Sophie Styles
Julieta
Ojeda is an active member of the anarcha-feminist collective Mujeres
Creando based in La Paz, Bolivia. Their activities include publishing,
direct action, and running a small cultural center. They are best
known for their graffiti, always signed Mujeres Creando.
SOPHIE
STYLES: How did you become active in Mujeres Creando?
JULIETA
OJEDA: The group has been going for ten years, but I got to know
them nine years ago through their activities at the university,
like murals and different actions. It was a completely new kind
of group. There was no talk about that kind of feminism at the time—a
militant, radical feminism, a feminism of the streets, of everyday
life. Of course the government was talking about the rights of women
on the radio and in the papers, and about certain laws for women,
but never about a feminism that engages you in any form of struggle
or politicized you. By contrast, the feminism of Mujeres Creando
was real and tangible.
By
the time I got involved in Mujeres Creando, I was realizing that
political activity does not only happen in political parties or
in organized groups; it happens as soon as you are conscious of
your actions and your decisions, an intuitive kind of feminism.
Within the university, there were a lot of groups on the left—Trotskyites,
Maoists, Guevarists—but none of them appealed to me or let
me feel as though I could be myself in those groups. It was very
different with Mujeres Creando. I think that through feminism, women
come to know themselves and each other, with all our potential,
our strengths, our weaknesses, and we discover a freedom that we
keep on developing.
How
would you describe Mujeres Creando?
When
we got together we said, We’re a group of women and we’re
a different kind of organization than the ones around us where the
revolutionary subject is the proletariat. We tried to demystify
this ideology. There are groups and sectors in society who are oppressed
and these are no less important. So with our starting point as women
and our identities as women, we can assert our own struggles and
fight against oppressions in society.
We
also recognized that we come from a particular social class, that
we have our own ethnic origins, that we are different ages, and
that we are part of society. In this sense, we don’t only struggle
for women’s rights or issues that affect women, but against
all types of oppression.
How
do you organize and make decisions?
Things
happen when somebody takes the initiative. We don’t consult
each other about everything we do, although there are things that
we each take responsibility for, such as working in specific areas.
For example, some of us organize at the university, others with
domestic workers, others with rural women.
If
there is an initiative that we all like and can all participate
in, then we get involved and help to organize it. For us, the important
thing is not to neutralize each other and that every woman makes
her own decisions and puts forward her initiatives, without feeling
inhibited.
What kind of
actions have you organized?
We
are street activists, we are creative women, but we are not artists
and we don’t want to become into an artistic elite. We take
up our right to create and to do new things. Creativity complements
our political practice. After we brought out our newspaper eight
years ago, we moved into graffiti and street actions, or creative
actions as we call them. The street for us is an important center
of political activity, because it allows us to interact with and
be in permanent contact with people. But our actions don’t
only take place in the streets, sometimes we occupy other spaces.
At
the beginning, we focused on the dictatorship. We mainly use symbols,
rather than being explicit. We also use theater: to symbolize blood,
we use red dye; for death, we use crosses; for joy, we share bread
and flowers with people. We’ve been doing these kinds of actions
for a long time. Two years ago we did a TV program called “Creando
Mujeres,” which covered the different issues our group works
on. We touched on the subject of the dictatorship, on NGOs, on work,
on the question of justice. For example, we did an action at the
Palace of Justice where we went in and filled the offices with rubbish.
We also touched on lesbianism, Barbies, racism, all of which we’ve
worked on.
What
was your involvement with the small debtors movement?
We
were working alongside the organization of debtors, which is a large
movement. We had to rethink the idea of creative actions because
we were working with a very large number of people who wanted to
get involved in peaceful protest. Later on it turned into something
violent out of sheer desperation and a whole host of reasons.
We
organized collective actions where everyone took part, women and
men. In one of them we painted a mural: the people took their shoes
off, put their feet into paint, and then they lifted each other
up so they could leave their footprints on the wall. The children
also put their hands into the paint and left their handprints.
This
symbolized the journey that these people had made. It symbolized
the harsh and difficult journey that these people had made. They
suffered a lot of repression as a movement. In another action, we
threw ourselves on the ground in front of the police so that we
wouldn’t be attacked. At the end, once an agreement was signed
that benefited the debtors, we organized a festival with flowers
and bread. The children began to share bread with everyone, a symbol
of the food of the poor, and of the poor who share what they have.
Give
us some background on the debtors’ bank occupation and your
involvement in this.
