Sergio Ciancaglini de La Vaca

Today we continue an interview with Sergio Ciancaglini, from La Vaca cooperative.  For the past decade Global Exchange Reality Tours have included La Vaca on our rich educational itineraries. Learn about the work and mission of La Vaca during this interview conducted by our summer assistant Kathleen Reynolds.

Kathleen: What has been your experience with groups that have come from Global Exchange?

Sergio: My experience with the people who have come has been very exciting. I noted that there had been very good communication because Delia Marx was always there doing very good translation. This allowed me to explain things, that in English I could not. The experience has been very good. There have been many people with an attitude that is very interested in living new experiences and I think these experiences are very beautiful.

Group members enjoying the Iguazu Falls

In terms of improving the experiences, I think in these places and with these people, having these types of encounters provide a person with the key to understanding this very important phenomenon. It is like when you go to a museum and see a piece of fabric that has a particular color, but you don’t know it until you see it and read the explanations. You come to better understand what you are seeing and see the value in something as if it were new. These experiences are new and original experiences and that’s why the people of Global Exchange come. The travelers were interested in these types of experiences that we try to replicate as journalists. They are new, original experiences from the point of view of human rights, the problem with the environment, the problem with production, but also from the point of citizenship and democracy. For me these new expressions that are portals to the future. Where citizens assemble and meet and discuss how they as citizens can preserve the environment; to discuss their plan of action so that the mining or petroleum companies don’t bombard the mountains, so that they don’t cut down the forests, to defend their life – this is democracy in a different way. No longer is it democracy like the one we know as a representative system, but rather, people taking on the responsibility of their own destiny and peacefully so. At the same time, they are intervening to be heard, but also taking into account how they are expressing themselves in a concrete place where the things are happening. For me, this is a new phenomenon. Twenty years ago, Mr. Francis Fukuyama said, that, ‘we are in the end of history’ and today we are seeing we aren’t. History continues with the possibility to democratize democracy.

Visiting a School in Buenos Aires

After the economic recession happened here in the United Sates, social movements have been forming and people are mobilizing and coming together to reform society, to create a new system.

Kathleen: After the crisis happened in Argentina and people mobilized together to create a new system of work like the workers taking over the factories, what recommendations could you give the people here in the US to mobilize and promote real democracy from a grass roots level?

Sergio: Yes, we just published the latest version of the MU.  Claudia Acuña, is a member here in the cooperative and did a great report in the latest version MU, and she was in New York talking on exactly this topic you’re talking about. This new movement of people in the streets, the problems with people getting evicted from their homes…the report will talk about this. It is in the current edition of MU magazine.

Kathleen: In the line of work in defending human rights, how can International Solidarity groups support the social movements of Argentina and South America?

Sergio: I think that these movements or experiences that happen with La Vaca itself are experiences that have already existed for many years and are going to continue existing. There are people who do their work looking for resources, looking for money. We do what we do, because we love our work and it gives us much pleasure to do it. In terms of determining what help that could be utilized for the movements in terms of resources, etc,… it is always important that this be determined with the greater aim that the movements continue doing what they are doing. I want to tell you this, for example, I know there are many international campaigns on different topics. It seems like there is a lot of money floating around in foundations and different institutions to promote issues. In our case, we are going to continue working on the topics of the environment, human rights, citizenship, communication, freedom and equality. They are topics that to us are central for the present and future. Those who want to help us and/or support these types of processes can always help us, but at the same time understanding that the most important is that these projects and productions continue maintaining autonomy of work and diffusion.

As I am very old, I realize that we are in the presence of a birth of, it seems to me, a new type of paradigm of social intervention, of political intervention. It is a new paradigm of thinking and new paradigms of action. It is exciting to be seeing how this exists and it is very important that it be able to flourish and I would say grow. As I said before, it is my intuition that we are being shown the paths of what is to come in the future.

For us, these experiences, this moment are very beautiful. It is an opportunity to always feel that what one is doing is having impact and is creating networks of new concepts for thinking about situations in our world. For us, our door will always be open for you.
Thank you Sergio for the years of effort and energy that you have put into organizing La Vaca and welcoming our Reality Tours delegates to La Vaca and Argentina!  Next week we will delve further into the power of those exchanges.

TAKE ACTION!
Experience for yourself: Join our “Building Economic Justice from Below” trip next March  and learn more about the 200 ‘recovered’ co-operative factories in Argentina.

Sergio Ciancaglini de La Vaca

Today we feature an interview with Sergio Ciancaglini, from La Vaca cooperative.  For the past decade Global Exchange Reality Tours have included La Vaca on our rich educational itineraries. Learn about the work and mission of La Vaca in this two part interview series conducted by our summer assistant Kathleen Reynolds.

Kathleen: Perhaps we can begin with a brief history of how La Vaca began and your work with La Vaca?

Sergio: La Vaca is a work cooperative that was born in the year 2001, which was a time of much crisis in Argentina where money disappeared and there were lots of social movements that had to take responsibility of their own life. They had to take on the responsibility to invent work and survival. In this year 2001, is when the La Vaca began as an information agency through Internet – it was one the first of its kind in Argentina that tried to reflect this new universe of actions we saw in large quantities of social experiences. From that moment, for example, we published on the Internet our reporting, our articles and later we began to work on books.

