Women Peace and Security: A Competitive Edge in Latin America’s Human Domain

Women Peace and Security: A Competitive Edge in Latin America’s Human Domain

Chris Telley

The institutions of the U.S. national security community have recognized, but just begun to remedy, a gap in how they interact with conflict environments: the failure to understand how gender and warfare intertwine.[i] The 2017 Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Act provides a clarion call for operationalizing a gender perspective at each command level and in nearly all activities in the environment. A gender perspective is an understanding of how men, women, boys, or girls are affected differently by given situation, due to the social norms around gender, and how those differences drive or prevent conflict. Some of the Combatant Commands, like U.S. Africa Command or U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, have initiated policies and programs ahead of the White House releasing its Congressionally mandated strategy. However, the region where a vertically integrated Department of Defense (DoD) gender approach is most needed but still quite rare is Latin America. The new White House strategy on WPS, signed June 11, 2019, calls on DoD, among others, to take on a host of efforts to support the meaningful engagement with and for women—this is more than an order, it is a unique opportunity.[ii]

Comprehensively implementing WPS programs in U.S. Southern (SOUTHCOM) and Northern (NORTHCOM) Commands, as well as their service components, engages previously untapped resources for addressing the root causes of instability. The WPS agenda, simply as a narrative purpose, is a chance to engage a fresh set of networks with which to grow local access and placement. Emphasizing a gender perspective enables innovative techniques to tailor actions and enable response in some of the most difficult security environments. Also, operationalizing gender analysis provides very measurable indicators with which to gauge return-on-investment for all U.S. security activities in the region. Critically, thorough WPS implementation provides a wide field of ways and means for increased effectiveness not, as some may worry, another set of nebulous ends. In order to promote the “stable, friendly, and prosperous states” that the National Defense Strategy expects, strategic and operational commands in the Western Hemisphere must fully embrace WPS action at a local, practical level.[iii]

Latin American governments are largely ready for gender engagement but also sorely in need of assistance. Though over ninety percent of the nations in the region have programs to address women’s issues, only six have National Action Plans for gender perspectives in the security sector and the region is still the most violent in the world for women.[iv] While the region is the global leader in legislative positions held by females, women and girls in Latin America are increasingly targeted by gangs with horrendous violence. [v] Local capacity is often corrupt or overstretched so that in some places more than 96 percent of women’s murders go unpunished.[vi] Human trafficking in Latin America is on the rise, up 300% for those fleeing Venezuela, specifically.[vii] These sorts of daily realities are why women make up an ever rising proportion of border crossers, now a national security priority.[viii]

Many Latin American threat groups already recognize the value of female engagement. For instance, since 1978, Colombian guerrillas have specifically targeted women for recruitment and even eventually placed them in field command roles.[ix] The FARC employed up to a 40 percent female force at its peak; their surviving peer, the ELN, has an approximately 25 percent female participation rate.[x] This percentage is comparable to US active duty female inclusion and is higher than any of the legitimate armed forces in that region.[xi] We can see how seriously threat groups take women demonstrated in the killing of female mobilizers across the region.[xii] This violence is exemplified by the attack on activist Elisa Zepeda Lagunas who was dragged to the town square after her house was burned, she was brutalized, and then hacked up with a machete for getting “involved in matters that don’t concern you”—she survived and is now a member of the Oaxaca State Congress.[xiii] Most of the progress for local women has come through local nonprofit groups whose leaders risk their lives to mobilize women to mitigate or circumvent government inaction.[xiv] Women in Latin America bear the brunt of many of the problems plaguing the region, but they also constitute a large part of the solution, the crux of the gender perspective.

Accelerating Our Human Network

The networks of women and those endeavoring to forward gender issues, that critical human terrain, is the first and most important reason to build DoD WPS initiatives in Latin America. Over the last decade, studies have shown that gender issues are interwoven with how fighting effects, and is affected, by the local female condition. It is now common knowledge that when women are involved in brokering peace agreements, they are more likely to be signed and, perhaps more importantly, to last. In stability operations, we have learned that women are an economic multiplier; they are safer borrowers and are more likely to invest earnings in their communities.[xv] Furthermore, women have proven immensely capable of combating electoral violence.[xvi] U.S. forces efforts toward public-private partnerships must include links to existing networks of women’s groups in theater.

