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2010
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doi:10.1093/cdj/bsq026
Advance Access publication 21 May 2010

‘The elephant in the room’:

silencing everyday violence in
rights-based approaches to
women’s community
participation in Argentina
Constanza Tabbush *

Abstract This article examines the role of the Manzaneras women’s community
network in Aranda, a poor neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, where
levels of violence and organized crime are high. The analysis explores
the impact of the hidden forms of domination and unvoiced fears of
violence which limit the local government’s rights-based approach to
women’s community participation in food aid delivery. It finds that the
social conditions and power relations, in which the network is
embedded, limit the potential of innovative rights-based strategies to
transform women and community development in the metropolitan
area of Buenos Aires. Unrecognized violence is a major obstacle to
women’s community participation.

Introduction
Structural adjustment packages and fiscal austerity in the 1990s led to the out-
sourcing of the delivery of social assistance to poor women in Latin America.
A prominent example was the implementation of food aid programmes tar-
geting poor women as communal distributors of aid, and impoverished
mothers as their recipients (Blondet, 2002; Molyneux, 2007; Copestake,
2006; Wood and Copestake, 2007). In Argentina, a middle-income country
and a regional pioneer in social policy terms (Mesa-Lago, 1991), the most
paradigmatic food aid programme was called Plan Vida (Life Programme).
This state initiative created in 1996 involved at its peak in 1998, 36,000

*Address for correspondence: Constanza Tabbush, email: constanza.tabbush@sas.ac.uk

Community Development Journal Vol 45 No 3 July 2010 pp. 325–334 325

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women volunteers in the province of Buenos Aires (Masson, 2004), constitut-

ing the most extended community network for and by women in welfare
delivery. Each woman was in charge of the distribution of food aid across a
residential urban division known as a ‘Manzana’. For this reason they were
labelled ‘Manzaneras’. The so-called Manzaneras network is constituted by
poor women who are responsible for the distribution and management of
food aid given to mothers and pregnant women living in their own margin-
alized neighbourhoods.
The Manzaneras network had unprecedented territorial coverage and
close links with poor women. In this way, Plan Vida became fundamental
for women’s multiple livelihood strategies, for informing beneficiaries of
other state programmes, for their inclusion in dynamics of distribution of
state goods and services, and for the construction of women’s political iden-
tities and local activism (Martuccelli and Svampa, 1997; Auyero, 2001;
Svampa and Pereira, 2003; Masson, 2004; Svampa, 2005). For these
reasons, I have selected it for this analysis as a paradigmatic form of
women’s community participation in Latin America.
In spite of its central role in securing minimal household needs, two main
criticisms have been directed at this form of women’s organising at the local
level. The first one highlights their involvement in politicized practices of dis-
cretionary distribution and appropriation of public resources. The close links of
this community network with local political parties and power structures can
facilitate the reproduction of patterns of material domination between female
community activists and food aid beneficiaries; between the poor and the
poorer. Secondly, as is the case in other countries in the region (Molyneux,
2007), Plan Vida does not draw on a critical gender analysis in its construction
of women’s participation, but rather builds on traditional gender identities
(Auyero, 2001; Masson, 2004). Women are ascribed the responsibility for secur-
ing household needs and social reproduction as a gender characteristic.
A pioneering local government that promotes a rights-based agenda of
social inclusion has attempted to counteract the first of these criticisms –
with relative success. Civil, political, social, and economic rights are under-
stood to be indivisible in such an approach, and women’s access to social
benefits is considered a citizenship right as well as a means to exercise citi-
zenship rather than a charitable gesture. The aim is to diminish material
and power inequalities between female community workers and benefici-
aries by fostering a more transparent distribution of livelihood resources.
In addition, it attempts to further equality by giving beneficiaries a voice
in the selection of Manzaneras community workers. Yet, this rights-based
policy to improve the delivery of welfare leaves unproblematized some
gender, social, and institutional relations that give a distinctive shape to
women’s practices at the local level.

