Seems a good idea to rob a bank to Rob Banks further.
Sounds Funny?
This is exactly what anti-capitalist campaigner Enric Durán borrowed €492,000 ($642,306) from 39 different financial entities with absolutely no hope or intention of paying it back. But—as you might expect from an anti-capitalist campaigner—he didn’t spend it all on diamond kitchen knives and luxury frisbees. Instead, he ploughed it into a number of unspecified anti-capitalist causes and spent the rest on Crisi, a free newspaper that detailed how he’d done what he did and urged others to do the same. ‘
In the absence of inaction by the Governments against the thieves of Corporate Sector,this seems to be best method.
Beat the system by being a part of it.
That’s what I always say to my son whenever he wants some things in the System is to be corrected.
”
VICE: Hey Enric, what exactly happened with your trial?
Enric Durán: The court accepted my lawyer’s resignation on the February 13th, then they told me I had to come to court again on the 18th, but I didn’t go to that. And now it’s not that clear if they can go on further with the case because I haven’t got a new lawyer, so it would be against my rights if they were to continue.
I see. Let’s go back to the start. You got into activism in 2000. What sparked your interest in the financial system?
Well, back then I was part of the anti-globalization movement. By 2005, I’d started reading about the energy crisis, which was related to the financial system. I realized that, not only was the system unwanted, but that it couldn’t keep going on as it was. That’s what sparked the idea of this act of disobedience—to retrieve money from banks and invest it in anti-capitalist projects.
In a way you anticipated the link between the financial system, politics, multinationals, and governments when it still wasn’t clear to a lot of people. What made you realize that it wasn’t only one part of the system failing, but a global thing encompassing all of those aspects?
It was in 2000, when we were fighting against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that we started realizing it was a global thing. What wasn’t clear to us was that the system would fail on its own. We thought we had to make it fail, we didn’t realize it would fall apart naturally.
Was taking out all those loans a demonstration of how you could take advantage of the system?
It was various things, but there were two main goals. One was to denounce the financial system as something unsustainable, and the second goal was to show that we can be disobedient, brave, and that we can empower ourselves. When I started with all of this I was inspired by historical characters like Gandhi, and I thought it was important to bring actions like those back to the 21st Century. We wanted to use the money for a project that could prove how methods other than capitalism were possible.
What was the day-to-day process of going to banks and asking for credit like?
It was between the summer of the 2005 and the spring of 2008—nearly three years. I learned about how the loaning system worked and the information banks relied on to grant them. I learned about the holes in the system and how to move around them. At first, I’d get one loan granted out of three requests, and by the end I was getting nine out of ten requests granted. For instance, one loophole in the system was that the Bank of Spain shared the loan information with other banks, but only for loans higher than €6,000 ($7,833). So I only asked for loans under that amount for two years, moving funds without having the Bank of Spain controlling my actions.
Did it get to the point where you thought, ‘Holy shit, I have a lot of money’? Or did you just invest it on the go?
The money was invested. I never had more than €50,000 ($65,275) at any one time. It was all spent on various projects.
You haven’t revealed any of the projects you invested the money in, but are you aware of any of them being subjected to legal action because of your investment?
Not at all. In fact, it’s pretty clear that banks weren’t interested in where the money had gone. There haven’t been any investigations and, as it was a political action, they only wanted to repress me, not the collective. They didn’t want to make it a bigger deal of it than it already was.
You published your own newspaper, Crisi. Why did you want to diffuse your message through that and not use the regular media channels?
I spent a long time figuring out how to get the story into the public domain. I wanted to get it out to as many people as possible, but I was worried about being repressed. So we decided to use some of the money to print the newspaper, and I think it was one of the best decisions we made. The media understood that this newspaper was being distributed on the street and they didn’t want to be left out of something that was being talked about, so publishing our own newspaper actually helped to get the message in the mainstream press.
http://m.vice.com/read/spains-robin-hood-prefers
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