A women’s movement, which already has 2,039 militants, is launching a list of 12 female candidates and six male allied candidates in Medellín for the upcoming regional and local elections next October 27 in Colombia. They aspire to obtain from five to seven seats in the Council of the city, the capital of Antioquia.
They are called Estamos Listas (We Are Ready) and they offer seven programmatic points: the defense of women’s human rights and promoting their social, political, cultural and organizational leadership; the defense of life and safety in the city; the boost of a municipal pact to eradicate violence against women; advancing municipal budgets to recognize the care work women do; a respectful sexual and emotional education at schools; the promotion of care and protection mechanisms for girls and boys so that they live free from violence; the right to live in “a beautiful, sustainable, healthy, equitable, egalitarian and safe city”.
Medellín is also considered to be the capital of conservatism in Colombia. The results of the 2016 plebiscite that sought to endorse the peace agreement between the national government and the FARC guerrillas sealed that perception about Medellín, as El Espectador notes. While in Colombia the victory of the NO option to that agreement won with a tiny margin (50.23% against 49.76% of the YES option), in Medellín the gap was exponential: the NO option won with 62.97% against the 37.02% of the YES.
Semana magazine and El País agree that this result was the seedbed of what is now known as Estamos Listas, the women’s movement that competes at the Municipal Council elections next October.
Catalina Oquendo writes for El País that the resounding triumph of the NO in the city caused this group of women to mobilize, in order to “recover from fear and discomfort.” They found the way to do this was to “occupy more spaces of power in the political life of the city.”
“And then we said that here we had to do something, because we were asleep with the reality of the city, we had to propose an agenda from the feminine perspective for all people, an agenda with a social conscience. We are a group of women who have been in social organizations and academia and who felt that we were ready to enter politics,” Piedad Toro, campaign manager of Estamos Listas, told Semana.
Catalina Oquendo quoted Dora Saldarriaga, head of the movement’s list of candidates, also a lawyer and teacher: “Before going out to the public we were doing an internal job, thinking about the agenda, inviting women. It was very nice because we told our friends: ‘Do you want to be part of a political movement?’, ‘And who is the candidate?’ ‘No idea.’ Nobody knows, it’s collective.”
Estamos Listas is comprised of women with different backgrounds and occupations: housewives, students, workers of all kinds, academics. They networked with each other. The movement has been growing since 2017. This year it became official with 41,948 signatures before the Registry Office.
For now they aspire only to the Council and not to the mayor’s office of the city that has managed to rise from the era of violence which it was subjected by today’s “Hollywood legend” Pablo Escobar. But Medellín has still a lot to fix, change, heal. As of March of this year, 15 women had been murdered in the city, 36% more than the same period last year; in July alone, 10 femicides occurred.
The 2,039 militants elected the list of candidates, according to El País and Semana, through the Internet, mainly apps and social media.
At the beginning, explains El País’ Catalina Oquendo, 39 militants nominated themselves as candidates. Any aspirant had to present their curriculum and record a video, explaining why they wanted to be a candidate. They were not allowed to campaign.
Piedad Toro explained to Semana: “Our main virtue in the campaign has been the collective. None of our candidates has to have money or experience, just be prepared, and we decided this because we see how men’s candidates work, because they are people who one day wake up wanting to be councilmen and achieve it because they inherit the votes of a family member. We all have the experience, and here only the collective weighs. Let’s suppose that we get three councilwomen. None of them has to put in money, we put in all the money, each one of us contributes money and in this way we are like a great fundraiser that is at the service of the movement.”
The men in the list of candidates, as Toro remembers, are allies who, in addition, help Estamos Listas comply with the gender quota established by law in Colombia.
The main symbol of Estamos Listas is a female owl with open wings, “always vigilant,” they say, with the purple color, the same one as the world women’s movements, and the yellow colors, from the guayacán trees of Medellín.
The owl is in all the marketing articles of Estamos Listas. The sale of these products is one of its funding sources. The others are donations they allow themselves to receive, between one and ten million pesos (between $292 and $2,925) that can be made by any citizen; microcredits that can be received from any person of 1 million pesos ($292); solidarity bonds for sale of between 5,000 and 90,000 pesos ($1.46 to $26.33); and cultural activities of the collective.
Photo: @Estamos_Listas Twitter Account