The Unpredictable Future: Stories From Worker-Run Factories in Argentina

Written by Benjamin Dangl

November 24, 2009

Reviewed: Sin Patron: Stories From Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories, edited by Lavaca, 320 pages, Haymarket Books, 2007.

Following the social upheaval in Argentina in 2001-2002 a book was published in Spanish that a lot of activists and independent journalists in the country began trying to get their hands on. It wasn’t in all of the bookstores, but news about it traveled like wildfire. Now the legendary book, Sin Patron: Stories From Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories, is translated and available to the English-speaking world.

The book includes a number of illuminating interviews and chapters by Lavaca, a journalism collective based in Buenos Aires that continues to produce some of the best analysis and stories on social movements in the country. With Sin Patron, Lavaca brings together dynamic voices and stories from the hearts of Argentina’s inspiring movements.

The timing couldn’t be better for the release of this book in English. Readers in the US seeking creative solutions to the current economic crisis may find some helpful suggestions in Sin Patron.

Workers in Argentina during that country’s crash figured out they needed to go beyond the law to survive. “For workers in Argentina there is no law. It only exists for the powerful,” said Eduardo Murua, President of the National Movement of Reclaimed Companies. “If we were stuck outside [of the factory] asking the judge to keep it open, we would get nowhere. If we were to ask politicians, we’d get even less. Only through occupation could we recover the jobs.”

One story of occupation and worker control told in Sin Patron is that of Sime Quarry, located in the province of Entre Rios. The owners of the quarry ran the business into the ground, but it was taken over by its workers and kept in operation under worker-control. Leading up to the closure the bosses abused the workers verbally and physically. María del Huerto, 45 years old, said that in December of 2002 the bosses of the quarry “gave us a 35-day unscheduled vacation.” The “vacation” lasted until January 20th, when the workers went back to the quarry to find it abandoned. It was “a pasture with no lights, running water, or telephone service. Nothing. It was desolate,” María said. Just a few machines were left.

María met with fellow workers and members of the Movement of Recuperated Companies, and they discussed taking over the quarry themselves. They decided to arm themselves before the takeover in case they ran into any resistance. “We took firearms, and some neighbors lent us shotguns. We announced that we didn’t want to shoot anyone, but wanted to defend our workplace and keep the bosses from stealing anything else.”

It was a terribly hot time of the year and mosquitoes were everywhere. No one had any money, so they used the guns to hunt. “To eat, the men hunted apereá rabbits – they’re brown; they look like big mice. They also fished caruchas from a nearby lagoon, and Don Joaquín would send us tarpon fish from the market. What had happened to us? We thought of ourselves as middle class, and here we were, begging and hunting to make ends meet,” María said. At one point, the workers were getting so desperate they had to sell furniture in order to buy meat.

Over time, they formed a cooperative and a judge ordered the plant be given over to them in April of 2003. Now the quarry is back in business, fully operational under worker-management.

The Zanon ceramics factory was also occupied and put under worker control around the same time. Reinaldo Giménez, a long time worker at Zanon, spoke of when the business was closing down and the boss refused to pay the workers what was owed to them. The boss “put everyone in the same boat, and the workers with the longest tenures said, ‘This scumbag should have paid me. I gave him my life, but he has no feelings, no compassion, and he makes no distinctions.’”

The tension with the boss blew up, and the workers went on strike, setting up tents outside the factory, marching, picketing and organizing a communal kitchen. Local schools, workers and neighbors helped out however they could; even prisoners in jail supported the workers by donating their food. The workers reached out to the community, explaining their plight to passersby. Locals empathized with them because they were hard-working people with families. It was this connection and support from the community that helped the workers of Zanon eventually transform the factory into a cooperative. Ramírez said, “We always said the factory isn’t ours. We are using it, but it belongs to

the community.”

That’s a key message at the heart of this book – that these failed factories and businesses should belong to the people, not the wealthy bosses who mistreated workers and then abandoned ship. Such challenges to classic ideas of private property and workplace hierarchy course through every page in Sin Patron. These examples of worker management defy the bankrupt logic of capitalism itself.

Angry workers everywhere should grab a copy of Sin Patron to read of the Argentines who built new worlds when the old ones failed. As the Lavaca editors write in the introduction to their book, “The limit of all prediction is what people are capable of doing. It is not chance, but courage, that makes the future unpredictable.”

Argentina: Turning Around - Interview with Mark Dworkin & Melissa Young

Conducted by Benjamin Dangl

Monday, 20 July 2009

Argentina: Turning Around is an exciting film which captures the spirit of Argentina’s grassroots response to economic meltdown. Drawing from diverse interviews and incredible footage, the film offers an inside look at the victories and challenges of Argentina’s neighborhood assemblies, protest movements and worker-run factories. Argentina: Turning Around skillfully transmits the country’s courageous examples of social change.

In this interview, the film directors Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young talk about what led them to make the film, how the social and political environment in Argentina has changed since the 2001 economic crash, and how Argentina’s methods of combating economic crisis on a grassroots level might offer lessons to activists in the US facing economic trouble.

Argentina: Turning Around is a documentary available from Bullfrog Films

Benjamin Dangl: What led you to make this film, and how is it connected to the story of your previous film on Argentina, Hope in Hard Times?

Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young: Just as we prepared to leave for the World Social Forum in southern Brazil, and then to visit Argentina, the dominant U.S. media reported Argentina’s economic and political collapse of late 2001 with pictures of people pounding on the shuttered banks and the news that 30 people had been shot and killed by the police in just one day. We almost cancelled our plans to visit Argentina for fear that it might be too dangerous or depressing. But friends in Buenos Aires encouraged us to come anyway.

And when we got there we saw what was not reported in the dominant media – a remarkable resurgence of grassroots democracy, mutual aid, and cooperation, with street corner assemblies that sometimes led to takeovers of unused banks to form neighborhood centers, factories that had been shut down and were re-opened by their workers in defiance of the law, large scale community gardens, and daily mass blockades of streets and highways to demand government action to help those most hurt by the economic crisis. We pulled out our travelling camera and began to film. Although we were only able to stay for a couple of weeks, we continued to follow events in Argentina and returned 6 months later for more filming. The result was Argentina-Hope in Hard Times (2004) which has screened all over the world in its English and Spanish versions and has even been translated into Chinese for a screening in Hong Kong.

