Category: Bolivia

In another provocative and essential text, the Bolivian activist María Galindo proposes to think through and act on 5 emergencies that, she says, cannot be justified by the advance of the coronavirus: fascism, colonisation, corruption and state indifference, male violence and hunger; how each of these other “pandemics” plague the Latin American countries that she baptizes Culo del Mundo/Ass of the World, “in the ambiguous sense of a place of pleasure and contempt at the same time.” Fear and hunger as means of control; financial loans as a method of colonisation; the ancestral views of health, closer to people than formal health care; the role of non-institutional, popular kitchens, managed by women; the question of whether the ways out are going to come from broken and corrupt states; sexist violence, the crisis of care and George Floyd’s phrase translated by Galindo: “In the center of the pandemic the movement I CANNOT BREATHE is born, which in Andean code means I CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE.”