The 2013 DoD mandate to “effectively engage women in… security initiatives, conflict prevention, [and] peace building… during all phases of conflict prevention” requires also engaging networks of academics, activists, and journalists whom might not always be friendly to the military. U.S. national security institutions come with intrinsic baggage in the region, given their direct or indirect participation in 41 regime changes since 1898; the American military should engage activist networks of women as a means to rebuild trust in vulnerable communities and enable thriving ones to export capacity.[xvii]  For the military, this means networks of trust that extend from Washington D.C., through partner nation capitols, and into the local conflict zones.

Networks of mobilized women, that will trust US actors, will be a primary conduit through which to address the region’s most vexing and fundamental issue—corruption. The neuvo-insurgency of narcotraffickers purchasing their way into otherwise legitimate governance structure is hard to see and extremely detrimental to U.S. regional goals. [xviii] However, rates of violence against women correlate to perceived and actual corruption in local government.[xix] Once threats are identified, women are incredibly capable of staging mass action and mobilizing public opinion against malign networks.[xx] Whether engaged to mediate local cease fires, lift roadblocks, or release hostages, networks of women have become increasingly capable of backroom or track-two diplomacy, from the strategic to the tactical level. [xxi]  For example: in conflict zones, there is often a need to engage local women’s networks to inform the populace of landmines and improvised explosive devices, government communication may leave out females, but those females may be better at spreading information to the community. [xxii]

Local corruption in Latin America isn’t always locally grown. The United States’ primary competitors, China and Russia, are buying clout with predatory loans and bomber flights.[xxiii] Those malign actors’ chosen focus on questionably beneficial infrastructure or mercenary support to dictators cedes the gender space for the DoD to occupy a position advantage on decisive human terrain. Earning a place in women’s networks provides the benefits of an intrinsic trustworthiness of female actors necessary for acting in such a difficult space.[xxiv] 

The intelligence and human connectivity offered by a gendered audience offers a glint of hope in the very challenging fight against a corrupt mafia state, whether fueled by drug dollars or debt-diplomacy. DoD actors can help their partner forces invest in safe public spaces, improve the gender focus of services, as well as empower women to contribute to local commissions and urban planning as a way to pursue US security interests in counter-transnational crime and migration mitigation.[xxv]

Innovative Actions and Prepared Response

The second area where a WPS initiative provides for operational effectiveness is the broad array of options for stability operations and competition short of armed conflict that gender-based considerations enable.  During the Iraq and Afghan counterinsurgencies, the DoD learned to use Female Engagement Teams to engage female populations who were out of reach due to religious taboo. That practice withered with the transition to a Great Power Competition focus; unfortunately, war is still a political creature and with women being half of any electorate, the military still needs gendered action. “All politics is local” and partner nations often care far more about internal issues than any broad U.S. equity like counterterrorism; so, just as assisting with local crime prevention provides a path to foreign objectives, so too can mitigating women's issues serve DoD purposes.

There is a great diversity of actions waiting to be integrated. There are small contributions to tactical actions; adding silicone menstrual cups—that can be purchased for less than a dollar—to Medical Civil Assistance Programs (MEDCAPs) increases a woman’s physical and, therefore, economic mobility. In some desperate places, like Venezuela, up to 44% of households are led by women.[xxvi] US forces in Haiti learned that common aid packaging, the 55lbs bag, was too heavy for a malnourished single mother to carry and was apportioned by chits given to male led households; ensuring practical and equitable aid distribution must be a key consideration.[xxvii] Operational level options are available, like messaging which implores women to ask hard questions of their sons and husbands preparing to do violence, as women have been shown to be more receptive to antiterrorism narratives and are well placed in homes, schools, and markets to promote milder narratives. [xxviii] At the strategic level, Latin American security force participation in UN Peace Keeping missions has risen exponentially since the turn of the century.[xxix] Given the thousands of reports of peacekeeper sexual violence emerging, U.S. efforts to build partners’ capacity for exporting security must take gender-based violence into account.[xxx]

Any gender analysis of the region quickly uncovers some environmental variables that U.S. forces or their partners might not be trained for. Many of the illicit trafficking networks in the theater share common physical, human, and financial infrastructure.[xxxi] This is especially true of networks exploiting women, men, boys, and girls fleeing failing state conditions in Venezuela.[xxxii] This reality dictates that any deployers be trained, or able to train a partner, on what to do when: a suspected boat full of drugs is instead full of migrants; a house targeted in a counter-drug raid is also a scene to sexual slavery; women are being used as drug mules; confronting the narco-equivalent of child soldiers; or, as demonstrated by the history of the FARC, a force encounters a pregnant combatant. [xxxiii] If, even given required training, U.S. personnel still get mixed up in sexual crimes then we can probably assume that many male deployers remain ill-prepared for women being used as intelligence assets by threat networks.[xxxiv]