We were invited to screen Hope in Hard Times at the 2005 Festival de los Documentalistas in Buenos Aires. While in Argentina again, we tried to assess if things were back to business as usual, or if there were some fundamental changes from when we were last there. We revisited the grassroots projects in our film with camera in hand, and we even screened Hope in Hard Times in a couple of the worker run factories. Many neighborhood assemblies were no longer active, but the factories that had been taken over by worker cooperatives were surviving and thriving, and we filmed at a few more.

We also visited a new community cooperative run by unemployed workers in the poor suburb of La Matanza, and a villa de miseria (slum) on the outskirts of Buenos Aires founded by cartoneros (recyclers). We met with economists, journalists and activists, including Esteban Magnani, author of The Silent Change, who helped us to appreciate that the long term significance of the events of 2001-2002 goes well beyond the accomplishment of a given factory or neighborhood. As Magnani puts it in Argentina-Turning Around, “It was a miracle! People took over the scene again. We said that we are the protagonists of our own history, and we want to be the protagonists.”

BD: Could you describe some of the main ways that Argentina’s social and political environment has changed since the 2001-2002 economic crash and subsequent popular activism and organizing?

MD and MY: This is what Argentina-Turning Around addresses. For most people life has become more normal again. Once the emergency passed, the intense grassroots activity subsided, but many efforts in communities and workplaces continue. In 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected President, and he was succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernández in 2007. They both talked a more populist line, and persuaded the courts and government agencies to give worker run factories a chance to prove themselves [even as former owners tried to get them back]. Argentina paid off its entire debt to the IMF with help from Venezuela. They began to prosecute human rights offenders from the military dictatorship of 1976-83 (also touched on in Turning Around). As the economy recovered substantially in 2004-2007, official unemployment rates dropped from over 20% to 8%. We were told that people would never again let the Argentine government favor the demands of global corporations and institutions at the expense of regular people such as what happened in the 1990s.

Of course, now Argentina is feeling the effects of the global financial crisis, and right now too, the swine flu. The economy is down and unemployment is up. The expansion of lands planted with transgenic soy has raised food prices and contributed to inflation. And President Cristina Fernandez’s party lost seats in the June mid-term elections, with criticism from both right and left. (For more information, see Argentine journalist Marie Trigona’s writings about swine flu and recent elections in Argentina.)

On a return visit earlier this year we found that the 200 or so worker run factories continue to “occupy, resist, and produce.” A few have failed but others have started up. When eviction has been threatened by former owners, often the public has shown up to demonstrate their support for the worker run enterprises. For the history of the Zanon ceramics plant, one of the first to be seized by its workers, see this article. Similar worker run enterprises have taken root in Brazil, Venezuela and most recently, Uruguay.

BD: Could Argentina’s experience with economic crisis and methods of combating that crisis on a grassroots level offer any lessons to activists in the US facing economic trouble?

MD and MY: Although there is seldom inspiring news from Latin America in the U.S. press, we believe we can learn a lot from Argentina’s activism, especially from the can do spirit of horizontalidad (non-hierarchical organizations). As Esteban Magnani puts it in Turning Around, “There is a vibe in the air that the important thing is to do it, to find your own way to do it, and to help other people find their own way!”

When Hope in Hard Times came out over 4 years ago, people at screenings in the U.S. would say, “We have seen similar policies, such as off-shoring of jobs and privatization of public services here in the U.S. Will we have an economic collapse of our own? And if we do, would we pull together as people did in Argentina?” Fast forward a few years and we are in the worst economic crisis since the great depression. The corporate agenda of globalization and privatization has been discredited.

Many in the U.S. have quit expecting solutions from the top and are becoming active with others in their local communities, with a particular emphasis on local food and alternative energy. Workers at Republic Windows and Doors occupied their Chicago factory late last year, to demand severance pay and benefits after the factory closed, and they won. That factory is scheduled to re-open under new management to produce energy conserving windows. Their example was followed by workers at Hartmarx clothing, who voted in May to sit-in at their plants to protect their jobs.

But so far, we haven’t seen workers begin to run these plants themselves. Even in Argentina, self-management didn’t happen right away. At the beginning of Argentina-Turning Around, Soledad Bordegaray of the Union of Unemployed Workers says, “It’s not like people began with the idea of running things ourselves, we weren’t taught to think that way. But no existing institutions were responding to our needs for jobs, education, and health care. People got together and said, why wait for someone else? Let’s see what WE can do!”

We produced these films to encourage our own resurgence of grassroots democracy here in the U.S. It is hard to imagine resolving the current economic situation and the challenges of energy and climate change by relying on the same top down, profit maximizing institutions that got us into this mess in the first place.

BD: What are you working on now?

MD and MY: Earlier this year we visited Argentina again and personally delivered copies of Argentina-Turning Around to all who appear in the film. Our travels led us to film some of the current struggles of indigenous peoples in northwest Argentina. The expansion of mining contracts, burgeoning grape production for wines, and the lucrative soy plantations that produce animal feed for export are exerting pressure on the traditional lands of indigenous peoples. We also witnessed the successful vote in Bolivia for the new constitution that provides more rights for indigenous peoples. Some short pieces about these struggles will appear soon on You Tube. At the moment we are preparing our most recent documentary for public TV broadcast in English and Spanish, Good Food. Recently we signed a license with public TV in Argentina to broadcast Buena Comida. Our website is http://www.movingimages.org, and you can contact us through info@movingimages.org

Argentina: Turning Around is from Bullfrog Films

Argentina Remembers: Marches Mark 33rd Anniversary of Military Coup

By Benjamin Dangl

April 21. 2009

The weekend that the hemisphere’s Presidents met in Trinidad at the Summit of the Americas marked the same weekend that Cuba defeated the US in the Bay of Pigs invasion 48 years ago. At the Summit, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega recalled the invasion in a speech that rightly criticized US imperialism throughout the 20th century. President Barack Obama replied, “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”

However, as the US President, Obama inherits a bloody legacy that is still very much alive in today’s Latin America. Just weeks before the Presidents met in Trinidad, thousands of Argentines marched once again to demand justice for 30,000 people disappeared in a US-backed military dictatorship.

On March 24, 1976 a military junta took power in Argentina, and until 1981, General Jorge Rafael Videla presided over the country in a reign of terror, torture, surveillance and murder.

