PUBLIC ART IN
THE AMERICAS

Introduction

Mirko Lauer:
Peru’s Fine Art
of Flag Washing

John Pitman Weber:
Out of the Studio,
Into the Streets

José Luis Soto and
Isa Campos Castañeda:
Mosaic Opening Night

Dora Andrade:
Brazilian Movement Gives Girls Dignity

María Galindo:
Bolivian Debtors
a Creative Force

Coco Fusco:
Now Playing:
Exotic People

Michael Schnorr:
Border Works
Tie Local to Global

María Esther Francia:
Uruguayan Youths
With Unruly Tastes

Slideshow:
Mosaic of the Americas

Books

Home: AMERICAS.ORG   September 2001  

Bolivian Debtors a Creative Force

María Galindo is a member of Women Creating, an anarchist-feminist collective in La Paz, the Bolivian capital. The group runs a small cultural center, publishes a biweekly paper and publishes books, but is known mostly for its clever graffiti and creative direct actions. In recent months, the group has helped lead almost daily protests by about 10,000 Bolivians, mostly women, who are demanding cancellation of bank debts. In this essay, translated from Spanish by Bruce Campbell, Galindo describes another recent direct action.

All social change is born as creative action capable of breaking, of moving, of calling together. In May, I infiltrated the Bolivian Chamber of Commerce’s annual Luxury Luncheon at the Radisson Hotel in downtown La Paz. My goal was to publicize a debt-cancellation demand of thousands of women ready to converge at the hotel.

The women are among half a million Bolivians with microcredit loans, the financing promoted by banks and nongovernmental organizations as a response to unemployment and hunger in the neoliberal age. The loans have gone mostly to women, whom lenders recognize as assuming the greatest responsibility for their family’s survival and meeting repayment schedules most reliably. Supposedly self-employed, many of the women and often their children have ended up working 14–16 hours a day while running up debts as high as $5,000 with annual interest rates of up to 120 percent. Bolivia’s economic crisis has sunk most of the businesses. Repaying the debt is unthinkable.

No such worries faced the luncheon guests. It was one of the most select gatherings since neoliberalism took root 15 years ago. The chosen, the winners, the intelligent ones and the occasional society lady—all white or whitened—had discovered how to turn a profit without wrinkling their suits and how to guarantee the loot with tear gas. They included the microcredit lenders, the invisible bosses of the street vendors, artisans, underground entrepreneurs and tradespersons. These gentlemen celebrated themselves as finance geniuses for launching businesses with capital diverted from anti-poverty programs. Disguised as honest men, they sat down, ready to enjoy a delectable lunch.

I sat among them and stirred my soup, waiting for my moment. My table companions enjoyed the paste—slurp, smack, slurp, smack—and we discussed the stock market and the keynote speech by Banks Superintendent Fernando Calvo. They mistook me for one of their own! At 2 p.m., as the sun revealed the fat belly of boredom, dessert arrived. It was time to break in.

Just then, like Pachamama (who, I’m certain, is on our side), two television cameras arrived. As they began taping, I darted to the podium and placed our sheet of denunciations over the superintendent’s notes. “We must interrupt because we are fed up with the insensitivity and the rhetoric,” I announced.

From table to table, I distributed our leaflet, scolding, shouting and pestering them. I described the terror of children when lawyers brought eviction orders. I said it was impossible to extract another cent from the debtors. I called the bankers inhumane bloodsuckers.

What’s the point of such direct action? It’s fun. Insolence and mockery are indispensable for our movement. Without us, the luncheon would have been a warm reception for the superintendent. With us inside, the event became scandalous, shameful and profoundly unpleasant.

After saying everything that struck my fancy, I looked at my watch and calculated that my people had arrived at the hotel door. I headed outside and, according to plan, there they were. The unemployed women, formerly deluded into believing that a microcredit loan would ensure a roof and shoes for their children, were shouting and singing about settling a score: the debt that society and the banks owed them.

In the banquet room, meanwhile, the bankers tried to recuperate from my invasion. They hurried through dessert amid frozen smiles. Then they descended elegant steps toward the hotel exit, as if walking toward gallows.

Outside we met them face-to-face. Neither the uniformed nor plainclothes police on site could have protected them. We shouted but, despite cowardly claims to the contrary by the bankers and their columnist friends, we didn’t attack or even insult them. We are humane, and we know that social change comes not from hate or violence, but from hope and creativity.

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