The fight for feminist justice in Bolivia

The chest of the mother of Lorena Scarlet Paredes, who was killed by a police officer in 2020, and whose photo appears over her mother’s heart. Image by Lorena K for Ojalá.

Content warning: this story contains reference to femicide, sexual assault and child abuse.

Opinion • Claudia López Pardo • July 20, 2023 • Leer en castellano

Waking up with pain in the pit of your stomach. Leaving home early to wait outside and inside the halls of the courthouse. Checking that the investigation and the files are in order. Meeting with the lawyer. Planning what to do if the presiding judge rules against you and things take even longer. Organizing a media strategy. Checking your pockets to make sure you have enough cash to cover copies, paperwork and phone calls. Missing paid work because you’re out, still waiting.

In February 2020, Lorena Paredes, an 18-year-old who was training to be part of the Civilian Police Support Group was killed by her instructor. Since then, her mother has learned that seeking justice is a process that requires her to be daring and take risks.

Mothers are daring to seek justice for their daughters. This daring has allowed mothers, family members, and friends of women murdered in femicidal violence to take on tenacious struggles for justice, and its institutions. To dare is not just a verb, it is an action that contains pain, love and rage. 

I met the families and mothers seeking justice for their loved ones on November 25, 2020, in the march for the elimination of violence against women in Cochabamba. 

That day, our network of women activists and organizers prepared an intervention in which each of us carried an outfit hanging from a pole. A sign with the name of a woman murdered by femicide was pinned to each outfit. I chose a tan dress with roses on the skirt, and the sign that hung from it read "Betsabé can no longer go out,” for Betsabé Mara Alacia, a 24-year-old murdered by a femicidal police officer. 

Betsabé was the 70th victim of femicide in Bolivia in 2020, just another number according to the patriarchal narrative that counts murders as mere statistics. In our narrative—which puts life at the center—she is a woman who will no longer go out, laugh, or sing. A woman denied her own vitality.

Lorena and Betsabé are two young women whose cases have become emblematic, exposing the contradictions of the police, the institution in charge of managing machista violence. Since their murders, which triggered the anger of the general population, their mothers and relatives have been fighting for justice.

The reaction to these cases brings to mind a massive march held by families and victims of violence in El Alto last January. That mobilization emerged from a powerful local call, which brought together associations, family members and feminists from across the country who accompany and support them. It took place in the midst of scandalous cases of corruption involving a group of judges, prosecutors and men responsible for femicides. At the same time, a long hidden truth exploded in public view: violence in Bolivian society is not being resolved through the formal justice system, which does nothing about impunity or the intensification of violence in the daily lives of women. 

The structural dimension from which violence arises and is reproduced continues to be overlooked. Bolivian legislation includes reforms, regulations, and laws such as the Law to guarantee women a life free from violence (Law 348), itself the result of the struggle of families, women and institutional feminists. But the injustices against us do not stop. Nor does the profound mistrust of the population toward the legal system and the institutions that manage and regulate violence. 

New directions toward justice 

The persistence of injustices against women and feminized bodies has us doing rehearsals, trying new strategies, and asking ourselves: What kind of justice do women and feminists desire? 

Answering this question illuminates how organizations of families, women, dissidents, and feminists are politicizing practices of struggle against all forms of violence. These practices have intensified in recent years.  

We are opening up the horizon of justice, against impunity. This opening goes beyond the narrow margins marked by the criminal justice system. 

In 2021 and 2022, the struggle of women university students from at least three public universities and one private university shook the educational system and the institutional agreements that underpin it. The students protested historical abuses, ongoing violations and the corruption of teachers and administrators who, for a long time—under the shield of university autonomy—believed themselves untouchable. 

They also called out the guarded silence of religious institutions that also asked "God's forgiveness" for the accused, revictimizing the students. The young women used social networks to create confessionals, organize assemblies and build bridges to break the boundaries around their institutions. From their struggle a powerful voice emerged, revealing the inefficiency and non-existence of protocols around sexual violence in their schools.

During the March 8 mobilization in Cochabamba, we saw how the practice of escrache (pasting up and publishing the names of abusers) is not only a symbol, but a practical form of struggle. The great river of women who marched that day left in its path walls and streets covered by the names and images of abusers. This year, in addition to escraches of individuals, the police and the church were denounced. The word CHILD ABUSER was spray painted on the cathedral in capital letters. A few months later, a series of horrifying cases of child abuse and sexual assault by the Catholic Church in the country would become public.

Escrache is already a legitimate way to publicly signal and delegitimize aggressors. It is an autonomous practice that has become widespread not only because the institutions that "attend" to gender violence are not effective, but also out of our desire to autonomously produce justice outside the state. 

Escraches are born of the lack of response from the police and other institutions to multiple gender violences, abuse, rapes and femicides against women, feminized bodies and gender and sexual dissidences. They are carried out to avoid repetition and as a call to collective memory.

The extensive and detailed research by the Precarious Researchers space, of which I am part, allowed us to build a comprehensive understanding of different practices of women and feminisms in the production of justice. The cases and examples mentioned above are concrete examples of the many practices we have documented.

These concrete practices contain a type of politicization that creates meaning in the heat of our struggles. We identified three kinds of practice: state-centric, combined and autonomous. 

State-centric practices are struggles that take place in the field of state justice. Combined practices are struggles for the production of justice in state institutions and their margins, as in the women in public and private universities. Finally, autonomous practices seek the production of justice outside the state. These include the escraches carried out by collectives and individuals, and other denunciations and actions that connect public and private spaces.

What do we want to happen?

"Feminist justice is not killing, hating, or humiliating," says Paceña feminist María Galindo. "Feminist justice is repairing the damage."  

Renewed feminist struggles are redefining the notion of justice in Bolivia. We are giving shape to a type of feminist justice in which we reappropriate the meanings of politicization, self-defense, the political action of accompaniment, reparations, and individual and collective healing.

Our struggles against all forms of violence and desire for justice emerge from the weariness produced by impunity and revictimization by the state. Feminist justice is a way to restore dignity.

There is a debate about feminist justice, punitivism and the carceral nature of the judicial system. But our struggles are not resolved by punitivism, which dialogues with the fascisms that have been installed in Bolivia in recent years.

The exercise of naming and recognizing ourselves as part of a larger fight that shares common desires for justice can trace its genealogy to the actions in this area led by La Paz feminist collective Mujeres Creando. They created a new form of social control of the institutions that manage and regulate violence. Through enrostramiento (displaying the faces of abusers), the members of Mujeres Creando found an effective way to publicly denounce the ineffectiveness of the state. 

Feminist justice is nourished by intergenerational dialogue. Today, the youngest women are shattering silences in all different spaces at a never-ending pace. With them we are navigating a mighty river of desires that in its flow connects language, emotions and freedom.