On March 24, 2009, in Mendoza, Argentina, colorful marches filled the central streets of the city in remembrance of the coup, and to demand justice. The various banners and placards waving above the crowd were a testament to Argentina’s healthy political diversity in activism and politics – from Maoists selling their newspapers to Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo giving teary hugs to supporters and friends.

Though the march was organized around one central theme – justice, truth and memory regarding the dictatorship – other themes arose in the crowd as well, including the negative impact of soy production, rising bus fares and political corruption.

The march was a time to remember when Henry Kissinger gave his blessing to the Argentine military junta in 1976, saying, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly” and reassuring the torturing, bloody leaders when he said, “I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”

Marches and protests in Buenos Aires on the same day were attended by the famous Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a powerful human rights movement that for decades has been demanding the truth regarding the whereabouts of their disappeared children. One document read by some of the Mothers explained that still, after all these years, “the slowness of justice generates impunity and impunity only creates more impunity.”

A column by one leading Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, Hebe Bonafini, explained that her movement is also doing more than just marching and lobbying for justice. Their reach has expanded into all kinds of media and walks of life. They have opened a literary café and publishing house, and hold seminars which 2,800 different students attend. Their “Shared Dreams” project provides housing in poor neighborhoods, as well as soup kitchens and daycare centers. Their radio station reaches into neighboring Uruguay and as far away as Brazil.

During the Buenos Aires mobilizations, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo spoke of the fact that “today there have still only been 44 sentences” for the authors of “a plan of systematic extermination” during the dictatorship. Therefore, the Mothers said, “we have to keep on fighting for truth and justice,” as there are still 526 criminals of the dictatorship that still need to be tried. They demanded an “opening of the all of the archives of the Armed Forces and security to know to the truth.” They also called for the appearance of Julio López, the main testifier in a case against Miguel Etchecolatz, a repressor under the dictatorship.

Julio Lopez, a political prisoner during the dictatorship, was disappeared in 2006 a few hours before he was scheduled to testify against Etchecolatz. Lopez was last seen on September 18th, 2006. Journalist Marie Trigona reported that Nilda Eloy, another survivor of the dictatorship who testified with Lopez to convict Etchecolatz, said that “Most of the evidence suggests that Julio Lopez was kidnapped by the gangsters from the Greater Buenos Aires police force and rightwing fascists…”

Outside Buenos Aires other cities remembered these harsh times that still cast shadows over generations upon generations. But this March 24 was also a time of hope and reconstruction. In Cordoba, Argentina, La Perla (The Pearl), a detention and torture center run by the military dictatorship was transformed into a “Space for Memory” and opened to the public. Emiliano Fessia, a member of the HIJOS human rights organization, said of the space, “This will now be a place of life, after being a place of death.”

Cerámica de Cuyo: A Profile of Worker Control in Argentina

By Benjamin Dangl, June 23, 2007

In the worn out meeting room of worker-run Cerámica de Cuyo, Manuel Rojas runs a rough hand over his face. The mechanic recalls forming the cooperative after the company boss fired the workers in 2000: “We didn’t have any choice. If we didn’t take over the factory we would all be in the streets. The need to work pushed us to action.”

After working at the ceramic brick and tile factory for nearly 35 years, Rojas joined the other two dozen workers at Cerámica de Cuyo and began to organize into a cooperative. These workers were part of national movement at a time when Argentina was in an economic crisis. Across the country, hundreds of factories, businesses and hotels shut their doors and sent their employees packing. Many workers, like those at Cerámica de Cuyo, decided to take matters into their own hands. As the stories of these workers illustrate, the cooperatively-run road hasn’t been easy.

Cerámica de Cuyo is surrounded by vineyards and artists’ homes in the bohemian community of Bermejo, Argentina , right outside Mendoza. Dust blows around the sun burnt factory yard as I sit down with Rojas and his co-worker Francisco Avila. Rojas wears a weathered blue plaid shirt while Avila has a baseball cap resting on a head of gray hair. We’re in the Cerámica de Cuyo meeting room. The ancient chairs have crumbling foam cushions. Phone numbers and Che Guevara slogans are scrawled on the walls. It’s easy to sense the wear and tear that lifetimes of labor have had on the place.

In August of 1999, the Cerámica de Cuyo owner cut wages. Though he promised it was only temporary, the lack of money pushed many employees to search for work elsewhere. Some left the country in desperation. “The boss kept promising money, so we waited,” Rojas says. “We worked on weekends, waiting and waiting, but no paychecks arrived. We had to support our families, pay the bills and everything.” In February, 2000, all the workers were fired. A year later they decided to form a cooperative and run the factory themselves.

While organizing the cooperative, they had to guard the factory to prevent the robbery of expensive equipment and machinery. Neighbors helped the workers out at this critical time, providing food, firewood and blankets. “Workers from other cooperatives came to the factory with classes, informing us how to organize a cooperative,” Avila says. “This kind of solidarity is common.”

Cerámica de Cuyo produces roofing tiles and bricks, and now employs around 32 people. Before the formation of the cooperative, the pay scales were typical, with the owner earning a lot more than the workers. Now everyone is paid the same amount and all workers have one week of vacation. Regular assemblies are organized to discuss administrative and financial topics, or to hire a new employee. Since the formation of the cooperative, they have also been able to buy newer machines.

“Before, the boss wouldn’t let us into the main administrative office. Now it’s ours,” Rojas says. “We go in there anytime to check on orders and be involved with that side of the business.”

We walk outside into the now scorching sun. One truck dumps off a load of dirt while clay is formed into bricks and tiles and sent inside to a massive kiln. Rojas works as an all around mechanic, fixing everything from fork lifts to conveyor belts. When we enter the main factory room, he is called from three directions at once with questions to answer and problems to fix. Steam rises from the hot, wet, recently cut bricks. The whole place smells like a potter’s kiln.

While Rojas works on a control panel for the conveyor belt, Avila takes me upstairs to his work area at the top of the kiln. Here the temperature rises by about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Though it feels like a sauna, Avila is comfortable and turns up the radio to a popular cumbia song. It’s a dangerous job: “Sometimes when the electricity is shut down, and the gas keeps going, there can be an explosion, so I have to pay attention.”

“It hasn’t been easy,” Avila says. “Before, we were workers. Now we have to be lawyers, accountants and everything. Before, we didn’t worry about the machines. Now they’re all ours, so we care more about them. Now when a machine breaks down we have to wait for money and parts.”

