Current Literature

In economics and gender studies alike, one topic frequently debated is the way in which women might achieve economic development.  Scholars argue that women’s economic development is a result of social status, number of years in education, or age, among others.  Yet current literature lacks an argument for the importance of marriage in women’s development.  IDB (1998) discusses women’s participation in the workforce, comparing men and women.  The authors also compare women in varying situations (with children/without children, rich/poor, rural/urban).  However, IDB (1998) does not discuss marital status as a factor in women’s success, which must have an impact as well. 

IDB (1998) introduces labor force participation, years of education, and fertility as the three main factors in determining women’s success (IDB 1998; 58).  In terms of labor force participation, the authors stress that lower income women are less likely to even enter the labor market at all.  When they do work, women of lower social status who are less educated are more likely to work long hours in the informal sector, whereas educated, upper-class women are more likely to work in formal sector jobs.  

Furthermore, IDB (1998) argues that uneducated women or women with less than four years of education are not likely to be found working outside of the home and that women with many children are less likely to work outside the home as well. The more education a woman has, the less likely she is to accept a job in the informal sector.  

This article also cites the many setbacks women in Mexico experience when trying to find work, such as discrimination based on whether they have or plan to have children, and whether they are married or single.  While the IDB includes the fact that married women are discriminated against based on the stereotype that married women want to reproduce, the IDB (1998) fails to include marital status as a factor in wage setting or explain how marriage might impact these factors aside from discrimination.  In other words, the IDB fails to explain whether married female workers earn more and work more than their unmarried counterparts.  

Model 

The economic model used to guide this line of inquiry is the Utility Model.  This model is used to display the utility consumers attribute to certain decisions.  It is a model that suggests that women will compare their own utility when single to their utility when married.  If their utility when married is greater, women will choose to marry.  If it is not, women will choose to remain single.  The model is explained in the following way: 

The Utility Model uses UF to display a female’s utility when she is married, which suggests that

                                                                            UF = UF(αm*Lf , x)

such that αm is equal to the couple’s compatibility, Lf is equal to the woman’s leisure time, and x is equal to the amount of market goods owned.  Furthermore, using VF to display a female’s utility when she is single, the model suggests that 

                                                                             VF = VF (Lf , x)

such that Lf is equal to the woman’s leisure time, and x is equal to the amount of market goods owned.  Under the Utility Model, since marriage can be considered a consumer decision, women will decide to marry when their utility as married women is greater than their utility as single women, or 

                                                                             UF > VF

and will decide not to marry when their utility as single women is greater, or 

                                                                             UF < VF

Under this model, women in Mexico deem marriage useful when their leisure time and consumer goods rise as a result, or when leisure is greatly enhanced by a husband. This model does not account for consumer satisfaction, but it does help to explain why marriage may be considered useful to some women and not useful to others.  As will be considered later in the results section, married women do experience greater leisure time and larger consumption.

Data and Empirical Approach

This study was focused on data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) from 2009-2012.  Since the study also focused on women’s benefit from marriage, the sample included all 13,714 females in the survey who reported marital status.  It also included all female records in the MxFLS for wage, income, household consumption, and hours spent doing certain activities.

The data are presented in groups of married heads of households, married women who are not heads of households, unmarried heads of household, and unmarried women who are not heads of households.  The number of hours worked outside of the household was considered, along with the wage each category of women was likely to receive on average.  Regression analysis was also used to determine the impact marital status had on employment, wage, household income, household consumption, and hours spent participating in multiple activities, holding all else constant. 

Results

Results showed that women spend more time in the home once they are married.  Table 1 shows that women who are not married are more likely to be employed than women who are married.  For example, among women who are married and identify as the head of the household, only 31 percent are employed, compared with 41 percent of their non-married peers.  Furthermore, Table 1 shows that female heads of household are more likely to be employed than their non-head of household peers, although only by a small percentage: non-head of household wives are 3 percent less likely to be employed than their counterparts who are the heads of their households.  

