Matagalpa Women’s Collective Condemns Latest Expropriation
Thirteen women’s houses in rural communities summarily confiscated
The experience and work accumulated for more than 30 years of community development has been taken away abruptly and arbitrarily
HAVANA TIMES – We express our rejection and support the denunciation of the thirteen women’s community organizations, regarding the invasion and expropriation of their premises, (women’s community houses). For more than thirty years they have been accompanying their communities with a space for organizational, informative, educational, sexual and reproductive care, and emotional health activities. Likewise, they promoted citizen participation and freedom of organization.
We unite our voices to denounce and condemn the robbery of women’s houses in rural communities. These houses are spaces built on land donated by people from the same communities and legalized as collective property in the name of the women’s board of directors.
These are women who have always been committed to the advancement of their communities in the prevention of gender violence and the defense of their human rights. Their efforts have included projects to improve their living conditions, as well as promoting work with young people and children with a wide network of rural libraries as spaces for childhood, adolescence and their growth.
The experience and work accumulated over more than 30 years for community development has been abruptly and arbitrarily taken away when their property was expropriated by the Matagalpa mayor’s office and the attorney general’s office, who were accompanied by the police to order the eviction and delivery of the keys to the premises without allowing the women to remove their property.
A robbery of rural women
This robbery of women’s community houses is one more act of the dehumanized cruelty with which the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship is appropriating the belongings of others, running roughshod over all the laws and rights of organized women.
They say they defend the poor, while stealing the property of the poor among the poorest, rural women. This violation of human and women’s rights demonstrates the destructive violent machismo that wants to silence and confine women again.
With this latest theft, they not only harm rural women, but entire communities, taking away from children the scarce books in the community, violating their rights to education, recreation, and free assembly. Young people have been robbed of the possibility of growing, of expressing themselves through murals and theater, and showing their social commitment by supporting the children of their community.
We hold the Matagalpa Mayor’s Office, headed by Sadrach Zeledon, the police, and the Attorney General’s office responsible for this robbery and violation of human rights, women’s rights, and children’s rights, as well as any aggression, threat, or coercion against women, youth and children.
Ortega is a murderer, rapist and thief.