María Galindo (1964) does not like being defined as a pioneer of feminism, because she considers that statements like this are made from a Eurocentric perspective. However, the feminist movement cannot be understood without her or, at least, without Mujeres Creando (Women Creating), an anarchist, feminist and self-managed organization created in 1992.
When asked where her interest in human rights comes from, María does not hesitate: “In Bolivia you notice social injustices from a very young age. You notice them when you go to buy bread or with any act of daily life. The percentage of people who live on charity is very high. There are also children who work and young people who live in poverty… Therefore, my relationship with the need for justice is not extraordinary and, in fact, it could have happened to anyone.”
In this context, Galindo began to develop as a defender who fights for justice as a minor, at only 17 years old. As she herself explains, it did not take long for her to “get into trouble” and that is when her repression began. “In the end they ended up persecuting me and I had to go live in a nunnery to protect my life. I, who am an atheist and a lesbian!” When the time came when not even the convent was a safe place, the Catholic Church helped her flee the country to the Vatican. There, María entered another convent and began to study theology, philosophy, psychology… a little bit of everything. She lived in Rome for five years and it was then that María Galindo encountered a reality that would accompany her all her life: that of fellow European feminists who treated her with “racism, contempt and discrimination”. This marked her forever: “My first contact with European feminism was disastrous, almost traumatic. I saw clearly that they had conceived it only for them, their feminism. They believed that I could not understand it, as an inferior and elementary being. It really annoyed me, all of it”. María understood that racism is not only about issues such as skin color. “I realized that it was a much more complex concept,” she explains. She realized that most of the European feminism of the time was not only racist, but also elitist.
She coined the concept of “intuitive feminism,” to refer to a type of existential movement. “I was able to read a lot about feminism during my academic training, but in a way I already had it inside me.” María defends a popular feminism that changes and overthrows patriarchal structures and generates ruptures.
Return to Bolivia and Mujeres Creando
After working for a few years in Germany, María Galindo decided to return to Bolivia, where in 1992 she co-founded Mujeres Creando,, a feminist, anarchist and self-managed collective with several lines of work; a “long-term social laboratory” that seeks to generate an effective impact on society in the field of utopian social struggles. It is a space for the production of pioneering thought both in Bolivia and in the rest of Latin America.
The defender highlights the importance it had for her to go back to her country of origin: “To me, migration seems very respectable, but I think a discourse of the European dream and the American dream has been set up that is now just beginning to collapse.” María assures that outside her country it would have been impossible for her to create the independent autonomous feminism of Mujeres Creando. “In Europe, that would not have been possible, because they would have overwhelmed us with trials. The level of discipline in European societies prevents you from moving and, if you are a migrant, it is even worse. You end up becoming a city rat that serves the Europeans, to make them feel good about themselves and that is all. When you are a migrant, you cannot do politics, because you feel panic. I would never have achieved anything if I had stayed in Italy, Spain or Germany. You live under extreme disciplinary control, without even being aware of it. You are not aware of the extreme levels of oppression you live with. It is oppression through control. You live in extreme fear,” she says.
Today, Galindo, who is one of the most famous personalities in Bolivia, not only continues with Mujeres Creando, but also has a radio program called Radio Deseo (Desire Radio).
Next August, general elections will be held in Bolivia. These elections will be marked by a deep political crisis in the Andean country and by the struggle for power between President Luis Arce and former President Evo Morales. Until just a few days ago, both belonged to the same party, the Movement for Socialism (MAS), founded by Morales, who came to the presidency in 2006. However, everything changed on February 28 when the former president resigned from the party, which had been immersed in a deep internal crisis for some time. In the August elections, Evo Morales will run for the Frente Para la Victoria (FPV) party, Front for Victory, although, according to the law, he cannot run, since the limit for re-election is two terms. The country’s Electoral Board has already informed Morales that he cannot run again in the electoral call. In addition, the once popular indigenous president is now embroiled in a series of scandals, including allegations of child abuse. There is currently an arrest warrant out for him.
As is happening everywhere, an attack by the far right is expected, with a neocolonial and extractivist agenda. “There is a danger (about the power of the far right); in addition, there is a so-called left that has no proposals or initiatives, and is divided and discredited by high levels of corruption and inefficiency,” she explains.
That is not quite true and, in fact, what you say reflects a European vision. In Europe they believe that feminism arrived by boat from north to south and that feminist movements, in this case in Bolivia, began in the 90s, but this is not the case; neither in Bolivia, nor in the rest of the continent. What is foundational about Mujeres Creando is the criticism of what already existed. I consider that we generated a foundational movement in terms of breaking with some postulates, through various theoretical and political elements of feminisms that already existed. Before the 90s there was a broad feminist movement in many of our countries. In Bolivia, when Mujeres Creandowas created, NGOs were already promoting what I call “gender technocracy”. The leaders of those NGOs recognized themselves as feminists and, even so, developed a proposal for gender technocracy linked to the neoliberal model. We, on the other hand, proposed an anti-neoliberal model that questioned the categories and parameters with which they were working. This not only happened in Bolivia, but also occurred throughout the continent.