Table 2 shows that women who are not married make less and work more than women who are married.  For example, among married female heads of households who are employed, the average wage earned is $61.20 pesos per day.  This wage is the lowest in the married women category, but it is still larger than unmarried women’s wages, which average $49.50 pesos per day for unmarried women who are heads of households and $54.90 pesos per day for unmarried women who are not heads of households.  Furthermore, the number of hours worked varies greatly from married to unmarried, even when the women were employed in more than one job.  While the married women worked anywhere from 35.5 to 36.9 hours in their first job, their unmarried counterparts worked 37.8 to 41.2 hours in their first job.  Table 2 also shows that unmarried women are likely to work anywhere from 6 to 10 more hours in their second job than their married counterparts.   

Table 3 reaffirms the results from Table 1; women who are married are less likely to be working, more likely to earn a greater wage, and earn more when they are not heads of households.  Married women are 13 percent less likely to be employed than their unmarried counterparts, and likely to spend 7.58 hours less working outside of the home.  Married women also experience an annual household income that is greater than their unmarried counterparts by $3,088 pesos and a monthly household consumption that is $108.22 pesos more than their unmarried counterparts.  

Table 3 also shows that a self-identified female household head is likely to experience an annual household income that is $9,584 pesos less than her non-married female counterpart who is not the head of her household.  A married household head also consumes $555.37 pesos less per month than her counterparts who are unmarried and not the heads of their households.  Marital status and head of household status had the greatest impact on a woman’s employment, wage, hours worked, annual household income, and monthly consumption in comparison with other factors, such as age and years of education.  

Table 4 shows that married women spend more hours doing household work than their unmarried counterparts, sleep more, and have more leisure time.  For example, married women are likely to work 8.72 more hours in the househol, have 1.13 more hours of leisure time, and sleep 0.97 hours more than their unmarried counterparts.  

Table 4 also shows that marital status has the greatest impact on women’s time spent doing various activities.  If she is the married head of her household, she is spending 2.04 more hours doing household work than her unmarried counterpart who is not the head of her household.  She is sleeping 0.49 more hours and experiencing slightly more leisure time.  Other factors with some impact are the number of children and the woman’s age, but these impacts are not as great as marital status and head of household status.

Conclusion and Policy Implications

It is clear that women’s differences in Mexico are based on a number of factors (as described in the regression table), but the most significant impacts come from the number of years of education a women has, her age, and whether or not she is married and the head of her household, with the greatest impact coming from the last two.  The results suggest that unmarried women who are not the head of the household spend more hours working in lower wage jobs, but they also spend more time in school and less time participating in household work.  Married women, on the other hand, make more money when they work, but work fewer hours outside of the home.  Instead, the number of hours they spend doing household work increases when they marry and more so if they are the head of their household.  

Unmarried women who are not the heads of their households belong to households that enjoy the greatest annual income.  Since these households also consume the most, it is reasonable to conclude that this could be a result of household size and more shared incomes.  Unmarried women who are the heads of their households consume the least and experience the lowest annual income.  Married women, whether they are the head of their household or not, enjoy annual incomes that fall between unmarried women’s incomes.  They consume more than unmarried heads of households and less than unmarried women who are not heads of households.  In interpreting the data, I must consider that unmarried women over the age of eighteen who are not heads of households are still living with family members who help to support them.  The results suggest that women who marry work less outside the home but more inside the home while still experiencing a greater annual income than they would if they were unmarried and the heads of their households.  

In terms of autonomy, unmarried women who are the heads of their households may feel the most autonomous because they support themselves, but they are working much more than their married counterparts and earning a lower wage.  Unmarried women who are not the heads of their households earn an average wage still below married women’s wages and work many more hours.  It appears that women who marry are able to work fewer hours because they earn a higher wage.  Perhaps marrying helps women become more successful in that they are able to work less and earn the same annually as they would working more hours as a single woman.  In other words, since women can earn more by marrying, and gain more leisure and sleep time, women can use marriage as a way to become more successful.

