Nicaraguan women fight sexism to become landowners
When Maria Magdalena Moran was told she had lost her land she didn’t know what to do. The deed for the property in an indigenous village in Nicaragua’s mountainous north had been forged, she learned. The discovery was a harsh blow for the 70-yearold, whose only asset was the small plot where she grew corn and kidney beans. Magdalena had broken what in Nicaragua is a patriarchal model that usually consigns women to the kitchen while viewing farming as “man’s work”.
According to a national farming census, only 22 percent of women in Nicaragua are able to work the land. Magdalena bought her small parcel after looking after her aunt for 24 years. From her savings, she paid 10,000 cordobas just $350 at the official exchange rate, but a sizable sum in this poor country. Technically, indigenous territory in Nicaragua is protected by national and international law. But cases like the one she encountered are common.
Magdalena said an indigenous leader forged documents to take her land and sell it, using some of the proceeds to bribe witnesses to back his account. “I’ve cried my tears. Something really serious has happened to me. I’m a woman, alone, and they took advantage of me. Machismo treats us as if we’re nothing. But from now on they are going to know about the rights we women have,” she said.
A struggle against tradition
Magdalena went to ADIC, an community-development organization that fights for women’s rights in rural communities, and was told that she could get her land back. “I went hungry, put up with rain in the streets of Matagalpa,” the town where she had to begin the legal process, she said. “In the end I managed to get the deed, to rescue the land.” Her case illustrates the struggle many Nicaraguan women face in securing land rights.
Silvia Elena Gonzalez is a mother of four who has been farming for 15 years. But to grow her corn and beans she has to rent the land. “If we had land of our own we could provide food and for our children’s studies,” she said. Her brothers are landowners, but an inheritance cut her out simply because she was a daughter, not a son. “I know I have a right, if my brother doesn’t want to give me a share (of an inheritance), to bring in a lawyer to speak up for me,” she said. “We are four sisters and three brothers, but the inheritance was only for them (the males).”
A law ignored
Nicaragua’s National Assembly in 2010 approved a law meant to redress the balance, to guarantee rural women access to land. But not one woman has managed to successfully use it, according to the Rural Women’s Coordinating Group, which is demanding the law be applied. A spokeswoman for the group, MarÌa Teresa Fernandez, said Nicaragua’s government under President Daniel Ortega had shown little interest in providing funds to meet the goal.
The law was supposed to create a fund to promote equality by facilitating the purchase of land by rural women. It was meant to fix an imbalance created in the 1980s, when Ortega’s Sandinistas, having taken power, enacted farm reforms that massively benefited men while leaving women with just eight percent of agrarian land. The Rural Women’s Coordinating Group is urging the government to make good on its commitment to fund the equality initiative. “It’s an act of justice. We are demanding a legal measure that’s already been approved. We’re not going against the law,” Fernandez said.