For us, autonomy of thought is fundamental; that is, the ability to read our social and political context from our perspective. NGOs have tried to make us people in the South mere operators of a colonial point of view; reproducers of this perspective. And this has been a mistake. First, because the concept of development is itself the product of a capitalist and Western mindset that wants to install the model of the capitalist and global northern societies in the South. This analysis is therefore of no use to us, neither to understand the North, nor to understand the South. Secondly, gender technocracy has had a lot to do with indebtedness and over-indebtedness, especially that of the poorest women: the entire area of poverty has been worked from the logic of over-indebtedness. The poorest women in the world, including Bolivians, pay at best 36% annual interest on debts ranging from 800 to 7,000 euros. On the other hand, billionaires pay at most 5% annual interest. The upper professional middle class takes out loans for no more than 5% annual interest. Therefore, microcredit is a suicidal over-indebtedness that allows large sectors (such as traders, seamstresses and women who provide different services in the cities) to move money to formal banking, without ever having the savings capacity that would allow women to play a role in changing the place they occupy in society. In this context, many NGOs and financial institutions capture concessional loans that have a 10-year grace period and very low interest rates. These credits become usurious and the ill-named development cooperation is patrimonialized, which turns poverty into big business. In addition, the debt collection techniques are violent and produce a great breakdown of the social fabric and the violation of human rights.
I speak from the South. My speech is surprising because I am very critical of the 2030 Agenda, born in the middle of the United Nations, and which has created a base of categories and a basic discourse for feminist movements, for LGTBIQ+ movements and for indigenous movements. My criticism has nothing to do with the Trumpist criticism, because my criticism comes from “domestication”. There is a lot of technocracy that benefits from this agenda. On the other hand, this agenda does not present an interesting horizon with which we can seduce society. I believe that we must leave this agenda in order to emancipate ourselves from it. What has happened? Well, now Trump is back, he has turned the agenda upside down and wants to destroy it. And now, supposedly, we have to defend it again. But what Trump has done is leave large sectors without a discourse. At Mujeres Creando, for example, we do not tackle the discourse on rights, inclusion or identity issues.
We are talking about a phenomenon of great spectrum that aims to generate riots in all countries. I think we are facing a long-awaited situation; and yes, the masks are falling. There was a fiction that spoke of rights and there was also a very basic agenda, which was that of the United Nations. Despite everything, what is happening right now represents a challenge because it is managing to seduce many social sectors. This new agenda has its origin in the extremist oligarchic elites who seduce through networks, which are not social but business and transnational. To all this, we must add the failure of the left.
I am a woman who is critical of Maduro and who has suffered under the government of Evo Morales. Specifically, I have had four trials that I have won, which aimed to block my political activism. In this sense, it is important to mention that our activism is not merely social, but also political. To be able to understand this, we need to redefine what politics is. I do politics. When I make art, I am doing politics; when I do feminism,
I am doing politics; when I write a book, I am doing politics; when I carry out an action in the street, I am doing politics and I am demanding or building a political ideology different from the ideology to which we have been subjected. We had a liberal democracy of rubbish that is is being reappropriated by the extremist oligarchy. They do not need to become dictators because they have the possibility of controlling a liberal democracy of rubbish in terms of marketing and not in terms of political discussion. The option that we and our fellow citizens have on a planetary scale is to bring politics into the realm of politics and take it out of the realm of marketing and filthy liberal democracy.
During the last elections for Ombudsman, I received very strong pressure from Bolivian society. In the polls, 60% of the nation’s population requested my candidacy. I was very clear that liberal democracy would not allow me to do so, that the institution would clamp me down and destroy me. I believe in collective work; not in the individual; but I also do not believe that there is a contradiction between the collective and the individual. In any case, a rally was held to request my candidacy and it was there that I explained the reasons why I would not run. For now, I stand by what I decided. Now people are asking me to run for president. I could do it, but in a playful way, to take advantage of the platform and dismantle the myths of what it means to be a candidate. I haven’t decided yet, though. What you’re posing to me is a contradiction that doesn’t just present itself to me as María Galindo, but it’s a permanent dilemma.
I’m an anarchist and feminist and on my radio show I receive about 400 WhatsApps a day: my radio agenda is decided by the people and I choose the topics. People ask me for things and I go to the institutions to negotiate them. I go there to complain; and that’s what my show is about. I do it almost every day. What I offer on my show is a microscopic analysis. We never deal with structural issues because I believe that society is tired of them, of big speeches. In Bolivia, we cannot currently speak of a Bolivian proletariat. We are talking about people who are at subsistence levels. I am interested in the great masses and that is why I have always opposed exquisite feminism. I am not interested in debating with academia; that is why I always speak of an “intuitive feminism”, of the street. What I want is for the ideas I propose to be understood and absorbed en masse by people who live at subsistence levels. In short, my work goes beyond the framework of what any institution can give me. What do I mean by that? Well, in this moment of paradigm shift, the institution is less powerful and factual than we think. There is a self-fiction of power in the State. As for Bolivia, the global economic model is one of patriarchal extractivist colonialism. Do you think that if I were president of Bolivi a, a tomorrow I would be able to settle A, B or C about the colonial, patriarchal, capitalist and extractivist framework? My role outside the institution is much more powerful; and the power of the critical mass and social struggle is a gigantic force.