Our first book was, Sin Patron.  Sin Patron is about the recuperated factories in Argentina and it is available in the US. We presented it in Counter Union in New York with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis. It is book that is written originally in Castellano Spanish by us, but later more versions were printed in English in the US, Italian and later in Portuguese in Brazil. We then wrote seven more books and the latest one is Argentina Originara. It is a book about native peoples of Argentina. With the passing of time, we started a newspaper, a monthly magazine called MU, which is a magazine published every month that we started five and half years ago. Out of the roots of the work we do, each piece of work gives us a new idea. From the work we had been doing, it occurred to us to do a radio program. You can listen to it via Internet at www.lavaca.org. It is a radio program that is broadcasted on 109 radios throughout Argentina. It is broadcasted through all university, community and local radio stations throughout the country.

It is a program created as an alternative form of social media and it is important to say that like many other commercial radio stations, this radio program also reaches all areas of the country. We do training courses for department chairs universities and high schools on social autonomy and we have a cultural center that is also a bar called MU Punto Encuentro Buenos Aires where there are conferences and sell leading independent editorial books. Here in Argentina, we drink el mate, our typical drink. Here it is made with herbs from cooperatives that are not sold in traditional supermarkets. The entire project of La Vaca is work of communication, of culture, of cooperativism and social economics.

Kathleen: What is the work you do in the cooperative and how did you begin to work with La Vaca?

Sergio: I have been a journalist for many years. I have always worked on the topics of human rights. For example, I covered the trials on the military junta in 1985, which was the first time in the democracy it was possible to try people who had raped, tortured and killed during the dictatorship. I have always worked with the most important media in Argentina for example, the newspaper Diaro Clarín, the newspaper la Razón and the newspaper Página Doce,… I worked as editor and reactor. In the year 2001, the experience of La Vaca began with all the people who were around me and so I joined. Now I work writing many articles of the monthly MU magazine. At the same time, I run the radio program that is broadcasted on 109 radios around the country and I am the President of the cooperative.

Thank you Sergio for the years of effort and energy that you have put into organizing La Vaca and welcoming our Reality Tours delegates to La Vaca and  Argentina!  Next week we will delve further into the power of those exchanges.

TAKE ACTION!

Experience for yourself: Join our “Building Economic Justice from Below” trip this November and learn more about the 200 ‘recovered’ co-operative factories in Argentina.

Delia and Delegates, 2003

In the second of a 2-part series, Reality Tours Argentina program officer Delia Marx shares with us in an interview conducted by our intern Kathleen Reynolds, her impressions on the enriching impacts of educational exchange. You can read Part 1 here.

 
Kathleen: Looking back, what inspired you to facilitate Reality Tours?

Delia: People are so willing to share, obviously their successes but also their struggles. The little things that are going on and there are many of them. After that first experience I was totally hooked. That was when I decided to do it as soon and as often as possible and I did!

Kathleen: If you were to highlight a particular moment as a RT Leader what would that be?

Delia: I think people worry about having different views on things. Somehow I pride myself on not telling people what’s going on. I’m just an intermediate. I’m just a translator. We go straight to the source. We talk to people. I think that the experience is very transformational. I don’t give my point of view, aside from the fact that I create the program. I select what we are doing based on what we can learn.

I remember one comment that I was really struck by. It was with an assembly organization that makes decisions by consensus, so you have to get everybody on board before you go ahead with anything.  A man said to me, yes it was a long process, people were forever discussing and never coming to an agreement. It took a long time to trust one another but once there was trust, everything went much more smoothly.

“Haciendo Caras” at a Community Arts Project, 2003

One of the highlights of our tours is a visit with the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, grandparents who are still looking for their ‘disappeared’ grandchildren. There are several stories of success in finding these children whose identities were stolen. Can you imagine? These children sometimes were ‘adopted’ by the torturers of their parents! The case of the Abuelas was instrumental in the successful research for identification of blood relationship with a missing generation in between. Normally you can establish fatherhood of a child through blood analysis, but here the parents were missing and the research needed to be done to ascertain relationship through the blood of the grandparents instead. Now the Abuelas are dying. They are mostly in their 80′s but they created a blood bank for the future! One ‘Abuela’ that has recovered her grandson fairly recently said: “I got a new grandson, only that he is 30 years old!”

Kathleen:  What does make the difference, why do people choose to travel to Argentina with Global Exchange Reality Tours?

The Beautiful Iguazu Falls

Delia: First of all a big portion of the cost of a Reality Tour program is airfare. Some people take advantage of being there already and they combine some other tour agenda in Argentina of which there are many. So keep in mind that you can stay a few days before or after the tour and visit the scenic parts of Argentina, we could go on and on about that but the portion of the Reality Tour is what as the name says “Reality”. The cost of the tour also includes contributions to the organizations we visit. This enhances the sense of participation on the part of the travelers and supports the work the organizations are doing. Your vacation dollars are working for a good cause. What brings you closer to the people is the direct connection to people. You are there sitting with them and you’re listening. Listening to the stories and listening to their experience and most fortunately you’re learning from them.

