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The United Nations quietly released a report in March exposing an array of human rights abuses associated with a growing mercenary industry recruiting large numbers from Latin American countries.

I wasn’t bothered the first time I saw my mother go through the suitcase of a maid that was leaving. “Suitcase” is perhaps an overstatement for the bunch of rags the woman carried in her hand. At eight years old, I peeked at the exchange from behind a couch. The maid slowly took out her belongings one by one: shirts, pajamas, underwear. My mom looked at me, saying, “She could be taking something.” Three women in a small room and an act of humiliation that still weighs on me: my own mother against the weakest person imaginable, a pregnant maid, who was leaving for good.

These days it seems journalists have become less popular than lawyers. The widespread perception of journalism is that it is a field full of pedantic windbags and hacks with hidden agendas. For anyone who might be looking for evidence there is such a thing as a journalist with something mind-expanding to say, whose work is potentially as life-changing as a great film or novel, I recommend Ryszard Kapuscinski. His books might serve to dissuade journalist-haters from their blanket dismissal of our kind, the scribbling tribe. 

Throughout the 1990s, the Bolivian women’s movement was ideologically polarized between a liberal, NGO-based “gender technocracy” and the anarcha-feminism embodied in the Mujeres Creando (Women Creating) movement. Between them stood the great majority of the country’s female population—a huge contingent of women of indigenous descent living in a colonized condition. Neither the technocratic nor the anarchist tendency considered them the subject of political representation.