Both admitted that one of the hardest things about working in a cooperative was that all workers, young and old, received the same wages. Rojas says, “Some people who have no experience at all are making the same per hour as those working as mechanics with 35 years of technical experience.”

Avila agrees. “Some workers want to earn more for working less. At the beginning it was all compañero this and compañero that, very glorious. But when we started working more, a lot of the conflicts broke out about salaries.”

Back in the meeting room, Rojas explains that now, whenever there is a problem, they all discuss things in the open, in assemblies. “There are always conflicts, but what’s good about it now is that we solve it together, right here.” He pounds his fist on the battered meeting table.

Finding Common Ground in Crisis: Social Movements in South America and the US

By Benjamin Dangl

Thursday, 18 December 2008

People in the US seeking ways to confront the economic crisis could follow the lead of South American social movements. From Argentina to Venezuela, many movements have won victories against the same systems of corporate greed and political corruption that produce economic strife across the hemisphere. These movements also have experience holding politicians’ feet to the flames once they are elected, a tactic that will be essential once Barack Obama takes office.

A recent connection between activist strategies in the north and south emerged earlier this month when over 200 laid-off workers from Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory occupied their plant, demanding the severance and vacation pay owed to them.

The occupation in Chicago echoed the worker occupations of factories and businesses in Argentina during that country’s 2001 economic crisis, and is now looking even more like the movement in Argentina: the Republic workers are currently seeking ways to re-open their factory and potentially operate it as a worker-run cooperative.

“This is a place that should’ve stayed open,” Republic union organizer Leah Fried told reporter Meg White. The factory could be very successful in the long run as it produces heating-efficient windows and doors. “The goal is to reopen the plant and create employment,” Fried said.

In Argentina, hundreds of worker coops were formed after the occupations under the slogan, “Occupy, Resist, Produce.” During the occupation of the factory in Chicago, workers and supporters chanted, “You got bailed out, we got sold out,” referring to the fact that Bank of America – a lender to Republic – received $25 billion of the $700 billion government bailout, only to cut off credit to Republic, leading to the closure of the factory. But after six days of the occupation, Bank of America and other lenders relented, agreeing to pay the workers approximately $2 million in severance and vacation pay plus health insurance.

A foundation created by the Republic workers called the “Window of Opportunity Fund,” made up in part from the donations received from around the US and the world to support the workers during the occupation, will be utilized to seek ways to restart the factory.

The similarities between the workers’ actions in Chicago and Argentina show that labor strategies to fight economic crises can be applied as internationally as the free market policies that contributed to these problems in the first place.

One international gathering that embodies the philosophy of cross-border organizing and solidarity is the annual World Social Forum which began in Brazil in 2001 to encourage collaboration and education between social movements from across the world. In 2004 I interviewed Michael Hardt, the co-author, with Antonio Negri, of Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, about the role the World Social Forums and similar encounters can have in globalizing social justice.

“I was at two of the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre, Brazil,” Hardt explained. “At one of them, there was this sort of counter forum going on at the youth camp where there were groups from various places. I was at one meeting where we had Italians, piqueteros from Argentina and a group from a movement in South Africa that is against these electricity and water cut offs in Durban and Johannesburg. It was great having three of them talk to each other, because even in a straight forward, tactical way they are experiencing the same thing, the same kinds of police repression and the same kinds of struggles. And it was not really learning from each other, but recognizing a kind of commonality that then creates new relationships… It is that kind of thing that has to happen on a much larger scale.”

As the economic crisis in the US worsens, and the need to pressure the Obama administration looms, movements in the US could seek such commonality with movements in South America. Of the countless examples of recent social movement victories in South America, here are a few that could suggest potential blueprints for social change in the US.

In the early 1990s, participatory budgeting was implemented by the Workers’ Party in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This process, still in operation, involves thousands of residents gathering to decide how government funding should be used for city projects and development. Popular participation in this process prevents corruption, and expands the conception of democracy beyond simply voting every few years for a different political representative.

During the Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia in 2000, residents of that city expanded the meaning of democracy even further when they united against the Bechtel Corporation’s privatization of their water. The privatization put everything from communally-built wells and rain cisterns under the corporation’s thumb, and led to exorbitant rates few could afford. In response, people from across economic lines joined together in protests and road blockades and were successful in kicking the company out of town and putting the water back into public hands.

In 2003, when former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada tried to export Bolivian gas to the US for a low price, working class residents of the city of El Alto rose up against the president and his plan. Citizens took shifts at street barricades, distributing food, spreading messages via bicycle and working together with meager resources to fight the police and military, eventually toppling the repressive Sanchez de Lozada government. That revolt paved the way to the election of indigenous president Evo Morales, and the partial nationalization of the gas industry. In his office in El Alto, Bolivian sociologist Pablo Mamani spoke of this rebellion, “During the uprising, the state was broken, it stopped existing, it died in El Alto.”

Other Bolivian social movements point to potential strategies for social change as well. Much of South America’s fertile land is in the hands of a few rich land owners. Landless Farmer Movements (MSTs) across region regularly occupy unused land to work it for their survival. The Bolivian Landless Movement has been instrumental in pressuring the Morales government to implement much-needed land reform. Silvestre Saisari, a bearded leader in Bolivia’s MST, explained his organization’s relationship to the government in this way: “Our democracy depends on us as social movements.”

One story from the neighborhood of El 23 de Enero in Caracas, Venezuela is emblematic of the progressive changes taking place in that country. Juan Contreras, a radio producer and resident of the neighborhood, talked about how he and his compañeros took over the local police station – for decades an outpost for crackdowns on leftist organizing – and transformed it into a community radio station and cultural center.

“This place was a symbol of repression,” Contreras explained to me in the studio, which still smelled like fresh paint from the recent conversion. “So we took that symbol and made it into a new one.” In words that reflect the spirit of the worker occupations in Chicago and Argentina, and the need for a broad grassroots response to the US crisis, he continued, “It is evidence of the revolution made by us, the citizens. We can’t hang around waiting for the revolution to be made for us; we have to make the changes.”

Argentina’s Bonfire of Memory

By Benjamin Dangl

Tuesday, 07 August 2007

Guitar strumming and singing starts and stops with the passage of wine and steak. The gaiety of this party in Argentina is in contrast with the topic of conversation. Some of the partygoers are sons and daughters of dissidents persecuted in the dictatorship and they talk about disappearances and torture as if it all took place yesterday. The past keeps seeping into view, like the persistent smoke from the barbecue.

