30 years of our collective struggles for justice, peace, life, and dignity!
Bogota, December 2, 2023 In these three decades of organization, struggle, and mobilization of La Via Campesina, indigenous women, peasants, landless women, migrants, fisherwomen, pastoralists, seasonal workers, and agricultural workers have been fundamental in carrying forward political and organizational strategies and tactics. They guarantee life and a future for humanity and the planet, fighting daily for the defense of Mother Earth, for Food Sovereignty and healthy nutrition for the fields and cities, and against the looting, devastation, death, and oppression caused by capitalism and agro-hydro business in our territories.
In 2023, La Via Campesina commemorates 30 years of “globalizing the struggle and hope” of the people of the world, with the certainty that solidarity and unity are vital to overcoming capitalism and the savage imperialism sustained by racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. We embrace and join the resistance of women in Palestine, Kurdistan, Niger, Haiti, Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua, Ukraine, and in each territory. As rural women, we have been excluded and subjected for centuries; because of that, we are building from our territories with wisdom and without fear a unified vision that today we call Peasant and Popular Feminism.
In these 30 years, there have been profound changes in the living conditions of rural women around the world. Today, the processes of exploitation, violence, and barbarism are still imposed on communities and peoples and on the bodies of those of us who rebel, especially women, children, and diversity. However, our dreams and challenges also expand as social organization, solidarity, resistance, and popular struggle grow and strengthen.
Today, we actively participate in the movement, leading processes and debates. However, there are still many internal and external challenges. Along with these fascist and neo-fascist waves in our territories comes a loss of historical and fundamental rights to guarantee a dignified and full life for women.
We are experiencing a crisis process where rights are questioned, mainly women’s rights. A fundamental right is the political participation of rural women, both within the movement and organizations and in societies. Throughout the history of La Via Campesina, there has been immense progress in the political participation of women. We have built and conquered several spaces with wisdom and daring. Nothing has been gifted to us. Gender parity in the political coordination of the movement is perhaps a particularity in an agrarian movement, but it is not the only demand we have.
The women’s assemblies of La Vía Campesina are not only a means of training and exchange but also of building an agenda, legitimizing our actions, and validating the fundamental role we have in the construction of Food Sovereignty, of our movement and societies of peace with social justice. Guaranteeing peasant rights means guaranteeing the rights of rural women!
The struggle and organization in these 30 years of La Via Campesina as a political and pedagogical tool have also taught us that we cannot build the present without knowing the past. Because of that, we recognize all the seeds that rebellious women left us, invisible but organized, for justice and dignity. We welcome the fire lit in us by the women who preceded us, our ancestors and sisters who opened the path of struggle for us.
Our history has been one of marginalization and exclusion from public spaces. Because of that, in this 6th Assembly, we listen and speak to each other in a safe and trusting space, understand our contexts, review the organicity, and remember and commemorate our collective achievements in this period, such as the Declaration on Peasant Rights.
With certainty, we reaffirm our fight:
- Anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racial;
- Through a processes of resistance and organization against all the violence that persists in the world towards women, gender diversity, the entire working class, and our people;
- With training, study, and exchange processes;
- For strengthening the participation and integration of youth and diversity;
- Against the criminalization of our struggles and for safe spaces of protection for women victims of violence and their daughters and sons.
- As we said in our first assembly, we today affirm: We will continue to be organized, strengthening our struggles and the practice of solidarity and outrage in the face of all injustices and inequalities.
- For new societies and organizations with relationships based on justice and human dignity.
With conviction, we commit to continue the fight:
- For an anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, and anti-racial society
- For a Popular Agrarian Reform that guarantees land for women
- For public policies with gender perspectives
- For political participation without exclusions of rural women
- For agroecological production, with native and peasant seeds, with local markets.
Enough of violence against women, femicides, sexual exploitation, and violence against gender discrimination! Enough of wars that destroy dreams, people, and social constructions! Fascism will not pass!
“With conviction, we pave the way for Peasant and Popular Feminism, build Food Sovereignty, and fight against crises and violence.”