We
had been working very closely with the debtors. Their organization
was fundamentally made up of women, which is why we worked closely
together. We had openly denounced the abuse of micro-credit in Bolivia,
as there were very high interest rates and a lot of irregularities
in the charges. People’s debts had doubled and tripled. When
the group arrived in La Paz they were already asking for the forgiveness
of their debts.
We
soon realized that these people had been indebted to micro-credit
institutions for eight, nine, or ten years. They had been trying
to pay off their debts all this time, but they reached a point when
they couldn’t pay any more. They were bankrupt, they didn’t
have a penny left.
We
organized a range of activities with them, from actions to reflecting
on issues such as non-violent direct action. We took films along
to the place where they were staying in the university. We did courses
explaining what international institutions were financing the Bolivian
banks and financial entities. In a lot of cases they were misusing
aid-provided micro-credit.
The
debtors had been in La Paz for three months and all that time they
didn’t get a chance to sit down and be heard by the presidents
of the associations, of the banks, of the private funds, mutuals,
and NGOs. During this time, many of them fell ill and many had respiratory
infections as they had been tear-gassed a lot.
We
published a newspaper with them and sold it together, so that the
general public would revise their opinion of the debtors. A lot
of people were saying that they were good-for-nothings who just
didn’t want to pay their debts. But then people began to realize
that it wasn’t that simple and that in reality the financial
institutions were committing usury and extortion, cheating people
and exploiting their ignorance, making them sign contracts that
they didn’t understand.
These
people became really desperate. We were not involved in the action,
because we do not agree with using violence and we didn’t actually
know about it in advance. It was a group that decided to occupy
the Banking Supervisory Agency. We found out about the occupation
on the radio and immediately got involved, as we had done so much
work with them up to that point. One of our group went to the Supervisory
building to try and prevent a massacre from taking place, as the
police were ready to go in and start shooting. Another companera
joined the negotiating table. It was a very tense moment and Mujeres
Creando was able to get everyone to sit down together and in the
end an agreement was reached that benefited the people. They didn’t
get their debts canceled but a lot was put under scrutiny and the
Supervisory Agency began to look into what was happening with financial
institutions in relation to micro-credit. We managed to stop the
bailiffs from seizing people’s property for 100 days, from
July to October. In cases where they had complained of irregularities,
these were revised, and in cases where the women had paid out more
than they should have, this debt was cancelled. There were many
successes.
Now
they are organizing in their communities. Together we are going
to organize an international seminar on usury, on high interest
rates. This is a policy of capitalism, of neoliberalism. But these
are people who have no money and no resources and we need to find
a way in which micro-credit can benefit them rather than making
them poorer.
What
other kinds of actions have you organized against neoliberalism?
We’ve
also done actions against Coca-Cola and McDonalds, we’ve brought
out publications. We were one of the first organizations to denounce
the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in Bolivia. We have
promoted quite a lot about what had happened in Seattle, in Prague.
Do
you feel part of a global movement?
Yes,
I think so. Our aim is not to become the vanguard in any society.
We have our struggles and we propose the changes we want to society
and we try to provoke, but we don’t think we are the only ones
that are going to change society. We know that we’ll do it
with other organizations around the world and in Bolivia, and although
we disagree with many forms of organization, we know that it is
a common struggle. We also realize that we have to struggle where
we are, in our own society.
What
we want is to coordinate with other autonomous feminists around
the world. In 1998, we organized the first meeting of autonomous
feminists from Latin America and the Caribbean. In Latin American
there is a political split between the “gender technocrats,”
or institutional feminists who work within government or within
large NGOs, and the autonomous feminists. We were appointed as the
organizational commission for the first meeting of autonomous feminists
to deepen our reflection and debates. We put forward many alternatives,
as autonomous feminists from Latin America, and explored ways of
co-coordinating our struggles as women. We plan to organize coordinated
actions with other women and with other groups, such as anarchists
and ecologists.
We’ve
been in contact with Spanish companeras as well. There are also
things that feminist women from Europe, from the North, can be active
on, for example, on the question of funding, which comes to Latin
America in the name of women and is always mediated by big NGOs
and governments. This solidarity is helpful to women in Latin America
and helps to combat colonialism. There are things that we would
like women from the North to do in their own countries to help Latin
American women, for example, on immigration or xenophobia, not as
a form of charity, but as part of a joint struggle. Z
Sophie
Styles is a freelance writer and activist who recently attended
the People’s Global Action (PGA) meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
This interview is part of a collection of women’s stories of
grassroots resistance from around the world, due in July (contact
pga [email protected]).