“During the 20th century, we have in Argentina more governments elected by bullets than by ballots,” Argentine investigative journalist Horacio Verbitsky said in an interview. He was referring in part to The Dirty War, a military dictatorship which shaped much of the country’s current political and social climate. The Dirty War refers to the state violence carried out by the military junta led by Jorge Videla from 1976-1983. At the start of the crackdown, one of the generals in the junta predicted, “We are going to have to kill 50,000 people: 25,000 subversives, 20,000 sympathizers, and we will make 5,000 mistakes.” In the end, approximately 30,000 people were “disappeared.”

Portraits of Disappeared, © Pepe Robles

Verbitsky has dedicated his life to uncovering crimes of the military dictatorship and bringing those responsible to justice. In his book Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, Lieutenant Commander Adolfo Scilingo confesses to participating in the torture and murder of political prisoners during the Dirty War. These activities included “death flights” - drugging prisoners and then throwing them, alive, out of airplanes into the ocean. In other cases, torturers put live mice into a woman’s vagina, pulled toe-nails off their victims and used cattle prods on prisoners.

This past still haunts much of the country. People I talked with during a recent visit to Argentina spoke of high school teachers in the 1970s and 1980s reporting to the government about unruly students and relatives hiding leftist literature in backyard gardens. Others had parents that disappeared and were never heard from again. Yet some people were hopeful. One friend explained at a party, “After the nightmares of the dictatorship, the neoliberal hell of the 1990s with Carlos Menem, [current president] Kirchner is okay.”

Julio Lopez

This legacy of terror has in fact continued throughout the Kirchner administration. Journalist Marie Trigona writes that Julio Lopez, a political prisoner during the Dirty War, was disappeared in 2006 a few hours before he was scheduled to testify against former police investigator Miguel Etchecolatz, who ran a detention center during the dictatorship and oversaw torture. Lopez was last seen on September 18th, 2006. Trigona reported that Nilda Eloy, another survivor of the dictatorship who testified with Lopez to convict Etchecolatz, said that “Most of the evidence suggests that Julio Lopez was kidnapped by the gangsters from the Greater Buenos Aires police force and rightwing fascists…” Torture survivor Margarita Cruz said “Lopez’s disappearance brings back memories of our kidnappings and what we lived through during the military dictatorship.”

Of War and Music: Latin America to the US

We drove into the countryside outside Mendoza, Argentina to an isolated town past countless vineyards. A comet descended in the distance. Trees lined the road, their canopies filtering a view of the stars, which were bright in a dark sky. After receiving three different versions of directions to the same place, we arrived at the site of the concert. Mercedes Sosa, a long time Argentine folk singer, was performing. Sosa drew a diverse crowd including teenagers, older folks singing along to the lyrics and some babies held by their parents. Sosa was exiled during the dictatorship, and lived in the home of Ramon Chao (Manu’s father) in Paris, along with other exiled musicians such as Atahualpa Yupanqui. Though she has been less political since her early days, her singing continues to reach across political and generational lines. Her heroic voice conveys the vast artistic and geographic territory of her homeland. Hearing this country in her songs is a powerful and heart-wrenching experience. She cried throughout most of the performance, along with much of the audience.

The sky was clouding over as Sosa left the stage. Tall trees bent violently in the wind until rain poured down. Thunder crashed and the lightning lit up the sky as Argentine folk legend León Gieco strummed into a rocking rhythm, his guitar and band accompanied by the thunderstorm. He reminded me of a cross between Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Paul Simon. Gieco was exiled in Colombia during the dictatorship and has helped inspire countless activists in Argentina and beyond. He was launched into fame with the song Hombres de Hierro about state repression of dissidents. The chorus in this song goes like this:

Hombres de hierro/que no escuchan la voz/hombres de hierro/que no escuchan el grito/hombres de hierro que no escuchan el llanto/gente que avanza se puede matar/pero los pensamientos quedaran.

Translation: Men of iron/who don’t hear voices/men of iron who don’t hear screams/men of iron who don’t hear cries/you can kill people who advance/but the thoughts will remain.

I thought of all of the people who had been disappeared in Argentina that should have been up on that stage with him. What would Argentina be like if the 30,000 disappeared social activists were still alive?

Víctor Jara

One activist who didn’t make it out of those bloody years was Chilean musician Víctor Jara. He was kidnapped by military officials in the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in 1973, just after democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown. Jara was taken to the large Chile Stadium where he was tortured and beaten along with thousands of other prisoners. After Jara’s hands were cut off, his captors mockingly suggested he play his guitar. He responded by singing a song of the Popular Unity, the political coalition of Allende. An estimated 3,000 people were killed under Pinochet’s reign of terror.

As the George W. Bush administration appears more like the Videla and Pinochet regimes each day, history lessons from Latin America’s dirty wars have much to teach US citizens. In an acceptance speech for a 2001 International Press Freedom Award, the Argentine journalist Verbitsky warned that after the tragedy of September 11th, 2001, the “United States may be tempted to erode its high standards of free expression, to restrict its own liberties and to ignore the suffering of other people… due process is at stake and even the possible use of torture is being debated. In this context Argentine experience can be useful … In our country we learned that sacrificing civil liberties and human rights standards in the name of security has devastating effects…”

***

Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia, (AK Press, 2007)

An Interview with Celia Martinez of the Worker-Controlled Brukman Textile Factory in Buenos Aires

Conducted by Benjamin Dangl

8/29/05

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One day before Argentina’s economic crash on December 19, 2001, fifty-two workers from the Brukman Textile Factory, the majority of them women, refused to continue working until their bosses handed over their back-wages. Plagued by debt and gradual bankruptcy, the owners hadn’t paid the workers their weekly pay check for fifteen days. The bosses demanded that the workers returned to their stations, but the sewing machines remained silent.

Jacobo Brukman, the owner of factory, told the workers, “If you think you can run the factory better than we can, than here is the key.” But instead of handing over the key, Brukman fled the building. The workers, many of whom didn’t even have the two pesos needed to take the bus home, remained in the factory, placing banners out the windows that said, “We Want Our Salaries!” Protesters in support of the workers showed up the following day. In a telephone conversation, the Brukman owners offered the workers two suits a piece instead of their salaries. The workers refused the offer and constructed a road blockade in front of the building in protest.

