Les femmes dans la justice indigène en Bolivie

The alarming statistics on violence against women in Bolivia derive both from a strong gender hierarchy and the State’s indifference to the issue. Such institutional passivity leaves the door open to indigenous justice in conflicts resolution. At the same time, gender issues are often seen through the prism of ethnicity, thus women's emancipation is relegated to a “secondary issue” on the pretext that an Indigenous woman represents mainly and above all her native culture.In this article we explore the way women are seen and defended in an Andean indigenous community. The institutionalization of indigenous justice opened the debate about the respect of women’s rights and the legal processing of cases of violence against them. However, if indigenous justice’s bad practices are often pointed out, Bolivian ordinary justice is far from being an example: between 2008 and 2011, only 27 out of 335 cases of femicide were punished by law. Is justice, native and conventional, the result or the cause of gender violence in Bolivia? We try to analyze this phenomenon through the eyes of the Indigenous Andean Authorities