the footsteps of her mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike, three times prime minister, a rare instance of a woman taking leadership after another female family member.

Benazir Bhutto, assassinated Dec. 27, was Pakistani prime minister from 1988-1990 and again from 1993-1996. She was the daughter of former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno (Indonesia’s first post-colonial president 1945-1967), led the world’s largest Muslim country from 2001-2004, and is expected to seek the post again in 2009. In Bangladesh, arch-enemies Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have both served as prime ministers and as heads of the two largest political parties. Hasina’s late father and Zia’s late husband ran the country at different times.

“These women share dynastic origins and ‘inherited’ political leadership,” says the German government-funded research report ‘Dynasties and Female Leadership in Asia’.

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En español

There it is my new article on democracy in Peru.

Q&A: “Just Keeping the Achievements of Democracy Means a Daily Struggle”
Interview with Gustavo Gorriti, President of Instituto Prensa y Sociedad

Gustavo Gorriti

ROME, Sep 25 (IPS) - With former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos in jail, Peru faces a new era. How did it come to happen, and what is in store?IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutierrez speaks with Gustavo Gorriti about the unprecedented decision of the Chilean Supreme Court to extradite Fujimori, who was president 1990-2000, and its significance.

Gorriti, an award-winning investigative journalist, covered Peru’s internal war in the eighties. He followed former head of intelligence service Vladimiro Montesinos’s career since 1983 — Montesinos was the source of Fujimori’s power, and his downfall. It was his actions that led to the allegations of murder and drug trafficking.

Gorriti is author of ‘The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru’ and the recent ‘Calavera en Negro’ (Skull in Black). He is columnist for Caretas newspaper and president of Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, a Latin American association that promotes independent journalism and freedom of expression. He was earlier associate director of Panama’s La Prensa newspaper, and co-director of Peru’s La Republica.

In the aftermath of Fujimori’s dissolving the Peruvian Congress in 1992 and seizing wide powers, a coup as it came to be called even though Fujimori was president already, Gorriti was kidnapped, and held in the Intelligence Service area of the Pentagonito, the army headquarters, where so many others were tortured and killed. Because of an international outcry, he was finally released.

IPS: This is the first time in history that a court orders the extradition of a former head of state to be tried for human rights violations and corruption in his home country. Fujimori’s extradition also means that all the main public servants involved in the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres are arrested. (The Barrios Altos massacre took place in the Peru suburb of that name Nov. 3, 1991; 15 were killed by a death squad of the Peruvian armed forces. In the La Cantuta massacre, a professor and nine others from Lima’s La Cantuta university were abducted and ‘disappeared’ by a military death squad). Do you feel somehow vindicated?

Gustavo Gorriti: Fujimori’s extradition doesn’t vindicate me. It means that justice has, so far, been partially served. It also somehow closes an extraordinary period in our history filled with incredible paradoxes, ironies and twists of fate. Its lessons are that consistent action in defence of democracy and human rights, while exposing the crimes of tyrants will in due time end up with a similar scenario as the one we have in Peru: with Montesinos and Fujimori in jail, facing the results of their past misdeeds.

As for me, it has been a long road fraught with the kind of conflict and peril no journalist should have to face. Do I feel any kind of elation now? None at all. It took too long, most of the time uphill. It cost too much to many people and to the country as a whole. Much was lost, and will never be recovered. We’ll have to make sure that our democracy becomes unassailable to the Montesinos and the Fujimoris of the world, and severe measures may have to be taken. But there is no joy in it. At least, I don’t feel any.

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Artículo en español…

By Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Oct 23 (IPS) - In a referendum Sunday Panama unequivocally said ‘yes’ to a massive canal expansion at a cost of half its gross domestic product, maybe more, in investments. With most of the votes counted, about 80 percent of Panamanians seemed to have approved the mega-project.

The winning line of the argument — that of the Panama Canal Authority (PCA) – is that the future of this maritime route depends on the deepening of the navigation channels, the construction of two sets of locks at both ends of the canal, and of a third lane capable of handling large container ships, bulk and gas carriers, and tankers that have previously been too wide. The canal handles nearly 5 percent of international trade.

However, not everyone is happy with the result.

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By Sabina Zaccaro and Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Feb 13 (IPS) - Abu Omar apparently never knew he had been tailed, so he did not notice that the Italian political crime investigation unit, DIGOS, had stopped following him. But the head of the Central Intelligence Agency in Milan Robert Seldon Lady knew that DIGOS had aborted the chase, and that facilitated the abduction of the Egyptian cleric.

That at least is what beleaguered former intelligence boss Nicolò Pollari says now in an attempt to extricate himself from the kidnapping.

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