Of course.
I apologize, Ms. Laverdière, but I will answer in English since my French is a bit shaky.
I would say that women are at the forefront of a lot of these struggles. Resource extraction increasingly is a real problem in the region.
I'm saying this from my personal experience too. To tell an anecdote that might get me into trouble, I first went to Latin America in the 1980s. I went to Guatemala and I was studying in a school in Guatemala. I was with people from the United States and they were afraid to tell anyone they were from the United States. They wore Canadian flags on their jackets because they were pretending to be Canadians because of the conflict.
A few years ago, I went back to Guatemala and I was in the region around El Estor where the case I'm talking about took place. Someone said to me when they found out there was a Canadian they suggested a lynching. I'm saying that because as a Canadian I find it increasingly difficult going to places in Latin America and hearing people talking about the actions of our mining companies. I say this with great concern for the impact of the communities when people are finding their rivers are contaminated or in the case of Guatemala that military bases are being set up in the same communities that have been traumatized by the military for so many years during a very brutal internal armed conflict.
Often women are on the front lines in these struggles, and it's really important to listen to their voices. That's where I come back to the point that we made about the need to support grassroots women's organizations so that conditions can exist for there to be free, prior, and informed consent, because currently in many of the countries that I'm visiting in Latin America, the conditions aren't there. People are frightened, they're still traumatized, and the women have experienced sexual violence as well when the military base comes in. So it's really important to support the women, to demilitarize, and to establish conditions where there can be free, prior, and informed consent.