Walkiria Chandler D’Orcy

Lawyer and Deputy Member of Parliament of the Republic of Panama/ walkiriachandlerdorcy@gmail.com

Lawyer, Deputy Member of Parliament and Legal Secretary of the Centre for Afro-Panamanian Studies. Postgraduate degree from the University of Salamanca and Master's degree from the Carlos III University of Madrid. Masters in Environmental Management and Audit, specializing in higher education, studies in leadership and electoral strategies for women and participant in the Competitiveness Leadership Program at Georgetown University.

Chandler D'Orcy has held positions in the public and private sector, including Director of the National Fisheries Foundation, Director of Legal Advice to the Aquatic Resources Authority, Advisor for the creation of Law 8 of 2015, which created the Ministry of Environment, and Legal Advisor to the Panamanian Fishing Industry Federation.

Gender and politics in the time of COVID-19 in Panama

At the end of last year, the first news appeared about a virus that caused respiratory disease and originated in Wuhan province, China. January passed with speculation that the virus only affects people over 60 years of age, or that it is a distant problem limited to Asian countries. February, which the Panamanians had been longing for, was then connected with the biggest celebration of the year, the carnival.  While people were planning their trips at home and abroad and making last-minute purchases, reports of the virus were accumulating, but the suspension of such a big event is an unpopular measure that no government wants to take. Instead of showing sovereignty in the form of preventive health measures, the deputy police director's spokesman used the situation to communicate that women in "suggestive" clothing would be sanctioned during the carnival events instead, a decision that police director Jorge Miranda had to correct the following day.  This incident is only one example, but it illustrates the situation of gender justice and politics that we women face in Panama during the time of COVID-19.

This was followed by March, in which, barely two weeks after the beginning of the school year, the government announced the measures of quarantine, "social distancing" and isolation to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on our country. At that time, the office of the "Defensoría del Pueblo de la República" [an institution of the Panamanian State created to ensure the protection of the human rights of all inhabitants of the Republic of Panama] pointed out that "it is important to take into account the state of vulnerability to violence that women can be exposed to in the domestic sphere". This warning is a reaction to the data of the Panamanian Observatory against Gender Violence (OPVG), which is coordinated by the Defensoría del Pueblo de la República. According to the Observatory, the months of January and February 2020 saw a 12.6% increase in domestic violence reports compared to the previous year; a 5.2% increase for sexual crimes and 66.7% for femicides. A quarantine further exacerbates these problems, as locking people up in an environment of insecurity and distress is a perfect trigger for aggressive behaviour. The vulnerability of women to domestic violence is therefore an important factor that the state should at least have taken into account in view of the quarantine requirement.

However, there is a lack of public policies that address issues of inclusion and equality. This is also due to legislation whose members of parliament are approximately 80 percent male and only 9.9 percent female. In addition, there is an executive cabinet with 35 percent women in positions such as ministerial advisors or in departments for social tasks, which means that politics is largely determined by men. This in turn means that there are fewer laws with a gender perspective.

It is therefore all the more urgent to make visible what really affects us as women in this society and to ensure that the population is not misinformed about it. As an Afro woman and politician, I am outraged when something as serious as gender-based violence is often trivialised by parties using it as a political commodity. Nor, however, does the media coverage live up to its claim when, in cases of shocking femicide, such as that of Karen Velasquez, who was doused in petrol and set on fire by her ex-partner and father of her children, it only gives vague reports of gender aggression and ethnic discrimination, while day after day women suffer simply because they were born as such.

Every crisis presents an opportunity for change, and the social and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is leading us to rethink an outdated and patriarchal economic model. There is an urgent need for public policies that ensure social safety nets, public access to health care, job creation and protection, environmental sustainability and social inclusion.

Formats such as this digital conference are therefore important because any serious analysis of the impact of COVID-19 requires the integration of a gender perspective, all the more so in our latitudes where inequality is a constant and where the collective memory jumps from scandal to scandal, giving little importance to the real sources of social problems. The mere fact of making the problem visible and triggering a debate on it already leads us to seek real solutions that will enable us to create a better reality for women.