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YES! Magazine Winter 2008: Liberate Your Space
Building Autonomy, One Co-op at a Time
by Michael Fox

It's a social movement and a housing cooperative. A massive self-help
program for the poor and a new way of life for thousands. With 20,000
member-families living in cooperatively owned homes in 400 communities
across the country, it is one of the largest and most radical housing
cooperative federations in the Americas.

The Uruguayan Federation of Housing for Mutual-Support Cooperatives
(FUCVAM) is also one of the most organized social movements in Uruguay.
Last March, Federation members led the demonstrations against President
George W. Bush's visit to the country, marching for five days to cover
the nearly 125 miles from the nation's capital, Montevideo, to the
presidential estate where the U.S. President met with his Uruguayan
counterpart, President Tabaré Vázquez.

The two concepts -- housing and political activism -- may not seem like
natural partners. But FUCVAM's principle of promoting autonomy in its
member organizations translates into broader social engagement.

The Cooperative Experience

Fabian Ramirez, 31, extends his hand to help us up the makeshift stairs
to the second floor of a nearly finished three-bedroom home.

Many co-op members had no prior building experience before they started
work on their homes, but everyone works together and puts in the same
number of hours. “If you know a little about construction, even better,”
Ramirez says. Whatever your background, “there's a job for everyone.”

Ramirez, his wife, and their young child are members of a housing
cooperative of 40 families in one of Montevideo's working-class barrios.
Like other Federation affiliates, they are building their homes with
their own hands. For the last 30 months, each family has put in over 20
hours a week on the construction, and their labor is finally paying off.

Ramirez proudly shows off the newly laid wooden floors, which they put
in themselves. He points out the window at a nearby cluster of
buildings, their roofs inlaid with pools of water which Ramirez says
will act as insulation against extreme temperatures, keeping the
buildings cool in the hot summer and warm in the chilly Uruguayan winter.

Although the co-op is just a month away from completion, Ramirez doesn't
yet know which home he and his family will live in; that will be decided
by lottery next month. The system is set up to ensure that everyone
works equally hard on every house.

Once they are done with the homes, co-op members plan to build a common
room and a daycare center for use, free of charge, by the cooperative
members.

The homes are owned by the cooperative, not by individuals or families,
but each family has the legal right to use their home. That right can be
passed down to future generations, or exchanged for the money and work
hours they put into the community, but it cannot be sold.

Cooperative members aren't just workers and residents. They are also
administrators and organizers. All decisions are made in democratic
weekly meetings that continue even after construction has finished.

The idea of cooperative housing might seem unusual elsewhere, but not
here in Uruguay. Ramirez lived in the same co-op since he was seven. Now
that he's starting his own family, he's building a home in the Housing &
Family Cooperative (COVIFAM), a cooperative not unlike the one he lived
in as a child. Both co-ops are members of FUCVAM, which is at the heart
of one of the most important, democratic, and autonomous housing
cooperative experiences in the Western Hemisphere.

Building a Movement

The cooperative housing movement got a start in Uruguay in reaction to a
growing housing crisis. Grassroots pressure resulted in the passage of
the 1968 National Housing Plan, which opened new housing opportunities
for Uruguayan citizens. The plan provided the legal framework for
cooperative ownership of property, and created the National Housing and
Urbanization Fund by taking 1 percent out of every Uruguayan paycheck,
with a mandate for employers to match the figure.

The new fund opened the door for some workers to get loans to purchase
their own homes. But with unsteady employment during difficult economic
times raising the threat of default, many Uruguayans risked losing their
newly-acquired homes and ending up right back where they started. The
answer: housing cooperatives, that could take out loans collectively,
minimizing the individual risk while building solidarity among members.

“Collective property functions as an umbrella under which members can
take cover in stormy weather,” says FUCVAM President Mario Fígoli
metaphorically. “If I lose my job, and for a few months I don't have the
funds to pay off my monthly share of the loan, . . . my fellow
cooperativistas will pay for me until I have a job again. Then I will
pay them back.”

FUCVAM was born less than two years after the passage of the Housing
Plan. It grew out of a well-organized Uruguayan labor movement and a
quickly growing cooperative movement, in order to help provide the means
for low-income, working-class families to acquire their own homes.

Each affiliated cooperative receives support from the Federation and a
technical advisory team. “No co-op has ever failed,” says Fígoli. “It is
not easy for a group of humans who have just met each other to develop a
project through autogestión, because we are taught to value
individualism. . . . But that is the richness of the housing cooperative
model, to transform the individual into a citizen.” (The term
“autogestión” has no direct English counterpart. It embodies
self-management through autonomous, grassroots, and democratic
decision-making.)