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 Silencing everyday violence in rights-based approaches 327

The community network is not only shaped by policy intentions, but more
importantly, by the social conditions and power relations in which it is
embedded in the neighbourhoods where it flourishes. Through an analysis
of a selected set of fieldwork material concerning the power dynamics in the
functioning of this network in an excluded neighbourhood, this paper
explores the limits of innovative rights-based strategies to transform women
and community development in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
Rights-based policies focus on improving the delivery of welfare to
secure women’s rights. However, they do not take into account the basic
social conflicts at play in neighbourhoods where power relations are
founded on the exercise of violence. Ironically, these violent dynamics
deny women those same rights that policies aspire to enforce. In this neigh-
bourhood, the social vacuum left by the absence of state-provided security
during the 1990s, gave rise to networks linked to illicit activities and their
alternative forms of violent social governance. The effect of these unequal
and violent power dynamics on women’s community participation directly
hampers the transformative potential of rights-based welfare policies.

Rights-based approaches to women’s community work

The province of Buenos Aires has experienced increasing poverty and
widening social inequalities in recent decades (Lo Vuolo et al., 2002),
accompanied by public insecurity and fear of crime (Kessler, 2006). The
women’s community development network considered in this article is
situated in a middle-class municipality in which poverty and violence
appear concentrated in specific spatial locations. One such location is the
neighbourhood of our case study, Aranda.
Aranda constitutes an urban space with high levels of poverty and exclu-
sion, with many residents lacking access to basic welfare services. The
Census of 2001 is the first official record of the social conditions of the neigh-
bourhood and identifies characteristics associated with extreme poverty. His-
torically, state security policies have addressed the concerns of those living
around rather than inside the neighbourhood, fostering a localized ‘govern-
ance void’ (Moser and Rodgers, 2005). As property crime rose in the 1990s
(Kosovsky, 2007), organized crime came to embed itself in this void and
establish alternative forms of social governance. The lack of provincial
police presence in the neighbourhood left inhabitants vulnerable to forms
of daily social violence including high rates of domestic abuse and homicide.
Neglected by provincial government, Aranda became a priority area for
the local state, with its particular interest in promoting a political platform
of inclusive citizenship-based policies (Rodrı́guez Gustáa, 2008) and its
ambitious aim to achieving a transparent and effective public administration.

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The local state intervened in 1998 and made significant changes to the
women’s community participation network in the neighbourhood.
The Plan Vida network operating in this neighbourhood is the largest one
of the municipality and involves 114 female community workers (or Man-
zaneras). Around 20 of these Manzaneras come from the spontaneous settle-
ment of the neighbourhood, whereas the majority resides in the housing
estates. The municipality’s rights-based initiative focused on material
inequalities and aimed to modify power relations within this network pre-
viously characterized by the discretionary distribution of public resources,
into a transparent system of resource allocation. The final objective was to
foster horizontal, more equitable, relations between female community
workers and beneficiaries.
These aspirations translated into a system of informal citizen forums and
audits to resolve complaints and queries concerning the work of some of
these community workers (around 20 in total). In Aranda, for example,
Manzaneras would grant food aid according to their own interests. For
instance, if a Manzanera quarrelled with one of the beneficiaries she
would not give them their entitled food ration, or if a beneficiary arrived
at an undesignated time, her benefit was suspended. To deal with these con-
flicts, the government implemented a system of open meetings between
beneficiaries, the community worker in question, and the municipal
social worker as mediator. In the more extreme cases in which the only sol-
ution was to replace the Manazera, this could only be done with the signa-
tures of more than half of the beneficiaries of that particular community
worker. Through this system of public audits many of the Manzaneras
who were unable to adapt the way they worked, were replaced. As
explained by the social worker in charge, ‘many of the women who were
deeply rooted in this network stopped being Manzaneras’. Thus, the strategy
was successful in diminishing many of the discretional practices in the dis-
tribution of food aid. Moreover, for the first time female beneficiaries were
empowered and given an active role in this decision-making process.
In spite of these achievements, these rights-based transformations met
with obstacles that cannot be explained by the lack of transparency in
welfare distribution networks. Rather, they are created through the unspo-
ken neighbourhood dynamics in women’s community development.