We are now witness to the global economic crisis in the United States and in Europe and in many other places in the world, something that may be new to many of us. Argentineans found many of their solutions, many of their ways out. People come to the understanding that there are alternatives that can be implemented here and now without waiting for somebody else to come and rescue us. Finding that in your community, in your peers with the people that surround you is very enriching.

Thank you Delia for the years of effort and energy that you have put into organizing and facilitating our Reality Tours to Argentina.

TAKE ACTION!

Experience for yourself: Join our “Building Economic Justice from Below” trip this November and experience Argentina first-hand.

Delia and Delegates in Argentina

In the first of a two part series, Delia shares with us in an interview conducted by our intern Kathleen Reynolds, the significance of the 2001 financial crisis and what lessons it provides for us today.

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Kathleen: Can you explain the significance of the 2001 financial crisis in Argentina?  Grassroots worker-run cooperatives radically changed the debate. How did they shift the focus from the cost of labor to the cost of owners?

Recuperated Factories, “of the People”, 2003

Delia: Well I’m sure you are aware that in the end of 2001 the whole economy in Argentina collapsed. It was a true collapse in the sense that nothing was working. There was literally no more money. There was no pay, there were only empty promises. Different provinces in Argentina which are like states here (in the U.S.) started to make their own currency. There was no credit for individuals or for businesses.

Business works on credit. There was no credit to be had. Nothing. The banks literally closed. These are banks like Citibank, Bank of Boston… Supposedly they all had the backing of the United States, not so. When the time came they simply closed and that was devastating for everybody. It was impossible to do anything so people took to the streets!

At that point there was a lot of political turmoil. I think there were four central governments that wanted to default. It was a total collapse. People could not even withdraw their own money from the bank because the banks were all closed. Some people were banging literally with hammers, banging on the closed doors of the banks. Everybody took to the streets. People were trying to get anything that they could get their hands on to make noise, pots and pans, banging with their hands, just making noise and saying the words everybody needs to go!  Everybody meant everybody politically.

Exchanging with Community Organizations

When people realized that their place of work wouldn’t even give them the promise of payment they began to rise up. Bankruptcy was widespread. Workers recognized that they were not going to be able to do anything to feed their families. That’s when they began to realize that they needed to find a solution for themselves.

The solution did not depend on the big picture, not on the politicians, the rules, the laws or the economic situation. It was a local issue. It was the smaller community that needed to come together. We had the movements and the assemblies, which were simply people that were meeting on the street corner trying to figure out how to help one another in the smallest sense of the neighborhood. They were called neighborhood assemblies and some of them organized broader markets in the work place.

Workers realized that they were still there, the machinery was still there, only the bosses were missing because they had declared bankruptcy. They were gone. So people decided to keep the shop open. And that’s when they started to do this movement that was later called recuperated factories, recuperated from bankruptcy.  But that wasn’t so easy because of the police of course. People were literally occupying their workplaces. The word “occupy” now has a different meaning.

In Argentina, people were simply saying ok we’re going to stay. We are not going to allow our bosses to take away the machinery to sell it out. We are going to keep and protect the machinery as well as the work place and we are going to keep it going. Of course at first they realized, wait a moment we don’t know anything about administration because the administration was in the hands of the bosses. That’s when the whole society somehow found a way to come together. Students from the university of economics came around and taught the workers how to keep the books and they realized that they could run this themselves. There’s no magic in management. We can manage ourselves. We can do it. And that’s when they decided, we can keep on going, and we really don’t need the bosses.

Cooperative Factory-Struggle, Work and Culture

The big advantage was that suddenly all of  the surplus that usually went to pay the higher salaries of the management was brought back into the factories as actual production. Now I think there are about 300 occupied factories still functioning.

Factory is not the proper word. It’s workplaces. (There are many different types of businesses;) cooperative hotels, clinics, and alll kinds of factories. For instance, one of them is a hotel where we stay with Reality Tours. We had the firsthand experience of seeing how it’s run. It’s a big hotel in the middle of town. Of course there was no guarantee but it all came together in a very positive way.

Some (groups) like La Vacca, the journalism cooperative that we work with, started to regroup. They began to form networks so that cooperatives could organize and buy from one another. One of the things I find very interesting is going back to visit some of these places, I can see the progress. It’s incredible to see how things evolved. In some instances people wanted to maintain a true horizontal management or decision-making process. Decisions are made by consensus. Other people decided that it was too time consuming and they selected representatives to form a commission. The commission would make day-to-day decisions, consulting only now and then with the full assembly.

They all have pros and cons. It’s very interesting to talk with different people about their experiences. For instance people who organized committees said that it was amazing how very soon afterwards there were marked differences.

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Thank you Delia for the years of effort and energy that you have put into organizing and facilitating our Reality Tours to Argentina! 

TAKE ACTION!

Experience for yourself: Join our “Building Economic Justice from Below” trip this November and learn more about the 200 ‘recovered’ co-operative factories in Argentina.