Understanding escrache

All of the collages included with this story were created by Claudia López with design and production by Lucia Herbas.

Interview • Precarious Researchers • September 12, 2024 • Originally published September 2 by De Boca en Boca • Leer en castellano

De Boca en Boca is a podcast that explores escrache, a practice of organized, unsanctioned, public call-outs of aggressors. Our goal is to encourage the politicization of the struggles against violence. The podcast is made up of the voices of women and feminists who participated in its creation, and centers on understanding the practice of escrache from different angles.

Escrache has been practiced in Bolivia as a way of denouncing aggressors since around 2010, and with renewed vigor between 2020 and 2023. We uploaded De Boca en Boca to Youtube and Soundcloud, and it has been broadcast on Radio ADICH in Sucre and on the Diversity Network in the city of El Alto.

We founded Precarious Researchers as a space from which to debate different topics and political forms, and propose interpretive principles that enrich ongoing discussions in Bolivia. Our work starts from the recognition that our labor as independent researchers is also precaritized. Since 2022 we have focused on organizing the experiences of feminist struggles against macho violence and the search for justice, without losing sight of the connection between these struggles and precarity.

Through our work with Precarious Researchers we seek to problematize the meaning of precarity by appropriating and re-politicizing how we understand work generally, and specifically, how we understand the work women do to ensure the reproduction of life.

The four chapters that make up De boca en boca are concise and profound. A bonus track sets up the series. Here, we’re sharing an excerpt from chapter two, which is titled “The potential of escrache”, and another from chapter three, “A double edged sword”, which have been translated and edited for length and clarity. The segments move between the voices of the three members of Precarious Researchers and interviews with women and feminists from different departments of Bolivia who gathered in the city of Sucre in the first days of April 2024.

Precarious Researchers: What is being disputed through escraches? What potential does the practice of escrache have? How do we politicize its practice?

Compañeras: To do escrache is part of healing. It is better to speak out, that is why I believe that escrache is very important. For me it has been a healing process.

PR: In the last few years escrache has become a loud and direct way of saying enough! It’s a way of naming our truth. Despite its limitations and contradictions, we cannot deny its legitimacy. Escrache is a process that implies a response. Surviving violence and becoming responsive shifts where guilt lies, it allows us to confront injustices and find our individual and collective voices. 

Compañeras: Escrache is born to break the silence. We will not be silent because patriarchal justice does nothing. We speak out, we denounce and name the rapist, the killer of women. It means stepping out of the role of victim.

It has been very powerful to connect with a historical and instinctive mechanism of transforming pain that is inherited and cultivated by women. This shows our capacity to rise up, to refuse to stay in pain, and instead to begin to generate mechanisms to dissipate or transform it.

I feel that escrache is a pedagogy of struggle, it is lived out in the first person. It is to recover joy. We are fucking with this jerk, we are breaking with impunity. Escrache is about breaking with impunity.

PR: Healing is an internal process, but it has been accompanied by networks of women who accompany the actions, making the faces of aggressors go viral. In recent years, women's networks and collectives have come together in spaces and networks to support survivors of multiple macho violences. They have come together around families who have lost a woman at the hands of femicidal violence.

The basic principle of accompaniment is to center the voice of the victim, to believe in her and to expose the perpetrator. To accompany an assaulted woman is a very powerful political position, but it becomes contradictory if it is done from an uncritical position, or one that speaks for the other.

Compañeras: Escrache is a form of reparation, of liberation, so long as it is done against an aggressor. I believe it fulfills its function because the person who decides to carry out an escrache, to denounce, is supported by her group or by other women who do not even know her, but who identify with her. I believe that the power of escrache lies here.

Violent and aggressive people are banned from our spaces. That is a huge step forward because we are making safe spaces, spaces of support where other comrades can come and feel safe. These spaces can be replicated, they are autonomous zones, they are zones of care, zones of freedom where we are interrupting violence.

As I mentioned, my experience has been that escrache is a healing process. I’ve had ups and downs throughout this struggle, but the crucial element has been to be able to meet with all of you, to share experiences and connect with the desire to believe in the collective again.

PR: To what extent is the limit that we are placing on macho violence in our spaces resolving violence?

If state justice is not solving the problems produced by violence and impunity, could we say escrache is? Does escrache always produce feminist justice? What kind of restitution are we seeking through escrache? Can escrache be associated with revenge?

“A double-edged dagger.” “A bomb with no specific target.”

These are some of the ideas that are brought up when we talk to women who have carried out or accompanied escraches. Escraches are full of contradictions and limitations. There is a thin line that can turn a public denunciation into an unfair attack or punitive punishment.

Compañeras: There are many contradictions in the mechanism of escrache because questions of revealing someone’s identity come into play, as do questions of moral superiority, of punishment, of canceling. Feminism as such rejects these acts but at the same time I think they are useful. I think we have to accept the contradictions of escrache, and talk about and discuss them in order to seek other mechanisms as well.

At the moment when an escrache takes place it works at many levels. We know that nothing happens to the men, but what happens to us? How do we manage this, not only in the heat of the moment? How do we weave ourselves to sustain each other with the passing of time?

Some aggressors have used escrache to gain notoriety for themselves or their spaces. Some are proud to have been escrachado, others claim they’re victims of political incorrectness.

In Sucre, [after an escrache] the targets carry on as if nothing happened. They cried, they complained, they threatened to sue, they got their sisters, partners or cousins to threaten me.