Rebuilding the Women's Movement, Defining a New World

María Suarez Toro is a Puerto Rican and Costa Rican feminist, teacher, women's human rights activist, and journalist. She has been the producer and co-director of the Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE) since 1991, covering the activities of the international women's movement at every major UN Conference during the 1990s. She has also brought the international radio program that she co-directs with Katerina Anfossi to places where women struggle to influence the international agenda to include their human rights.

María Suarez Toro was a victim of human rights violations in 1982 when she was "disappeared" by the army in Honduras while training literacy teachers in the Salvadoran refugee camps. She was one of five survivors out of the hundreds who disappeared in that country during the 1980s.

The Women's Peacecasts Program, which Toro started on FIRE as a joint endeavor with other media projects, such as WINGS, has continued to webcast women's voices from conflict situations in every region. The project has given much needed coverage of women's ideas for peaceful solutions to international conflicts (see Women's Peacecasts philosophy and reports at www.fire.or.cr). Toro has written numerous articles and has contributed to several books. Her most recent publication -- an investigative journalistic essay in the book "Beautiful Country for Sale" with co-author Cristina Zeledon -- unflinchingly deals with environmental destruction and oil explorations in Costa Rica.

Recently at the AWID (Association for Women's Rights in Development) conference in Mexico (October 2002), Toro presented a proposal for a Women's Summit on the State of the World that would

• assess the huge changes that have taken place in the past years
• evaluate and take stock of what women have and have not accomplished in that context
• assess how women have achieved results (strategies of action, negotiation, agenda setting, and power building in personal, organizational, and sociopolitical areas)
• analyze the gains and the costs (personal and organizational) of these achievements
• make proposals about the changes that women have to make as a movement in order to be more effective in the new context

The following excerpt is taken from Toro's statement regarding the proposed Women's Summit:

"It will not be a Conference against the UN or its conferences. It will assess the current status of the UN today, to look for ways to contribute more effectively to affirm the principles, objectives and programs for which it stands and how to defend, promote, protect and implement what women have gained in it.... But it will address other issues and spaces beyond the United Nations.

Whether it happens before, parallel to or after a 10-year UN assessment on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action is a discussion that is independent of the proposal of a Women´s Summit about the State of the World....

A Women´s Summit about the State of the World will not even be a conference by women in NGOs or other types of civil society organizations. Convened and organized by the women´s movement, it will invite women in governments, specialized agencies and States that want to take part in a women´s space that will set the agenda and proceedings in women´s own terms, regardless of the place they occupy professionally.

The women´s conference will not be an event, but a whole process leading up to it, which includes preparation at the personal, local, national, regional and international levels in order to assess, but mainly to contribute to re-building the empowerment and movement that is so dis-articulated at those levels, and also to name the paradigm shifts we need in the world.

I hope it will debate and construct new paradigms, be they based on the 'commons' or the 'gift economy' or whatever women call the paradigm of the planetary world we need to build as a reference point for the transformation we want and that humanity desperately needs..."

To read the entire proposal, please visit the FIRE web site (English or ).Spanish