President of ANAMURI, a Chilean rural and indigenous women’s organization. She is the founder of CLOC/Via Campesina and one of the most recognized rural leaders in the continent. Recently involved in the Chilean Constituent Assembly to ensure the inclusion of rural women’s rights, she has been a living history of the Latin American social struggle for decades.
What do you think are the current challenges in the cooperation sector?
One of the main challenges for social organizations like us is that we do not want projects that condition us, so we have very few, and also Chile is no longer in the spotlight. Our ideas are in the projects we present and the programs we present, but sometimes the NGOs restrict you and lead you to their own interests that serve only to justify resources and in the end we are the ones who are damaged.
How do you consider they should be faced?
The development community must show solidarity, it is deeply meaningful, and if we do not see it in this way, for the liberation of peoples, we will just keep holding on to a system of colonial and dominant logic.
Another challenge is the empty or conditional labels and concepts that the development community has given us and has made us lose our identity. We are no longer rural workers, we are producers, everyone is now middle class. We believe that we have to recover our class identity, our revolutionary mystique, for the changes we need, the sense of organization. There is a lack of political leadership in the movements and the development community must help us. Revolutionary feminism with identity.