“We each come to the co-op for just one reason. We need housing,” says
Fígoli, who has himself been a resident of a Federation-affiliated
cooperative since the late 1970s. “But once we get involved in the
process, the dynamics of autogestión create a cultural change in people.”

The change is evident when you visit one of the cooperatives.

“Everyone here knows each other?” I ask as we wander through a large
FUCVAM-affiliated cooperative apartment complex of nearly 200 families
just down the street from COVIFAM.

“Of course,” says our guide, Vicente Addiego, who is well into his 70s
and has lived in a housing cooperative on the other side of town for
nearly 35 years. “They all have to meet frequently. They have to
administer all of this.”

A neighbor passes and waves hello. Someone else stops to help us with
directions. You get the feeling that they look out for each other.

We pass the gymnasium, recreation center, daycare center, common room,
library, sports fields and playgrounds. They are all built by the
residents, run by the residents, and free of charge to cooperative
members. Some larger cooperatives even have their own free health clinics.

Perhaps this habit of community sharing is why FUCVAM continues to be
one of the most active social movements in Uruguay.

Decades of Struggle

FUCVAM's political activism may seem risky for a group whose funding
depends almost entirely on the government. But Uruguay's housing loan
program has weathered political storms, in part because, as housing
activists point out, the loans are financed out of workers' pay.

The true autonomy of the Federation was put to the test only two years
after its founding, when Uruguay was thrust into a repressive 12-year
dictatorship. Tens of thousands were jailed and tortured, and FUCVAM was
not spared. Hundreds of Federation activists were persecuted, and the
government tried to outlaw co-op assemblies, while decreasing loans to
new co-ops and increasing interest rates from 2 percent to as high as 9
percent. In spite of the repression, FUCVAM´s members soon emerged as
the vanguard of the struggle against the dictatorship, as organizing
erupted throughout FUCVAM's tight-knit communities.

“You can shut the door on a union, but you can't kick 7,000 families out
of their homes,” says Fígoli with a smile.

After the fall of the dictatorship in 1984, FUCVAM faced government
threats to outlaw cooperative style ownership. In the 1990s, they
opposed a loan restructuring. The Federation is now conducting “a pay
strike,” with its affiliated cooperatives withholding repayment on all
outstanding loans. The strike is intended to force the government to
agree to restructure previous loans based on worker salaries and to
throw out the exorbitant interest rates imposed on Federation co-ops
during the dictatorship. As a result, according to Addiego, Uruguay's
current leftist government, Frente Amplio, is giving out only a pittance
of the loans to new co-ops compared to past governments.

Learning from the Past

Not everything is perfect at the Federation. Not every member likes
FUCVAM's political activism, and the Federation found that children were
resenting their cooperative because of the long hours of construction
and meetings in which their parents had to participate. As a result,
FUCVAM now encourages the whole family -- from the youngest child to the
oldest grandparent -- to get involved in their cooperative from the very
beginning, whether through helping out with construction, taking care of
younger children, or attending a daycare or adolescents' program. FUCVAM
has a training center where they hold workshops on social politics and
cooperative management, organization and administration for their
members. They have just recently launched a training program for
community teachers based on the teachings of Paulo Freire, author of The
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, who is best known for his groundbreaking work
on popular education to combat illiteracy.

“We believe our model is one of the many expressions of Paulo Freire´s
work” says Fígoli, “and that it is completely replicable anywhere in the
world.”

It would appear that Fígoli is not far off. With the support of the
Swedish Cooperative Center, FUCVAM is collaborating with grassroots
housing movements across the Americas. Representatives of the Federation
are currently in Venezuela to exchange experiences and expertise with
the Urban Land Committees. Throughout Central America, the Federation
has supported local struggles with workshops on FUCVAM's unique style of
cooperative housing. Elsewhere, such as in Bolivia, FUCVAM has helped
local groups to directly form their own housing cooperatives.

Addiego takes us across town to show us his cooperative, BANREP, where
an impressive 90 percent of the original 40 member families still live.

“When we got here, this was all sand,” he says pointing at the green
yard and thick trees in front of his house. His passion is contagious,
and we ask him to sum up his three and a half decades of cooperativism
with FUCVAM.

“It's not easy,” he answers quickly, “but it's worth it.”

Michael Fox wrote this article as part of Liberate Your Space, the
Winter 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Michael is a freelance journalist
based in South America. In 2006, he was a staff writer with
Venezuelanalysis (http://www.venezuelanalysis.com ) and a correspondent
with Free Speech Radio News.

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