Caribbean & Central America - November 2013 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) government of President Daniel Ortega is trumpeting a recently released report on gender equality by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) which places Nicaragua within the top ten countries globally in terms of efforts to close the gender gap. The government’s commitment to women’s rights has, however, been recently called into question by civil society groups following amendments passed by congress weakening a law against gender violence.

The WEF’s annual Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), released on 25 October, ranks countries’ efforts to close the gender gap in relation to economic, political, education and health-based criteria. Nicaragua ranked 10^th out of 136 countries, the only country from Latin America and the Caribbean to feature in the top ten and a significant improvement on its rank of 90^th registered in 2007, the year the FSLN government took office for a second time.

While one place down from 2012, Nicaragua still registered an improved score overall and is well ahead of its Central American neighbours. According to the GGGI ranking, Costa Rica came in at 31st; Panama, 37th; Honduras, 82nd; El Salvador, 96^th; while Guatemala performed worst, ranking 114th. Nicaragua scored best in the category of ‘political empowerment’, where it ranked 5th, with women accounting for 40% of legislators and 46% of ministers. At the other end of the spectrum, however, it scored 91st for ‘economic participation & opportunity’ (including 109th for ‘labour force participation’ and 103rd for ‘estimated earned income’), with women earning on average just 46% as much as men.

Steps backward

The release of the WEF report came exactly a month after Nicaragua’s FSLN-controlled national assembly approved reforms weakening a comprehensive law (779) against violence against women. Passed in June 2012, law 779 was considered an important step forward in improving women’s rights [RC-12-08], although even then international human rights NGO Amnesty International (AI) noted that “while the law represented a positive step, lack of resources assigned to ensure its implementation remained a concern”.

The main change to the law was an amendment to a provision which prohibited mediation as a way of responding to any cases of violence; under the law, those accused of crimes with sentences of less than five years (this includes crimes like serious bodily harm; the abduction of children and threats) can be dealt with through mediation instead of through the criminal justice system. This provoked outrage from women’s rights groups as well as AI which described the prohibition of mediation as a “crucial component” of law 779, a provision that had been developed on the basis of studies that “showed that mediation had repeatedly put women at risk”.

It is also worth pointing out that women’s rights groups remain deeply suspicious of Ortega’s professed commitment to women’s rights on two counts; the claims of sexual abuse made in 1998 by Ortega’s stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Narváez, and the intransigence of the FSLN government vis-à-vis a blanket ban on abortion. The ban, which prohibits abortion even when continuing pregnancy risks the life or health of the mother or when the pregnancy is the result of rape, was introduced in 2006 under the Enrique Bolaños administration (2002-2007) with the support of the FSLN, which backed the measure as part of efforts to win over the support of the Roman Catholic Church in the run-up to the 2006 election.

• Figures

According to an 11 October report by leading Nicaraguan daily El Nuevo Diario 76 women were killed in 2012 according to police figures, while women’s rights organisations put this figure at 85. So far this year at least 64 women have been killed. Since law 779 took effect, 33,535 complaints have been registered against men by women before the national police’s women’s commissariat.