The five pandemics that plague the Ass of the World. By María Galindo at Mujeres Creando/ Bolivia. translation TheFreeOnline shared with thanks
original en castellano más abajo
In another provocative and essential text, the Bolivian activist María Galindo proposes to think and act on 5 emergencies that, she says, cannot be justified by the advance of the coronavirus: fascism, colonization, corruption and state neglect, male violence and hunger .
How each of these other “pandemics” plague the Latin American countries that she baptizes “Culo del Mundo (The essof the world)”, “in the ambiguous sense of a place of pleasure and contempt at the same time.”
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Fear and hunger as a control formula; financial loans as a method of colonization; the ancestral views of health, closer to health care; the role of non-institutional popular ‘pots’ (communal funds) managed by women; the question of whether the exits are going to come from the broken and corrupt states; sexist violence, care crisis and the phrase of George Floyd translated by Galindo: «In the center of the pandemic the movement I CANNOT BREATHE is born, which in Andean code means.. I Can Take NO MORE ».
By María Galindo, life-long inhabitant of the abnormality. Women Creating / Bolivia.
Grateful for the critical reading of Claudia Acuña and the edition of Helen Álvarez.
La Paz, Bolivia.
In this part of the world from where I write, it is urgent to say that we are not facing one pandemic but five, and at the same time. Or, if you prefer, to a pandemic then multiple layers, attached to each other, where the visible and external layer is that of the coronavirus. That layer functions as the obvious surface behind which the five pandemics hide and legitimize themselves, namely:
1) The fascism pandemic that affects democratic structures and freedoms and that mobilizes all the prejudices around the disease, contagion and the “protection” of the population.
2) The colonial pandemic that affects the North / South relations, and the relations with the south of the world present in all societies, the relation with the knowledge and management of the disease and the over-indebtedness of the entire region for the intensification of a more severe global colonial debt contract.
3) The pandemic of corruption and state apathy.
4) The pandemic of sexist violence that directly affects the place of women and the care crisis.
5) The pandemic of pandemics, which is that of hunger.
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