References

Binder, Melissa.  Dec. 2, 2014. “The Utility Model,” Discussion Notes.  

Interamerican Development Bank (IDB).  1998.  “Chapter 3: Inequality and The Family,” Economic & Social Progress in Latin America 1998/99:  Facing Up to Inequality in Latin America.  (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank.),:57-86.

I first became interested in transitional justice in Uruguay when I heard the story of Macarena Gelman. Gelman was twenty-three years old in 2000 when she learned that she was born in a secret Argentine prison in 1976. Argentine and Uruguayan operatives extrajudicially abducted and murdered Gelman’s parents, transferring Gelman to live for the next twenty-three years as the unwitting daughter of a Uruguayan policeman and his wife.  Sadly, the abduction and transfer of babies born in covert prisons was a widespread and systematic practice during the regional dirty war. There are likely numerous young adults across Latin America’s Southern Cone who today remain unaware that they, in effect, disappeared at birth.

Amnesty and the Disappearance of Children

In the 1990s, Uruguay’s Peace Commission received forty denouncements involving children; eight were alleged by young people doubting their biological identities. Given methodological limitations and challenges confronted by the Peace Commission during their investigation, disappearances of children are woefully underreported. Indeed, when Gelman and her grandfather brought a case against the Uruguayan state, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized the systematic forcible transfer at birth of the children of detained political dissidents. While increasingly acknowledged in Argentina, the ICC’s recognition of forced infant disappearance reveals how the practice remains Uruguay’s dirty little secret.

So I became interested in transitional justice in Uruguay—particularly prosecutions, or the absence thereof. As a dual degree Law and Master’s student focusing on human rights in Latin America, I am interested in studying the role that amnesty laws play in negotiating the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the wake of the region’s military regimes of the 1970s and 80s. The field of transitional justice— worldwide—has been partially shaped by debate surrounding the efficacy of amnesties as “necessary evils” for negotiating peace in the war torn nations of Latin America and Africa.[1] Whatever the outcome of this ongoing theoretical debate, I am convinced that three decades of impunity in Uruguay must come to an end.

Democracy and Impunity in Uruguay

From 1973 until 1985, Uruguay was the prototypical Orwellian state. Military personnel entrenched themselves in most public offices. Police records classified citizens into categories of ideological trustworthiness, greatly limiting the opportunities for work and travel of those who were arbitrarily blacklisted. Worse still, the prime method of repression was mass-incarceration and torture. For much of the period, Uruguay was responsible for the highest per capita incarceration rate on the planet. The military locked away—without due process—student activists, professors, union organizers, journalists, lawyers, doctors, social workers, and Communist party members. Meanwhile, children like Gelman were born in military prisons and disappeared. 

When the military stepped down in the mid ‘80s, the leaders of the fledgling democracy agreed to immunize the prior regime from future prosecution. In 1986, as victims and their families filed civil human rights lawsuits in Uruguayan courts, Parliament passed a retroactive amnesty resolution: the Ley de Caducidad (“Expiry Law”). Ignoring threats from the military, Uruguayans gathered over a half-million signatures to overturn the Expiry Law by referendum. Still, to the dissatisfaction of many Uruguayans and international human rights observers, the law survived. The architects of the dirty war were thus insulated from civil and criminal penalties.

Between the 1980s and 2005, four Uruguayan presidents sponsored policies of “silence and oblivion” regarding past crimes. Many citizens felt that Uruguay’s transition to democracy was incomplete without justice. As one Uruguayan told journalist Lawrence Weschler, “You can’t pardon someone who’s convinced he has behaved well.”[2] 

The Inter-American human rights regime has denounced impunity in Uruguay. In the early 90s, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published a report concluding that the Expiry Law violated several articles of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the American Convention on Human Rights—including the right to justice, the duty of state parties to respect and ensure rights, and the right to judicial protection. In 2011, the Inter-American Court condemned Uruguay for the Gelman disappearance, ordering the State to guarantee that the Expiry Law would no longer impede investigation into past crimes. In response, on October 27, 2011, Uruguay negated its Expiry Law, purportedly ending nearly thirty years of amnesty for the aging generals of the military regime.

