Fasting while hungry

The interim president's final mandate: "Fast and pray with faith to overcome the pandemic." This request harks back to medieval times when prayer was the only path to divine salvation, while supposed sinners were punished. In an effort to prevent any "contagion," they were persecuted, humiliated, tortured, and burned at the stake. Thousands of women (labeled witches) at that time had the courage to denounce the hunger their children suffered, the exploitation they endured, and the excessive taxes they paid to the aristocracy and the rulers of the day. Let it be known that the stake deprived us of their wisdom, their knowledge of natural medicine, and other valuable insights.

The president's request comes after more than 40 days of lockdown, which has left families pleading and demanding to share a single loaf of bread. Just a few days ago, a young girl committed suicide from hunger in Montero. I wonder: what must a mother's pain be like when she sees her daughter take her own life, a daughter who felt crippling hunger pangs because she hadn't eaten in days?

This past weekend, President Jeanine Áñez's daughter, Carolina Ribera Áñez, was seen arriving in Roboré on a Bolivian Air Force plane to relax and unwind at the Aguas Calientes hot springs in that municipality. How many times has Carolina fasted? How many times has she felt hunger? Did she ever have bread to eat and stave off her rumbling stomach? Upon hearing of the FAB plane's landing, people, thinking it meant government aid was coming, went to the hotel where she was resting, but received no honest answer. How will Ms. Jeanine explain the use of an official plane for a pleasure trip? Will Minister Murillo face the same legal rigor he applies to the women with empty pots or to those who dare to publicly express their hunger? We remember his draconian measures against the people of Riberalta.

Madam Interim President, stop pretending. Your calls for prayer only remind us of inquisitorial times, of priests with crosses and swords who helped subdue and displace the true owners of this land. People don't need to fast; they need to eat what they need, and you have the obligation to guarantee their basic right to food and, consequently, their right to life.

The person writing these lines works at Casa de la Mujer (Women's House) and I can tell you that women arrive there with children who don't know how to feed them. They also receive requests for immediate help because the mothers refuse to watch their children die without doing anything. You could fast and pray peacefully, ignoring your children's hunger. Don't lie; if you are a mother, you know it as well as I do.

Another fact you seem unaware of is that in this diverse country, being undocumented is an expression of poverty, and living on the margins of towns or in the urban periphery is another facet of poverty. While you deploy your military to the streets—soldiers who never understood their role—those living on these margins are arrested like criminals simply for walking, believing they deserve their government assistance. So much confusion surrounding ineffective and discriminatory measures that fail to grasp that this is a plurinational and secular state.

For this reason, Casa de la Mujer, with small efforts, distributed food to the Community Promoters and to the women who fulfill the role of mother and father to their children, and it does not do so to replace their work, nor with a welfare-oriented purpose, it is an act of fierce solidarity in the face of the pain and absence of a State that lies to us more and more each day, from the news to the fasting day that you and your children will not observe.

Miriam Suarez Vargas