Soon after, a Brukman client contracted a large order of Bermuda shorts. The workers produced them, using much of the money from the deal to pay the gas and electric bill of the factory. It was at this time that they began running the business themselves, organizing contracts, salaries and general managerial activity.

What started out as a simple demand for back-wages had turned into a fierce struggle for worker-control of Brukman. Driven by a need to survive and support their families, the workers tried through legal means to gain ownership, fighting against politicians, judges and police in riot gear. Political differences among the workers themselves threatened to weaken and divide this struggle. Yet more than four years after they confronted their old bosses, the workers are still in charge of Brukman. Their fight has become a symbol of the recuperated factory movement in Argentina and an inspirational example to workers and activists around the world.

Celia Martinez, a worker at Brukman, has been part of this struggle from the beginning. In this interview she talks about the worker takeover, how the factory is currently organized, the difficulties of working closely with others in a cooperative, and how this experience has completely changed her political orientation.

Benjamin Dangl: The workers at Brukman have been through a very profound experience. First you were all simply demanding the back wages from the previous boss, and then you ended up taking over the factory and running it yourselves. Which do you prefer now, working for the old boss or operating as a cooperative? Why?

Celia Martinez: In the beginning we just wanted to see the bosses to talk about our wages. Later on, after the 19-20 of December (when the economy crashed, protests filled the streets and President De la Rua was forced from office) we saw what was happening in the country; three government came and went in just a few weeks. The leftists were all in the streets and they came together. I believe it was the leftists that sustained this uprising and made it what it was. The P.T.S. (Socialist Workers Party) worked the hardest so that this uprising would be well known throughout the world.

It was the left that supported us the most. The workers of Brukman were opportunists. Opportunists because we surrounded ourselves with people that gave us confidence, that told us we could fight and take over the factory. We made the most of the time we had to put the factory under work control without any legality and fought long and hard against the government…

I hope that we can be able to unite all of the recuperated factories and create a strong movement and defend each other, so that the factories continue to be of the workers. But now we just saw an attack at Zanon, (a worker run ceramic factory outside Buenos Aires). The wife of a companero was beaten up. They cut all of her face and body up. So what can we hope for? We don’t know.

What we want now is to be able to work and earn our salaries. It is very difficult for these recuperated factories to enter into the market. Those that are entering the market well are the metallurgical factories. They are entering the market easily, but the textiles, for now, are not doing well at all. We barely have any work and our clients don’t respond.

We have some fear that Chinese products will enter the market. The same thing happened in the 1990s when Menem was president, when most large textile factories went to other countries for cheaper labor. We can’t do something like that. It is very dangerous that Chinese products could invade the industry and the textiles could be left with nothing again.

BD: How is Brukman organized now? Do you have assemblies every week? Does everyone have an equal vote and receive an equal salary?

CM: We all charge the same for our work and each person has one vote. The assemblies are held once every week and every fifteen days, depending on the necessity that there is. Sometime we have them twice or three times a week, it depends on what we discuss. Now we have a direct commission, with a president and secretary etc. Before it wasn’t like this. There was an internal commission and nothing more.

BD: When you get together each week, what are some of the issues that you discuss?

CM: It almost always has to do with the work, what we need, legal problems and problems with the machines. It’s always something like this.

BD: What is the secret of maintaining a successful cooperative?

CM: It still is not a successful cooperative so I cannot give you the recipe (she laughs). I believe that the recipe would be – I am not giving you it really because it is still not a successful cooperative – a lot of democracy and class consciousness.

BD: In an interview in the book Sin Patron, conducted by the writers at LaVaca.org, your co-worker Matilda Adorno talked about what the early assemblies were like, just after the factory was taken over: “For many of us it was difficult to understand how to live with each other, and treat each other equally. Now we know what it is like in the other person’s shoes and we have made peace. In the assemblies we would be able to pull each other’s eyes out in order to defend our respective points of views. But afterwards we’d drink mate (thick herbal tea) together.” Could you expand on this experience?

CM: In the beginning we thought that all the companeros were equal and you’d try to see with these eyes, thinking that everyone has the same objective. But sometimes this just isn’t the case. Eventually you have to become accustomed to discussing in assemblies everything that you’re worried about, everything that you want and express your own position – the position of your work politics and your human position. It is important to discuss this in assemblies, but when the assembly is over, the discussion is over as well…

BD: What is the biggest challenge for the recuperated factories that function as cooperatives?

CM: The challenge is to be able to enter the market. It is very difficult. A capitalist could lose thousands of dollars, but we cannot because we don’t have the same economic strength that a capitalist has. We live on a day to day basis.

BD: In an interview with LaVaca.org, you said that your political orientation changed a lot throughout this experience. Could you explain this change?

CM: I used to be a Peronista, like my husband and children. But when we took over the factory I went to ask Peronistas in my community for help. I went a Peronista Senator that lives in my neighborhood for help and advice because I really didn’t know what to do. And he never responded, but the left gave me all the responses and helped me understand that I had to fight until the end. I think that of all the struggles that happened in these recent years, Brukman has come out on top. It has been an enormous experience that is famous all over the world. Journalists from all over the world have come to see this…The Peronistas would have tried to make a deal so that our old boss would come back and we would end up like slaves again.

BD: I was studying here in 2002 and there was a stronger social and political consciousness then with all of the assemblies, protests and the taking over of factories. And now much has changed. The people of Buenos Aires in general don’t support the protesters, piqueteros and the recuperated factory movement nearly as much as before. Why has this changed so much?

CM: Because the political situation in the country has changed. Many people believe in President Kirchner, because he appears to be a President of the semi-left, a president that appears to be with the people, but this is not true. For example, I think he will continue to pay the IMF.

BD: Does this change in consciousness have to do with people earning higher wages?

CM: There is at least a little more work. The middle class is recuperating and they were the ones in the streets in the assemblies because they had all of their money in the corrolito (in 2002, when people couldn’t get their money out of the bank because the financial infrastructure of the country was bankrupt.) This is not the case anymore, their economic situation is improving.