The persistence of silent forms of domination

Those in charge of the process of auditing the community workers acknowl-
edge some limitations to their efforts to clean this women’s network of
unequal power relations. Although successful in dealing with discretionary
allocations, they were never able to remove from their posts the five or six

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 Silencing everyday violence in rights-based approaches 329

Manzaneras from the neighbourhood’s housing estates that were described as

‘the most controversial ones’. ‘These five Manzaneras did not leave, and will never
leave the network’, states the social worker in charge of this initiative in a
moment of frankness. These controversial figures dominate local public
debates within community participation and enforce relations of domination
over the rest of the Manzaneras, yet they were never removed from their posts.
These women, although they are connected to municipal structures or politi-
cal parties, base their power elsewhere. They are grounded in their positions
in local kinship networks that manage organized illicit activities. The salience
of alternative forms of social governance gained force during the 1990s with
the installation of drug dealing and the commercialization of stolen cars
inside the neighbourhood, further strengthened by the inter-linkages
between prisons and local power networks.
Female beneficiaries and other community workers would never sign a
petition complaining about these ‘controversial’ community workers
because they were afraid of violent retaliation. ‘I would be crazy to put
myself against this woman, because when the social worker leaves, she will send
her kid round to blow my head off’, one of the other Manzaneras argues. Bene-
ficiaries systematically declined the opportunity to have any public meeting
where they could settle their complaints and grievances. Their argument
was simple: ‘you go back home, but they will send their sons to ours’. Social
workers were not exempt from these violent threats.
There is a paradoxical factor about these ‘controversial’ female figures.
Although obstructing participation with their network domination, they
are also identified by state workers as ‘the driving force of the whole team of
Manzaneras’. The coordinator of this network goes on to explain this contra-
diction: ‘The Manzaneras from the spontaneous settlement have a low profile and
they do not participate in anything. When you ask for their opinion, nobody speaks.
The others are violent, fierce but they participate. In the end, you do not know which
is worse’, she says.
The local power hegemony of these ‘controversial’ Manzaneras signals the
juxtaposition of community development with the leadership roles women
enact within these violent social networks. The Director of the Community
Centre explains: ‘the three gangs that we have here are led by women. . . this is
mainly because the older men are currently in jail’. It appears that this form of
female leadership could be filling the vacuum left by male leaders, and as
such, will probably cease at their return. So, even though some women
embedded in these kinship networks through their appeal to (or threat of) vio-
lence might gain certain power and agency, these are transitory and depen-
dent on their bonds with, and the good will of, other (male) kinship members.
Two relevant points emerge from these examples that relate gender
relations to the attainment of rights. From a gender perspective, it is

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 330 Constanza Tabbush

relevant to note that Plan Vida reinforces women’s traditional femininities

making them responsible for household reproduction. Conversely, these
‘controversial’ figures appeal to violence – a traditional hegemonic mascu-
line cultural form of exercising power in this neighbourhood within this
same community network. The impact of the violent female leadership
based on women’s links with extended family criminal networks is that it
limits the democratic aspirations of the local rights-based agenda for com-
munity development. If rights-based efforts focus exclusively on women’s
role in welfare without engaging with the effects of violence on women’s
community development networks, they risk perpetuating these silent
forms of domination and undermining the aspirations for social change
inherent in women’s activism.

Beyond welfare: feminist advocates against domestic

violence?
The fate of the manzaneras network as an outsourcing of state welfare deliv-
ery was becoming uncertain in this new millennium. The Provincial Minis-
try of Social Development was gradually eliminating their function as food
aid administrators and community workers are being replaced by electronic
bank cards. In the context of this modernization agenda, which removes the
welfare role of community workers in the distribution of food aid, should
rights-based interventions continue to focus on the transparent distribution
of public resources? Might they instead, try to strengthen the feminist
efforts of this network, articulating it with the local government’s gender
policies?
Such an initiative was developed by the Municipal Gender Policies
Department in December 2004. Drawing on the reach and grassroots
access of the many manzaneras networks functioning in the municipality,
it established the Municipal Women’s Council. This Council is the moni-
toring entity for the Municipal Plan for Equal Opportunities between men
and women, and also organizes a variety of activities to enhance women’s
rights at the municipal level.1 The main function of the manzaneras at first,
was to promote local women’s participation in the Council. Once the
Council was established, their main role was to pass on information
about the conditions of the women of their neighbourhood. At the time
of my research in 2008, around 30 Manzaneras participated in this

1 The Gender Policy Department has two broad axes of interventions: the Plan for Equal
Opportunities, and a Centre for fighting domestic violence. The council has three main commissions:
one on health and against violence, another on culture and education, and a third that organizes their
annual participation in the National Women’s Meetings.