But impunity remains. In February of 2013, Uruguay’s Supreme Court ruled that portions of the law that derogated the Expiry Law were unconstitutionally retroactive, prompting the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights to remark that the “shadow of impunity” was potentially being restored in Uruguay. While many observers remain hopeful that past crimes will soon be investigated, I propose that it may be time for the international community to step in.

Prosecuting Uruguay's Generals in the International Criminal Court

Perhaps one strategy for forcing investigations and combatting impunity in Uruguay is to prosecute those responsible for the enforced disappearance of persons in the International Criminal Court (“ICC”). As a legal matter, the ICC is not bound by domestic amnesties or statutes of limitations. Crimes against humanity are considered nonderogable jus cogens, which cannot be insulated from prosecution by domestic law. The  ICC’s arrest warrant for Joseph Kony in Uganda, for example, demonstrates that the ICC prosecutor can and will determine that a domestic amnesty has no legal effect on extraterritorial prosecution.

A more difficult obstacle is that the ICC has temporal jurisdiction only over crimes that occurred on or after July 1, 2002, the date that the statute establishing the ICC went into force. But enforced disappearance is a continuing crime—“continuing” in the sense that withholding information about the identities and fates of the disappeared is itself a crime that leaves families and entire communities of victims in a state of frozen mourning. The crime thus continues until the State identifies the whereabouts or fates of the disappeared.

Participants at the Rome Conference (the “framers” of the ICC) had considerable difficulty drafting Article 24, which eventually provided: “[N]o person shall be criminally responsible under this Statute for conduct prior to [July 1, 2002].” Some participants suggested that “[c]are should be taken not to bar prosecution” of acts that “began before but continued after the entry into force of the Statute.” One delegate even proposed to append the words “unless the crimes continued after that date” in order to ensure jurisdiction over continuing crimes, like enforced disappearance. This interpretation of Article 24 would permit ICC prosecution of pre-2002 disappearances in Uruguay, so long as the whereabouts or fates of the disappeared remain concealed. According to William Schabas, the chair of the Working Group on General Principles eventually resolved the highly contentious and “unresolvable” question of temporal jurisdiction over continuing crimes by avoiding the issue altogether and essentially leaving the issue open for interpretation.[3]

An analysis of the proceedings at the Rome Conference and reconsideration of the temporal and legal status of criminal enforced disappearance suggests that there may be no concrete legal bar to prosecuting Uruguay’s generals in the ICC. The normative issues are much more difficult as extraterritorial prosecution arguably tramples Uruguay’s sovereignty and calls into question the viability of amnesty as a tool for negotiating transition to peace after civil conflict. Questions arise: Would future repressive regimes be willing to cede power knowing that amnesty laws will have no effect in the international sphere? Is it appropriate for the ICC, with its mandate to promote peace as well as justice, to assume the risks associated with the investigation of crimes that occurred decades ago? The real question, in other words, is what type of international court do we want?



[1] Mark Freeman, Necessary Evils: Amnesties and the Search for Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2009).


[2] Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 198.


[3] William Schabas, An Introduction to the International Criminal Court (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 198.
Erektil dysfunktion Whatever the outcome of this ongoing theoretical debate, I am convinced that three decades of impunity in Uruguay must come to an end.billig viagra danmark Whatever the outcome of this ongoing theoretical debate, I am convinced that three decades of impunity in Uruguay must come to an end.