Argentina: Hope in Hard Times

By Benjamin Dangl

7/25/05

“Imagine you lost your job and the government closed down the banks, so you couldn’t get out your savings. What would you do?” asks the narrator of the new film, Argentina: Hope in Hard Times. In the case of Argentina’s economic crisis in 2002, the situation brought about a renewal in grassroots democracy. This film covers the social movement that broke out in Argentina during that crisis, taking the viewer on a wild ride to street protests, worker-controlled factories, barter fairs and a Citibank transformed into a community center. It discusses the rise and fall of a country that, in a matter of days, went from being one of the richest nations in the region, to one of the poorest.

For decades, Argentines enjoyed a higher standard of living than many of its neighbors. Yet due to corrupt politicians and pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to develop new economic policies, these glory days came to an abrupt end.

During an interview in the film, Abraham Leonardo Gak, Rector of the School of Business at the University of Buenos Aires, explained that during the nineties the Argentine government’s control over the economy was gradually shifted into the hands of the market. “There’s an idea that the market is the best way to manage resources,” Gak said. “It’s been preached continuously for more than 27 years. It was installed, not just in the economy, but in the minds of the people. Imports replaced local manufacturing and investment capital could go in and out of the country at any moment. It seemed like the economy was growing…”

“But wealth became more concentrated in the hands of a few and unemployment went up,” explained the film’s narrator as the camera cuts to a shot of pedestrians walking below a giant Coca-Cola sign. “Argentina privatized public services. The government laid off workers and cut regulation of business. This was supposed to free up the private sector for an economic boom.”

The house of cards fell in December 2001. In an attempt to stop the flow of dollars out of the country, the government froze everyone’s bank accounts. Middle class people became poor, unemployment skyrocketed and protests filled the streets. The country went through four presidents in less than a month.

In the midst of this crisis, people worked together to develop the many creative solutions that are the focus of this film. One visit is to a barter fair in Palermo, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires that before the crisis was economically well off. At this fair they use creditos, an alternative currency to the official Argentine peso. People use this new currency to buy shoes, shirts and tools as well as hire painters and plumbers for housework. Few had official pesos, so creditos worked as a survival measure. “I don’t get paid that often, so I try and get by in other ways,” one customer at the fair explained.

The film also includes interviews at a barbeque held in another formerly upper-class neighborhood. The event is a fundraiser to pay for tetanus shots for cartoneros, people who search the garbage for recyclable material in order to earn a meager amount of money. A man helping out at the event explained, “I’ve lived here for seven years and only knew two people. Now I know my neighbors.”

“It’s fashionable now to help others,” another woman said.

Other phenomena which the documentary depicts are the popular assemblies which sprouted up in Argentina during the crisis. The assemblies were basically made up of distraught neighbors gathering in the streets, trying to figure out what to do next.

Referring to the politicians that had helped to create the economic mess in the first place, one citizen at an assembly said, “Everybody out! Get rid of them all! This new force that is emerging in the neighborhoods and factories could someday replace the current system.”

“People should give money that we were paying to the government to the popular assembly now,” a young man commented.

The film crew also visits a poor neighborhood in Quilmes, outside Buenos Aires, where a community of people occupied land to live on and grow their own food. In interviews with the workers there, one woman discussed the essential function of their community cafeteria: “Three hundred children come here each day because they don’t have anything to eat.”

The film includes a number of interviews with formerly wealthy people who were well-dressed, but could not afford to feed themselves. It was this group that was finding out, possibly for the first time in their lives, what it meant to be poor. Out of necessity, these newborn activists joined the popular cry, “Que Se Vayan Todos!” (Throw them all out!), banged pots and pans against bank windows and began, along with other social sectors, to create grassroots networks and projects that helped their communities survive the crisis.

Unfortunately, the amount of solidarity between Argentine citizens has plummeted significantly since 2002. Whereas poverty still affects much of the country, and some social sectors are working for change, many who were forced to protest and organize with their neighbors in order to endure the crisis now have steady salaries and aren’t as inclined to participate in such activism.

Argentina: Hope in Hard Times provides an exciting look at this social movement in its heyday. It takes an exhaustive, panoramic shot of Argentine activism in 2002, capturing the grassroots power people felt as they transformed the broken pieces of their country into new opportunities. This is the best documentary yet on what was a pivotal moment in Argentina’s history and should be required viewing for anyone who is interested in working for a better world.

Argentina: Hope in Hard Times was produced by Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin. To order a copy of the film, email video@bullfrogfilms.com, call 1-800-543-FROG or go to www.bullfrogfilms.com.

Benjamin Dangl studied in Argentina during the country’s 2002 crisis and has since written from there on the worker-controlled factories movement in Buenos Aires.

Member of Worker-Run Factory in Argentina Was Kidnapped, Tortured

by Benjamin Dangl

3/24/05

Zanon ceramics factory, one of the most prominent of the recuperated, worker-run factories in Argentina, was taken over by workers in 2001 and since then has been economically successful as a cooperative. However, as a major symbol of Argentina’s recuperated factory movement, (over 200 such cooperatives exist in the country), it has been a target for right-wing hostility. Workers at the factory have received death threats and have been violently oppressed during protests. Recently, this intimidation escalated: a woman who works at Zanon was kidnapped and tortured by a group workers believe is linked to the local government.

In the afternoon on March 4th in Neuquen, a city outside Buenos Aires, the woman (whose name has not been released) was leaving the factory when a group of people forced her into a green Falcon car, the same type of vehicle used during Argentina’s dictatorship in the seventies to kidnap and torture “leftists”. The group in the car began to insult her and said they knew where she lived, where her family worked and where her daughter plays after school. Then they began to cut her with a knife, taunting her by saying things like “cut her more so that the blood will flow in Zanon…” After cutting her arms and face they threw her out of the car and said they were going to go after her daughter next.

The woman called the workers at Zanon and the police. Police surrounded her house to protect her family throughout the night. By morning, however, there was only one policeman on guard. At 9 am one of her kidnappers returned through the back door and repeated what he had done to her in the car: insulting her and cutting her with a knife. When the man left, the one policeman who was on guard said he did not hear or see anything.

“This is one of many things that have happened to Zanon workers. Last year, Pepe, a Zanon worker was seriously injured in the eyes with pellets from police during a protest,” said Esteban Magnani, author of “El Cambio Silencioso” (”The Silent Change”), a book about worker cooperatives in Argentina. “In Neuquen you have Jorge Sobisch, a right wing governor who wants to be the new Carlos Menem (president of Argentina during the nineties who enacted numerous neoliberal policies which many believe greatly contributed to the country’s economic crisis). Sobisch wants to show how tough he is, so he is trying to get rid of Zanon.” The governor recently declared he will run for president in the next elections.