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 Silencing everyday violence in rights-based approaches 331

Women’s Council, and in addition, 19 of them travelled every year to the

National Women’s Conference representing each one of the neighbour-
hoods of the municipality.
One of the founders of the Municipal Women’s Council coordinates a
small group of Manzaneras that after being trained as health promoters
started a campaign to combat violence against women in the neighbour-
hood of our study. They coordinate with the Municipal Council for
Women’s health commission and with the Municipal Centre against Dom-
estic Violence. They are currently working on awareness-raising campaigns
with a focus on preventing domestic violence. They have carried out a cam-
paign on violence against women and started a survey on the incidence of
domestic violence in the neighbourhood. ‘Now, women come and consult us
about violence. I have distributed all these leaflets in my building, and that
means women have some information. At least, they have all the phone numbers
in case of violence’ explains the leader of this work in the neighbourhood
in an interview with the author in 2008.
What this group of Manzaneras and other women aspire to, is to decentra-
lize the Department of Gender Policies and have a territorial presence for
preventing violence against women in Aranda. This example signals that
parts of this network are building links with the local state’s gender
policy machinery. This could re-define the traditional gender identities in
which they are based in order to campaign for women’s rights. Some Man-
zaneras are beginning to become local feminist reference points on issues of
domestic violence. They offer information and, if needed, escort local
women to safety at the Municipal Centre against Domestic Violence. This
sheds some light on how this women’s network has the potential to articu-
late gender and rights-based policies in localities experiencing high levels
of violence. It also demonstrates a way of continuing this important com-
munity network beyond its welfare functions that are now becoming
defunct as welfare provision is modernized.

Conclusion
The experience of women in Aranda demonstrates how women’s commu-
nity participation is entangled and trapped by the hidden social processes
and silent forms of domination that characterize poor neighbourhoods in
the region where poverty and violence occur. The empirical findings
show that women’s community participation cuts across two competing
logics, each of them having contrasting effects on the promotion of
women’s rights and well-being.
The first institutional process signals a renewed logic of rights-based local
politics. In our case study, this is evident in the informal forums created to

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 332 Constanza Tabbush

‘clean’ this community network of the discretionary distribution of goods

and appropriation of material resources. Yet a second set of social processes,
more silent and effective in their reproduction of vertical and non-
democratic power relations, is founded on the control and access some
women have to deliver (or threaten with) physical violence and the conse-
quent ability to pressure and coerce. These logics of domination hinder the
extension of women’s rights and undermine the rights-based agenda
of enabling horizontal and democratic forms of women’s community
organizing.
In these contexts where state protection of physical safety is not guaran-
teed, issues of women’s basic security seem to be marginal to participatory
spaces. Unrecognized violence at the community level questions the citizen-
ship discourses of rights-based initiatives and sets a new array of challenges
that go beyond the welfare community activities developed by poor
women. The exploration of these brief examples seems to point out that
the rights-based agenda made some progress in safeguarding women’s
social rights, but is less effective in guaranteeing their civil rights to physical
protection, which in turn affect the delivery of welfare provision.
With the progressive elimination of this network’s welfare functions,
rights-based agendas in the region might be given a window of opportunity
for the advancement of women’s rights. As is the case with the re-definition
of a group of Manzaneras as advocates against violence against women, the
women’s networks here analysed could be supported to promote social
change favourable to women.

Funding
Funding for this PhD research was provided by the Institute for the Study of
the Americas and the School of Advance Study at the University of London.
The author is grateful to both institutions for their support. The author
would also like to thank the journal editors for helpful comments and sug-
gestions.

Supplementary material
A Spanish translation of this article is available as supplementary material
at CDJ online.

Constanza Tabbush is a specialist in gender and poverty issues, and a human-rights activist in
Argentina. She has developed her career in London, Geneva and Buenos Aires working on
migrant women in the United Kingdom; gender and poverty alleviation policies in Argentina

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 Silencing everyday violence in rights-based approaches 333

and Chile; institutional violence and women’s rights; and conditions of women in prison in
Argentina. She is currently finishing her PhD in Sociology at the Institute for the Study of
the Americas at the University of London. Her latest publications include ‘The possibilities
for and constraints on agency: Situating women’s public and hidden voices in Greater
Buenos Aires’, Journal of International Development, 21, 868 – 882 (2009); and ‘Gender,
citizenship and new approaches to poverty relief: The case of Argentine CCT strategies’, in
Shahra Razavi (ed.), The Gendered Impacts of Liberalization: Towards Embedded Lib-
eralism? (The Routledge/UNRISD Series in Gender and Development, Routledge, London
and New York, 2009).

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