Accessible Environmental Data

The third area where a WPS initiative creates operational value is a widened aperture for understanding the environment and assessing U.S. forces’ impact on it. The contemporary operations that US forces find themselves committed to do not lend to convenient metrics of success: enemy killed or objectives taken. This makes assessing whether they are doing things right, or even doing the right things, difficult. However, seeing the environment with gender colored glasses is part of the solution. After almost two decades of counterinsurgency, most leaders in the force recognize that the lack of women in a public environment is often a sign of malign activity. Women’s movement pattern can provide a refined view of the security environment.[xxxv] Women’s understanding of local economic and security vulnerabilities and can clearly add to U.S. total domain awareness, engagement with a gender perspective can also grant access to information that is harder to reach.[xxxvi] Following the DoD mandate to “ensure conflict early warning and response systems include gender-specific data,” tactical and operational commands should act on the knowledge that women are often the first to actors with an understanding of impending conflict and that measures of their wellbeing indicate larger trends in the environment. [xxxvii]

Recent research has provided several sets of very calculable metrics with which to monitor changes to the operational environment: early warning signs of rising violence or indicators of success. Links to overall stability are fairly obvious; large gender gaps correlate to lower economic growth as well as higher infant and child mortality rates. Failed or lacking rural property rights systems drive conflict but also largely ignore women.[xxxviii] In places with strong land rights, for women, females have been shown to be three times as likely to be work off the farm and have incomes above the poverty level.[xxxix] Higher rates of violence against women also correlate to non-compliance with international norms and treaty obligations, as well as overall neighbor relations.[xl] Furthermore, smaller gender gaps have also been shown to align with higher trust in government.[xli] Larger the gender gaps tend to correlate to increased risk of intra-state and interstate conflict. [xlii]

The conditions of women in the environment, often already gathered statistics, are in fact measurable and malleable levers that the DoD can target for changing the security landscapes over which it has purview. Tasking units to gather, and staffs to analyze, sex-disaggregated data—not exclusively from women but taking particular note of the additional value of what women can provide—provides for effective pattern analysis. In this sense, WPS is a critical capability for driving innovative actions to deny safe haven to bad actors.

Gender Perspective as a Force Multiplier    

The initial steps for initiating action on WPS issues must begin with efforts to “enhance staff capacity for applying a gender sensitive approach.”[xliii] Internal actions, like awareness training and exercise scenario inclusion, are low cost but can be translated into high impact results. There are some U.S. military actors already engaging women in the field; Civil Affairs teams and Military information support teams currently deployed are the first to take into consideration as the military begins to develop these new options. Forward personnel, armed with appropriate information requirements, doing assessment and subject matter expert exchanges as well as cross institutional engagement, to synchronize with the State Department Regional Bureaus, USAID, and the U.S. Institute for Peace, are critical to long term success and building the perception of a trusted partner. These actions are incredibly inexpensive, no need for systems procurement, ammunition or operating costs: they just need passionate people.

The intent in WPS efforts is not to securitize women’s issues, which might only make the narrative of women as victims stronger.[xliv] The threats in Latin America, according to the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, are generally centered on “organized crime, drug trafficking, violent death, lack of access to rights, poverty, and extreme poverty,” all of which strongly effect and are malleably affected by the condition of local women.[xlv] The need for WPS programs is not about political correctness, tokenism, or ideological agenda but is driven by the emerging opportunity to improve the operational effectiveness of the military units at the tactical and operational levels.

U.S. policymakers have historically ignored women’s participation in committing violence and have rarely enlisted their help in stabilizing efforts, now we are seeing a dynamic shift.[xlvi] Leaders in the military increasing recognize—from recent experiences in counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and stability operations—that force cannot solve many of the underlying issues which are clear seen driving conflict and instability.[xlvii] The lesson here, for the male-dominated military, is that a gender perspective is a force multiplier—such that it deserves far more attention than just part-time representation or a yearly brief. U.S. military commanders, in NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM, must pay specific attention to the gender lens of conflict to see their environment in the most accurate light, out maneuver the bad actors in human networks, and answer evolving threats with innovative actions for effective operations aimed at durable stability in Latin America.[xlviii]

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Department of Defense.

End Notes