“The police are related to this because they didn’t protect the woman so that the kidnapper was able to return,” Maganani continued. “No one officially knows who conducted the kidnapping, but most people are pretty sure those involved in it are related to the local government…Zanon is very politicized and famous, which is bad for a governor who wants to be seen as a right wing savior. Sobisch feels the need to crack down now, because the longer he waits, the more powerful Zanon becomes.”

At a press conference held by Zanon workers regarding the kidnapping, Alejandro Lopez, the general secretary of Neuquen ceramic workers, said, “The police have not helped Zanon…nothing goes on in Neuquen without the consent of the local government.”

“Neuquen is not an island,” Lopez continued. “What happened there has happened elsewhere. Subway workers (a strong union group which recently went on a city wide strike) have been threatened and are under constant surveillance. Student groups have also been threatened.”

Hundreds of people were in attendance at the press conference, which was held in the worker-run Hotel Bauen in Buenos Aires. The mood at the conference was somber. The memory of the dictatorship’s killings and torture still weighs heavy in the hearts and minds of Argentines. This kidnapping was a harsh reminder that after years of fighting against such horrendous acts, they still do occur.

Hebe Bonafini is a member of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women whose sons and daughters were “disappeared” during the military dictatorship. For decades the women have been fighting for social justice, human rights and answers regarding the whereabouts of their children. “We cannot permit this to happen,” Bonafini said, referring the kidnapping. “The government needs to intervene in this now. I called the Ministry of the Interior and he knows all about this. He just needs to do something.”

“Kirchner and Sobisch are enemies,” Magnani said. “Kirchner wants to be the leftist leader and Sobisch wants to be on the right. One of Kirchner’s flags is human rights. Now with this kidnapping and the continued threats, Kirchner shouldn’t have any excuse to not do something about this.”

Protests regarding the kidnapping and intimidation have taken place in Neuquen and Buenos Aires and various political, human rights, student and activist groups have gathered in solidarity to fight for justice and to prevent such brutal acts from happening again.

To sign a petition in support of Zanon workers, go to www.petitiononline.com/zanon/petition/html For more information on Zanon check out: www.labase.org.

The People’s Bank: Microcredit in Mendoza, Argentina

by Benjamin Dangl

3/6/05

“Without micro-credit, poor people would not be able to participate in globalization. The big question that everyone asks is, yes or no to globalization. For me, this isn’t the question. The real question is a good globalization versus a bad globalization.”

Such was the perspective of Mohammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who invented The Grameen Bank, or The Poor People’s Bank. This bank involves lending small amounts of money to economically challenged people who want to start up their own community projects or businesses. The transaction is based on trust and word of mouth; there are no signatures or paper work. The idea is to infuse confidence into the lending process and empower the borrower.

Yunus developed this lending process after observing that poor families, especially women, could not receive credit by using the traditional financial banking system. He realized that many poor people were living in a viscous cycle that would not allow them to escape from poverty. Many were creative and had a huge capacity to work and produce, but because of their poverty and a lack of credit, they were unable to rise above their situation.

The loans had very low interest rates (2%) and were for, as Yunus explained, “the poorest of the poor.” He believed that the desperation of these people was so great that when they had any opportunity, they would make the most of it. The system was highly successful in his country and later spread internationally. It is now practiced in Africa, Central America, Asia and the Caribbean.

When Nestor Kirchner became the president of Argentina, his administration began a lending program based on this system. Pupi Palero and Fernando Mastrantonio work as representatives of this bank in a poor neighborhood on the edge of Mendoza, a city with a population of roughly one million in western Argentina.

“Major financial institutions are based on a lack of confidence,” said Palero. “In order to get a loan you have to have documents about your house, your property and sign everything. The loan system we’re working with is based on confidence.”

In Mendoza’s Poor People’s Bank, when people want to borrow money, they have to create a group of five people who promise among themselves that they will pay the loan back. After the group is formed, they meet with Pupi and Fernando once a week for a month until the loan is given out. During this time, the members discuss how they will carry out their projects. It is also a time for the people in the group to get to know each other.

“This system gives the people in the neighborhood the power to decide what needs to be done with the money. It is organizing from the bottom-up; they know what needs to be done because they live in the neighborhood and know the community,” Palero explained. “We never say no to a project. If it needs more work, we give advice, but we never say no.”

The amount of the loan starts out at 300 pesos, which is roughly 100 US dollars, and the loan is paid back in twenty-four weekly installments. If the loan is paid back in time and the project goes well, more money is lent after that. Projects often include starting up small businesses or improving the ones already existing. Some people in the groups were starting kiosks; others made clothing, another baked bread and sold it to other women who then distributed it at their kiosk.

Barrio Favorito

I accompanied Pupi and Fernando on a visit to a poor neighborhood in Mendoza called Barrio Favorito. Many of the houses in the neighborhood were shack-like and densely packed into a labyrinth of narrow, garbage strewn paths and roads. “The land these houses are on was taken over roughly twenty years ago, and still no one pays rent to live on it. The electricity is all pirated, but the water and gas is paid for,” Palero explained.

All of the groups they have worked with so far have been women. She attributed this to a variety of factors. “Nearly half of the women we work with are single mothers, and they have to look out for their children, so they are thinking about the long term more than men and often they are better administrators.”

The group we met with called themselves, Las Mudas, or The Deaf People. The name is a joke because they all talk constantly. When Palero handed out the money, everyone began cheering and clapping. It was the culmination of weeks of work, meetings and details.

As one of Las Mudas explained, “I have two kids, no husband and I have to pay someone to watch my kids. I also have to work and study because I went back to school. I receive a subsidy from the government, but it is not enough to live on.”

“More than the commercial and economic success of the person, the best part about this work is reinforcing social connections and dignity,” Palero explained. “A person without work, who is living off government subsidies, loses dignity. We are helping to rescue the dignity and the pride of someone who realizes they can work again. This project also organizes neighbors and helps them get to know one another. It is hard to find good groups because of individualism - capitalism promotes cultural individualism. People have lost confidence in their neighbor. The idea with this project is to recuperate the confidence in the other.”