To all women of America who speak as their first language an indigenous language of the Americas Open Letter (3). “Guaraní: official language of Mercosur” campaign To all women of Paraguay
To all women of Mercosur
To all women of America
To all women of America who speak as their first language an indigenous language of the Americas
To all women of America who speak as a second (third, fourth…) language an indigenous language of the Americas
To all women of America who live and live with indigenous languages of the Americas although they do not speak them
To all women We Paraguayan women who speak Guaraní ask for justice. We ask it for ourselves, we ask it for our families, we ask it for our country, we ask it for all the other indigenous languages of the Americas. We ask for linguistic justice and social justice. We have a right to it. We will no longer be silent. We want Guaraní - - indigenous, majoritarian, historic and official language of Paraguay since 1992, and spoken in Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia - - to be in all respects a fully official language of the Mercado Común del Sur (Mercosur), alongside Spanish and Portuguese. We have a right to this. We want it. We will no longer accept a situation of linguistic and social apartheid in our own country nor in the the inter-American institutions where our country is represented. Enough of applying the inherited colonial linguistic model --discriminatory, insulting and segregationist. Enough! America is the only continent in the world - to the shame of all and as living and permanent reminder of the past and present imfamies committed on our soil - where no indigenous language has been converted into the normal functioning language of a state. Enough! We are human beings. We are normal. We want to be recognized as normal. We want to be recogniaed in our humanity. We want to be who we are, renouncing nothing. Wthout renouncing other languages. As women, we (many of us) have suffered by our own flesh all the tragedies that this continent has endured. Many of us have endured - and still endure - hunger, poverty, exclusion, machismo, lack of access to culture and to information, work discrimination, sexual violence, dictatorships, disappearances, kidnappings, rapes, emigration to other countries. We have endured it all. We are sisters of all women of Mercosur because their pain is our pain, their life is our life. But further, we Guaraní-speaking women have lived - and still live - an additional age-old, atrocious, injust, cruel discrimination: we have been denied our language and our culture. Those who have not lived our experience will not be able to fully and justly understand the magnitude of our tragedy , nor what this intense humiliation and sadness means. We must decide, in a context of disdain and devaluation of our language, if we will pass it on to our sons and daughters. We must decide, in a context of real and objective discrimination, of symbolic and economic violence, if we will abandon speaking our language. We must decide if we will silence our mothers, our grandmothers, all that we are and have inherited from them, and live in silence and our own oblivion imposed from outside. We must decide if we will deny ourselves to our own selves. Thos who in the Mercosur, speaking only Spanish or Portuguese can not understand our pain because no one has demanded of them nor pushed them to this barbarous dillemma. Enough of lies about our language. We do not want to renounce our language “in order to give our sons and daughters more opportunities”. We want our language to be completely official in Mercosur and in Paraguay, and that opportunities are and should be in our language, just as they are and should be in Spanish and Portuguese. Further, we will learn, just as two billion human beings have done, other languages and we will spread additional opportunities with them, but we will live in our own language. We want this. We have been denied our language in school, in the Administration, in communications media, in books, in compuuters, in the press. We have been denied. We have been silenced. We have been humiliated simply for being who we are; something we did not choose, that no one chooses. We have been denied by being. And we want to be: to be who we are. We are here, in these words written in Guaraní, in Spanish, in Portuguese, in English, to say “ENOUGH!” The linguistic and cultural apartheid that extends from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and in which Mercosur and Paraguay participate, must end. Our language is equal in worth to Spanish and Portuguese, no more nor less. Equal in worth. We want it to live. We want full official status of Guaraní in all respects, in a lasting and effective way, in Mercosur and in Paraguay because between six and twelve million of us citizens in the influence area of Mercosur speak Guaraní. We have a right to it. Without delay. And among all of us - based on the experience of the solidarity among women, the only inheritance that we have had on this continent to face all the tragedies that lash us and have lashed us throughout history - we seek solutions for the other indigenous American languages whose demography and/or particularly atrocious history does not permit them to think they can convert themselves into fully official languages of the the central instituions of the state. We do not want - we roundly condemn it - hypocritical and pharisaic demogoguery from the monolinguistic élites, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, in English, in French, in Spanish, in Dutch, or in Portuguese who tell us that if we don’t save all the indigenous languages of America at the same time, we will save none of them. That we will not save Guaraní. We have already seen how these élites think and act. We have had centuries of this. They have not wanted nor do they want any indigenous language to live. They have not wanted it in the past and they have not done anything effective in the present that they might live. But we want them to live. We want Guaraní to live. We are the best guarantee, through our experience of pain and suffering, that we are going to have the intention of finding appropriate solutions for each linguistic reality; solutions that will not occur by extermination, assassination, or genocide of people or languages. And we are going to work so that new communication and information technologies will help us in this commitment. With this open letter we ask for the solidarity of all women of America in our petition for full official status of Guaraní in Mercosur and in Paraguay. We have a pain which does not heal, which has lasted centuries. A pain to add to all the pains of all the women of America. A pain for centuries which demands justice. We ask for this. We ask for justice. From all women of Paraguay
From all women of Mercosur
From all women of America
From all women of America who speak as their first language an indigenous language of the Americas From all women of America who speak as a second (third, fourth…) language an indigenous language of the Americas From all women of America who live and live with indigenous languages of the Americas although they do not speak them From all women Paraguay - Asunción, March 31, 2006 Magiorina Balbuena and Julia Franco
CONAMURI (Coordinadora Nacional de Organizaciones de Mujeres Trabajadoras Rurales e Indígenas) rérape. conamuri@rieder.net.py Teodora Verón and Magdalena Fleytas
Mbo'ehára Ñemongu'e Jekupytyrâ (Movimiento de Educadores Jekupytyrâ) rérape. jekupytyra@gmail.com Miryam Estela Duarte Rojas and Berta García
CMC - MCP (Coordinación de Mujeres Campesinas integrante del Movimiento Campesino Paraguayo) rérape. www.okaraygua-paraguai.org; info@okaraygua-paraguai.org; mcp@highway.com.py Lilian Coronel Ávila and Miguela C. Britos Salinas
Yvy Marâe'ÿ rérape: yvymaraey.fundacion@gmail.com Please send your own request that Guaraní be an official language of Mercosur in all respects to: presidente@presidencia.gov.py
sugerencias@presidencia.gov.py
info@presidencia.gov.py
secretaria@mercosur.org.uy
ministra@mujer.gov.py
info@mujer.gov.py
inter@mujer.gov.py
inter2@mujer.gov.py
prensa@mujer.gov.py
cnm@cnm.gov.ar
spmulheres@spmulheres.gov.br
ouvidoria@spmulheres.gov.br
ministra@mides.gub.uy
subsecretaria@mides.gub.uy
cberamendi@mides.gub.uy
inamujer@inamujer.gov.ve