Life in Debt. Clara Han
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a different tone in family relations or at least provides a time of respite in order to face them anew.
Uncertainty infused these diverse gestures of care. How much time would a distraction last? Would a family member reveal a different aspect of herself if the tone of family relations shifted? Would she, as many said, “show the other face of the coin”? As families waited to see loved ones show a different side, this “made time” rubbed against the temporality of monthly debt payments and the uncertainty of unstable wages that impinged on the home.
LIFE LOANED
Over the next three months, Florcita and Kevin were not at home when I came to visit. Rumors spread that Florcita was engaging in prostitution to buy drugs. Kevin was said to be spending time with friends on “the other side” of the población, a way of saying that he was consorting with pasta basteros (addicts to pasta base). On one occasion, I saw Kevin driving an old sports car with three men whom I did not recognize. He called out to me, “Clarita!” I waved to him, but his tone of voice made me fear approaching the car. Stopped in front of the house, he revved the engine repeatedly, laughed, and drove off. A dust cloud lingered at the door. Several evenings, I spotted Florcita from afar with her children, returning from her work as a teacher's aide. By the time I arrived at their home, she had already gone to other friends' houses, leaving her children in the care of Sra. Flora.
Sra. Flora developed a growing reticence about Florcita and Kevin. In contrast to her earlier attempts to talk about the state of relations as a way to address and diffuse their tensions, her silence suggested that the neighborhood rumors and Florcita and Kevin's friendships with pasta basteros had overrun her, leaving her little to say that would be listened to. When I inquired about them, she remarked, “What can I say. They don't listen. For now, I just eat it.” Indeed, Sra. Flora was literally embodying the effects of this failure to listen. She had gained several kilos in the previous three months. Her ankles were constantly sore. She went to the general practitioner in the local primary care clinic, who suggested a diagnosis of hypothyroidism, but her thyroid tests were within normal limits.
Meanwhile, the house faced mounting difficulties in keeping up with monthly debt payments. Rodrigo found a minimum-wage, temporary job in construction, building chalets in Chicoreo. The hours were long, and the bus fare took up one-third of his income. As a result of his unemployment, the family got behind on their payments to department stores and the electric and water companies. They had to resort to cash advances from the Líder Supermarket to buy groceries. Debt collectors from the department stores had arrived at the home, threatening to take an inventory of household possessions of value that they could sell to pay off the debts.
Just over the northern hills bordering La Pincoya, Chicoreo was quickly becoming a location for “green,” “natural,” and “alternative” living for young professionals, hip actors, and TV personalities. As we sat outside in the evening chill, Rodrigo compared his lifeworld to those in Chicoreo: “There, they pay for the houses in cash. And here, I'm still paying quotas on this chair. So, this chair—the Hites [department store] still are the owners of it. Credit is for the poor.” Rodrigo voiced a shared sentiment in La Pincoya. As long as one continued to make monthly payments on commodities, they were not one's own. Other neighbors linked the uncertainty of ownership to the uncertainty of life itself: “Tenemos una vida prestada” (We have a loaned life).
The “loaned life” was tied into the historical conditions of the credit system itself. As many adults who lived through the dictatorship told me, the Pinochet regime gave credit to the poor. Credit gave the poor access to material resources for a “dignified life.” In reflecting on her family's history of debt, Sra. Flora elaborated on these historical conditions.
It started when Pinocho [Pinochet] came to power, because before, credit was for the rich, those same rich who worked in the government, in the same commercial houses. And I remember when Pinocho was elected [salió], he gave credit to the poor. Hites was the first store that offered credit to the working class. And you could arrive with your income statement and your identification card and the light and water bills, and you could take whatever you needed. And with this, the poor began to get themselves into debt. Pppffff. And now you will not go to any house, Clarita, where there is not a family in debt, because to have your things of value, you need to be indebted. I remember when tío Ricardo asked for a loan from Atlas [bank] for 100,000 pesos [USD 160], and was paying for three years, but gave back 300,000 [USD 500]. And that is how the rich financial businesspeople make their money off the poor.
“What were the consequences?” I asked.
Well [she paused], good, because before, no one could buy anything, and we were experiencing needs [pasando necesidades] much worse than before. Imagine, Clarita, entire families sleeping in the same bed. I with my husband and my three children slept in the same bed for years, but when the department stores began to give credit, we could buy a bunk bed and the children slept on top on the second bed and we slept on the lower bed. So, with this credit, families could live with more dignity, a dignified life. They had their stove, their refrigerator.
Yet, as she explained, such resources for a dignified life emerged in conjunction with new visibilities and social controls:
But with all of this, families began to get into debt, and there appeared DICOM [the private credit registry], because the businesspeople realized that the poor were getting into so much debt that they could not pay their quotas. Many people owed three, four, five times their monthly income. One owed in Hites, in Ripley, in Almacenes París. And with light, water, and something to eat, one did not make it to the end of the month. So, with computation, the computer, everything changed, because, for example, you could now be in Puerto Montt in Hites. And they could see in the computer there that you owed in Hites in Santiago. And they say, “You can't take out this TV, because you haven't paid your letras [monthly payments] and you're late.” So now there is more pressure to pay the letras on time, or you have to do everything possible so as to pay the letras on time—work extra hours, look for small temporary work [pololito], whatever thing to not arrive in DICOM.
New temporal forms of surveillance arose with the development of extensive credit reporting systems that meshed the state-mandated credit registry of the Superintendent of Banks and Financial Institutions with the main private company for credit information, DICOM (Center for Information of Commercial Documentation; see Castel 1991).
In 1979, the National Chamber of Commerce and private entrepreneurs had established DICOM, four years after the initiation of the Chicago Boy's structural adjustment plan. Throughout the 1980s, it won public bids to provide private credit information to the Superintendent of Banks and Financial Institutions and made individual contracts with banks and financial institutions. Owned by the U.S.-based company Equifax since 1997, DICOM's database currently contains financial information on persons with a tax identification number and any credit history. This information ranges from a history of bad checks, overdue bills, consolidated debts, reporting registry, to one's credit score (Cowan and De Gregorio 2003).
As Sra. Flora emphasized, DICOM exerted a continual presence in everyday life, in terms of both the material constraints that came with a troubled financial history and the anxieties that being in it, or on the verge of being in it, generated. To be “in DICOM” meant that one could not accede to any form of institutional credit: bank loans, department stores, or state-financed loans for higher education. Further, those in DICOM were often subject to labor discrimination (Raczynski et al. 2002). DICOM was used as a character assessment, a screening for personal responsibility and discipline. And, with access to DICOM's database, employers often conditioned contracts to the worker's status in DICOM.
From 1979 to 1999, when the Senate passed Law 19.628, Protection of Data of Personal Character, popularly known as the “DICOM Law,” one's financial history was not only available to all employers and financial institutions, but it also remained in the DICOM database even when debts had been settled (see Ruiz 2002). The persistence of this history was often called the “debtor's stigma”; it made life chances attenuate, as if one were in an interminable, invisible cage (see La Cuarta 2002; Raczynski et al. 2002). The 1999 DICOM Law was the state's attempt to limit the abuse of this database, but it