On September 4, I attended a talk at UNM by Michael Hammer, Ambassador-Designate to Chile and former Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, entitled “U.S. Foreign Policy and Why it Matters to You”. Hammer gave an overview of the main duties of the State Department and discussed its ‘strategic priorities’ in advancing U.S. interests abroad. He highlighted several U.S. programs, including economic partnerships such as free trade agreements, jobs diplomacy to advance the interests of American companies abroad, empowerment of women and girls, and digital diplomacy. He finished by telling the audience members why they might want to work for the State Department, citing the foreign language skills that its employees develop, the experience of living in new cultures, and the variety and change of moving to new posts every 2-3 years.

Throughout his talk, Hammer emphasized the State Department’s commitment to promoting U.S. interests abroad. All of the priorities that he mentioned were expressed in terms of protecting U.S. national security, creating jobs in the U.S., and forging ties with other nations in order to enhance shared interests.The rhetoric of self-interest was juxtaposed with the stated priorities of promoting ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ in Latin America and around the world.

As a student of Latin American Studies who has grown up during the age of the so- called ‘War on Terror’, I am skeptical of this rhetoric. The war in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and the School of the Americas are just a few examples of the discrepancy between U.S. foreign policy and its oft-stated goals of democracy and human rights. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. In this case, U.S. self-interest was carried out in opposition to democracy and human rights. Similarly, in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti, Argentina, El Salvador and many other Latin American countries, democracy and human rights were inconsistent with the self- interest of the U.S. government. 

A more recent example of this inconsistent rhetoric is clear in Hammer’s discussion of economic trade deals, which similarly highlighted the conflict between U.S. self-interest and human rights. Over the last two months, hundreds of thousands of Colombians have taken to the streets in protest of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Some of the demands of small farmers result from their inability to “compete with low-price food products imported under free trade agreements with the United States and the European Union,” among other demands (See article on Truth.org ). The Free Trade Agreement was approved even though Colombia is considered to be “the most dangerous place on earth to be a union member” (See article on ITU website). However, when Hammer discussed free trade in response to a question from an audience member, he emphasized that the “net benefit to the United States far exceeds any negatives.” In other words, U.S. self-interest (and arguably the interests of the Colombian government) takes precedence over the interests of large sectors of the Colombian people whose economic well-being and human rights are severely threatened. 

U.S. national interest also takes the form of military intervention, or more euphemistically military “cooperation”, in Latin America. A prime example of this is in Honduras, where U.S. funding and training of the Honduran police and military is promoted in order to advance its commitment to fighting drug trafficking. However, these U.S. policies are highly controversial, given the horrible human rights record following the 2009 coup d’etat. As Hammer stated, “We have to deal sometimes with governments who do not have pristine human rights records, in fact, they have pretty bad human rights records and what we do as diplomats, what we do as an administration, is try to urge them along, both in terms of private conversations with them in terms of trying to encourage an improvement in human rights.” On the ground, this ‘urging along’ has been ineffective. On the night of May 26, 2012, Ebed Yanes, a 15-year-old boy was killed at a Tegucigalpa checkpoint on his way to visit his girlfriend. The soldiers that killed him were in a special forces unit that the U.S. had trained, funded and vetted to ensure that they were complying with human rights standards (See article in Huffpost). And this is not an isolated incident. Honduras’s recent decision to militarize the police has not changed U.S. funding and support. As History Professor Dana Frank (UC Santa Cruz) points out in a recent article, “The United States...is pouring funds into...Honduran security forces, countenancing a militarization of the Honduran police that has long been illegal here at home, while dismissing Congressional pushback about human rights issues in Honduras” (See article in Miami Herald). In Honduras and elsewhere, the “War on Drugs” continues under U.S. leadership despite widespread human rights violations. 

The discrepancy between the stated goals of the State Department and its effects in Latin America are clear. Why does U.S. foreign policy matter to me? Instead of asking why U.S. foreign policy is in my self-interest, I pose what I believe to be a more pertinent question: Why does U.S. foreign policy matter to those who are most heavily impacted by it, such as Colombian small farmers, Honduran youth, victims of U.S.- sponsored violence and even U.S. military personnel who feel the impacts of war? This is where U.S. self-interest falls short.