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.

Those of you who have taken the tour will recognize many of the interviewees including the journalist and freedom fighter Vasodevan Nampoothiri, Dr. R. Krishna Kumar, a pediatric cardiologist; newspaper editor S. Radhakrishnan, coordinating editor of The Mangalam Daily; Professor G.S. Jayasree of Kerala University, publisher of a journal of women’s studies, Samyukta; and Sri Marthanda Varma, Maharajah of Travancore. Gods’ Own Country (Kerala) is one of five chapters of Pax Ethnica, describing societies where people of various ethnicities and religions live in peace. In the book the authors question whether there actually are such places, and if so why haven’t we heard more about them, and what explains their success.

Reality Tours Participants and Community, Kerala India

To answer these questions, Meyer and Brysac undertook a two-year exploration of oases of civility, places notable for minimal violence, rising life-expectancy, high literacy, and pragmatic compromises on cultural rights. Beyond the Indian state of Kerala, they also explored the Russian republic of Tatarstan, Marseille in France and Flensburg, Germany, and the borough of Queens, New York. Through scores of interviews, they document ways and means that have proven successful in defusing ethnic tensions. This path-breaking book elegantly blends political history, sociology, anthropology, and journalism, to suggest realistic options for peace.

We extend our congratulations to Meyer and Brysac on your new publication and thank you for traveling with Reality Tours to Kerala! See praise and reviews for Pax Ethnica or sample their blog for the Pulitizer Center for Crisis reporting.

Travel to Kerala with Global Exchange: If you would like to explore our trip to Kerala, visit our website for information, photos and ways to learn more.