Lourdes Huanca, Peruvian peasant leader and president of FENMUCARINAP, has come to Europe to meet in Brussels with MEPs from the Group of the Left in the European Parliament — GUE/NGL (The Left).
Lourdes Huanca is one of the best-known indigenous leaders in her country, Peru. Committed to defending women’s rights and sustainable development, in 2006 she founded the National Federation of Peasant, Artisan, Indigenous, Native and Salaried Women of Peru (FEMUCARINAP), after noting that women unionists did not have a space for support national collective. FENMUCARINAP, which today brings together more than 126,000 women, was born to fill this gap and gather the demands of rural and urban, native and indigenous, salaried and artisan women.
Since its inception, FENMUCARINAP has been part of La Vía Campesina (LVC), a peasant movement founded in 1993, which brings together millions of small farmers throughout the world. Together with the 182 member organizations of LVC, FENMUCARINAP promotes the defense of food sovereignty -the right of peoples, their countries or Unions of States to define their agrarian and food policy without dumping vis-à-vis third countries, as well as the right to a healthy and culturally appropriate diet, produced with respectful and sustainable agroecological methods[1]. The search for an agrarian reform, the respect for peasant rights, the promotion of agroecology constitute the way to achieve the food sovereignty of the peoples.
Another fundamental axis of struggle for FENMUCARINAP and its president, Lourdes Huanca, is the empowerment of women. From her experience in leadership, Lourdes comments that “machismo is very strong in the country and especially in the Andean, Amazonian and coastal areas.” In the 17 years of organizational life, the Federation revalues the work of rural women in Peru, traditionally educated in caring for the home and family
FENMUCARINAP was founded within them and since it began it has been part of La Vía Campesina. For us, La Vía Campesina is our university, because we learn every day how to confront this neoliberal, capitalist system that exists in all countries and especially in Latin America where it tries to dispossess us of our territories. The indigenous peoples, native women and men, peasant producers, work with the land and if we do not have land there is no life and worse if we do not have water and seeds we do not have to eat. That is why we uphold La Vía Campesina with that strength, with that fighting faith.
FENMUCARINAP is also a training space for families; The peasant woman is always accompanied by her family nucleus. In this framework, it is necessary that the social bases know international treaties and personal rights. In this way, women acquire tools to assert their rights, carry out national advocacy and propose feminist proposals to the new national governments.
The experience of defending women’s rights at the national level is not exempt from defamation and aggression. At the national level, the stigma attached to struggles such as the one undertaken by Lourdes, causes them to be branded as “terrorists”, “thugs”, “spoiled” and “radicals”. Even in the social sphere, promoting women’s rights is seen as promiscuous and undignified work among women. Given this, the defender comments that “the position of FENMUCARINAP is to be rebels, there is no door that closes […] the
empowerment, to be safe, to identify with the country, with the people and have capacities”. Thus, for example, in 2011 supporting the then presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, in charge of making him swear to uphold democracy, Fujimorismo, the party of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) not only assaulted the premises of his organization, in Jesús María, stealing information from the registers of affiliates, her personal documents and her son’s documents, but also received death threats endangering her life, that of her family and her companions.
Likewise, Lourdes expresses that assuming a leadership is also recognizing responsibilities as a woman, mother and leader at the same time. Which opens flanks to attacks, including family and personal, to intimidate and reduce the presence of her organization and the defense of rights in the country. However, she states that it is necessary to maintain the objective of revaluing rights, not bending, not selling conscience; for the fight is one.
During the government of Pedro Castillo (2021-2022), he was a bridge between the government and social, peasant, and indigenous organizations, working particularly on the bill for a second agrarian reform. This process led her to participate together with her organization and other spaces of the peasant movement in gathering the demands of small producers from different regions in Peru. Unfortunately, the current Congress shelved the law, frustrating the desires of thousands of men and women in the countryside to rescue family farming. For Lourdes Huanca, this archiving responds to the interests of the large agribusiness companies behind the unfavorable votes of the Congressmen and is one of the reasons why the peasant movement is taking to the streets today. This has led her to be one of the leaders of the social mobilizations in Peru, which include slogans to repair the victims of police violence, close Congress, call for new general elections and a popular and plurinational constituent assembly, for a New Constitution.
FENMUCARINAP is currently generating economic means, through self-management activities or “economic autonomy”, as Lourdes calls it, to continue serving the protesting peasants who continue to arrive in Lima to join the protests, which have already left some 50 dead and more than 600 injured, due to the police and military repression of what the protesters call the civic-military dictatorship of the current president Dina Boluarte.
Thus, FENMUCARINAP has taken over care tasks in these demonstrations, providing accommodation in the premises of the Peasant Confederation of Peru, as well as food and medicine for the protesters. This has resulted in a police persecution against Lourdes, which today puts her physical and moral integrity at risk, given the harassment of the hegemonic press and the criminalization of the right to protest in Peru.
